No can do. Ever since Strongbad imagined what he would be like as a "moderately hot chick", I'd repressed all memory of his existence. Now if you'll excuse me, I'm going to go spend a few hours driving him back into the deepest recesses of my mind.
My Linux box is named Tux, but the rest of the computers ended up named after Homestar Runner characters. Mom's laptop is The Cheat, the 800MHz Pentium from UofU surplus was blessed with the Strongbad moniker, and my brother's new machine is called Coach Z because it had a giant chrome Z on the front of the case.
It's a workable system, so long as I don't get too many more machines. I cringe to think of the sort of machine that would get "The Poopsmith," and eventually you have to start using minor characters like "Gremlin," "YelloDello," "Thnicka-man," and "The Cheat's Lightswitch."
Your insightful, constructive advice should act as a role model for everyone. Marriage counselors, diplomats, CEOs, guys trying to talk their way out of a barfight, the Los Angeles Clippers. Everyone.
Dammit! The first thing every English teacher has ever told me was, "Remember who your audience is, and write with an eye towards their understanding."
Mr. Jensen, Ms. Argus, in my foolishness I forgot your wise counsel. I hang my head in shame.
Okay, let's say I offered you the choice between a current 40Gigger iPod and a hypothetical iPod:Spiffarino Edition. The Spiffarino holds 120G of songs and has three times the battery life. But it weighs nine pounds and comes in a color best described as "goat-vomit green." User interface and everything else is the same.
Say the 40 gigger costs $400, and the Spiffarino costs $500. Why not buy it when 20% more gets you 3x as much machine? Some might. But it would be useless for jogging, unless you bought two of them to keep you balanced. Nor is the extra battery life a frequently appreciated feature, given that the lesser model will get you through even a heavy day of listening.
The point is, once something is "good enough," beefing it up further cannot come at even a moderate premium in price, weight, or other features.
It's not that average consumers are actually afraid of "too much hard drive space." It's just that, once you can fit several hundred songs on the player, it's enough. Other things like price and size become more important than yet another doubling in size of an already capacitous drive.
It's like the way most guys select girls. If she's "pretty enough" (doesn't matter where on your priority list this one stands, because it's usually the first thing you find out) then you move on to checking out her intelligence specs, then check to see if she has a serviceable sense of humor. One might be willing to upgrade his girlfriend to the deluxe supermodel edition, if the upgrade was totally free. But if the upgrade seriously degrades the performance of the "sense of humor" or "not totally full of herself" features, no right-thinking guy would make the exchange.
I'm thinking the mini is a better value for me. One thousand songs (fifty hours of music?) is about enough for a cross-country drive. If you drive back, you might have to suffer through repeats. That's an absolutely sick amount of music, and I don't feel a compelling need for more.
The difference is, Microsoft caught onto this idea only after a decade of giving everyone complete rights to everything. Don't think that tradition isn't relevant.
Last Christmas, my mom got herself a laptop. I tried to set it up right, with her as a limited user with access to an administrative account. A couple of months back, my brother installed a wireless card on my mom's laptop. But the software installed kept popping up this message box every thirty seconds. After a good deal of hunting, the only solution my brother could find was to give mom's account full administrative privileges. The software simply assumed that it had write access to the registry.
Multiply that by thousands of lazy application writers, each demanding elevated privileges for common user tasks, and suddenly Microsoft has this huge cultural inertia to overcome.
Whether widespread adoption of Linux will drag it in the opposite direction remains to be seen. Though, given the whole "Lindows" thing, I'm certainly concerned.
You can't have my break. I'm keeping it so I'll have something to fall back on when dealing with illiterates. All the poster was saying was that his chosen profession requires a somewhat higher degree of knowledge and sophistication than waiting tables at the local Cracker Barrel.
In my experience as a CS undergrad, people who harp on their "twenty years of coding" and go out of their way to denigrate formal education are the sort who get insecure around people who actually know what an algorithm is.
But let's put our respective insecurities aside for a moment. You don't know anything about this guy, except you know he's dismayed that entry level coders are being offered $8-10/hr for their services. I'm dismayed too. That's about the amount I earned both as a construction worker and as a telemarketer.
I'm not sure what your deal is about community college graduates. I did my time at the community college before transferring to the University. The classes were cheaper, the instruction was comparable, and both scenes offered students ranging from very smart to very un-smart. I certainly wouldn't reject an entry level applicant on the basis of having come from the wrong school. But I do see a couple of differences between the two:
1) There are classes and degrees at a university that a community college simply don't have the ability to provide. My community college offered nothing beyond an A.S.
2) There's no actual research going on at most community colleges, hence no opportunities for students to participate in said research.
So is it the chance to participate in research that turns the CS University grads into "complete wastes of time?" Or is it the extra two years studying compilers, operating systems, algorithms and data structures, graphics, numerical analysis, and AI that saps them of their potential?*
If you would be so kind as to go beyond the inflammatory one-liners, and describe your dealings with the products of modern education in some degree of detail, I'm sure your perspective would be quite helpful to us young'uns. You know, things like, "What sort of tasks did you ask these new employees to perform?" "What sort of knowledge did you assume they already possessed?" "What sort of personality conflicts emerged, and why?" "Was their code any good?" "Was the problem that they didn't learn what they were taught in school, or that the material being taught isn't suited to the realities of software production?"
Somehow, I expect another one-liner instead. But I can always hope.
* This is actually a pretty good summary of my degree program. I feel fortunate, because it appears to be one of the better ones.
Really, to a great extent, your salary doesn't matter. It's your attitude towards the salary that makes the difference. You can blow through $200K a year with only a bit more effort than blowing through $30K. If you're smart and keep your expenses down, in five years you could very well be better off financially than the guy who earns seven times as much, and lives like he does.
In my opinion, your first goal after getting a job should be to build up a buffer of about three months of your current salary. We've all read the Ask Slashdots: "My company is about to do something of EXTREME ULTIMATE EVIL! What do I do?" Somebody always advises that they quit, and someone else responds with, "Are you crazy? In THIS economy?" Which is a valid point. Point blank: this buffer represents control over your life that living month to month can never give you. It's also nice to have for other potential emergencies.
I'm not going to bore you with great Ramen Noodle recipes. Just take a look at your life, decide on some valid, long-term goals, and then structure your finances so that you're working towards them. It's one thing to have a fast car, trendy clothes, and a large apartment. It's another to have a crappy, reliable car, sturdy but boring clothes, a crappy apartment in a less-than-ideal neighborhood, and $20K sitting in the bank, waiting for you to start your own business.
In the end, you are the sum of the choices you make. You can either sit back and gripe about the insultingly low salaries being offered (though you have a right to be unhappy), or you can make the choices that will make you rich, happy, famous-in-the-serial-killer-sense, or whatever your ultimate goals may be.
You confuse me. Which of the following are you claiming?
* You know "anonymous reader" personally, and are therefore able to comment on both his technical proficiency and his marketability when compared to 2-year college graduates. * Having a CS degree automatically disqualifies him from having a high level of skill? * Community college graduates are automatically (or likely to be) better qualified than graduates of a four year college? * If an Indian can do it, it's not skilled work. * You enjoy insulting people you've never met. * You're jealous of people who get their questions on the front page.
Note: You didn't get modded down because of overly sensitive CS majors. You got modded down because your "advice" is either incoherently written, or simply gratuitously insulting. I haven't figured out which, but I'm leaning towards the latter.
I doubt there is any such thing as a "positronic brain." Not just in the literal sense, but also in the wider "magic box that is somehow endowed with the ability to perform 'original thought.'" Some forms of hardware (neural nets, grid computers, etc) may be more suited to intelligence than the processor->cache->RAM we're used to. But any Turing-complete architecture can emulate any other Turing-complete architecture. So no, it's not about finding the right style of hardware, nor is the current sort of hardware automatically disqualified from possessing intelligence.
To answer your question, what good is a human psychologist if a human is governed strictly by the contents of its programming (that is, its brain)? Personally, I think that our behaviors are in fact deterministic. The inputs that pour into our brains through our senses enter in a deterministic manner. They interact with its current contents according to the laws of physics and chemistry, strengthening and weakening neural connections. As the brain changes, the "us" that is represented within also changes. We can't choose to override the signals pouring through our brain, because those signals themselves are how we make decisions.
Some would argue that there are options for non-determinism: quantum indeterminacy, for example, could bubble upwards and create macroscopic effects. But that's not the same as "free will." You would have to postulate some external entity (a soul) that caused the indeterminacy to act in such a way that the result represented "your" wishes. Otherwise, quantum indeterminacy is just a sort of random number generator, creating variety but not intentionality.
So everything is going to happen the way it's going to happen, and therefore nothing matters, and you may as well jump in front of a bus. Right? Wrong. The most obvious fact is that your jumping in front of a bus makes the world a different place. If instead, you went on to be a Greenpeace activist, or a businessman, or a CIA assassin, you've made a difference.
But beyond that, consider science. Scientists keep performing experiments, knowing full well that their results are going to be absolutely and unequivocally determined by the physical and chemical laws governing the setup. Knowing that our own actions are a manifestation of physical laws tells us nothing about what those actions are going to be.
As an avowed determinist, I don't know what's going to happen today, or feel any sort of fatalism towards it. My decisions affect the world in unimaginably complex ways and the world affects me in ways I don't understand. My life will be different depending on whether my next act is to do my homework, browse Slashdot a while longer, or have lunch. I still haven't decided. But I do accept that--just as my understanding of the world is inherently incomplete--my understanding of myself is incomplete because the "I" I feel is only a representation of the real me.
I think that pointing out that robot action is predetermined by its software isn't a terribly helpful point to make. It's kind of an observation of the "water is wet" variety.
The most common attempt at refuting the Turing test is called "The Chinese Box" argument, invented by Dr. John Searle. It basically goes as follows: Imagine that you're sitting in a room with one opening. The opening allows in tiny slips of paper covered in chinese symbols. You have a big book which you use to decode the symbols into other chinese symbols, which you dutifully write on another piece of paper, then deposit it in the opening.
To the outside world (which you are utterly unaware of), it's an amazing thing. They're holding a conversation in Chinese, by putting their words into the box, and getting coherent responses back out. But according to the argument, all that is really happening is mundane, mechanized symbol manipulation. The manipulator of the symbols (you) has no clue as to what they actually mean. The conclusion we are meant to draw is that elaborate symbol manipulation doesn't require actual comprehension.
I've never liked the argument. The whole thing totally glosses over one critical fact: in order for it to be passing the Turing Test, the rule book cannot be static. It has to change with every input, just as our brains are subtly rewritten as we talk to others.
For example, if I put in the box, "New York is called 'The Big Apple' because there is a mile-high apple sitting in the middle of downtown," a naive book would update its 'New York' symbol to include the apple, and its 'apple' symbol to include the possibility of mile-high apples. Meanwhile, a smarter book would update the symbol 'guy I'm talking to' to include the information "Compulsive liar." A static book, on the other hand, wouldn't change, so the input would always return the same output (most likely, "How does that make you feel?").
So this book, sitting in the box, is slowly altering its representation of the world as the inputs flow into it. This representation is one of the hallmarks of intelligence.
Another hallmark is awareness of context. If you're having a conversation with a five year old who just learned that Albany is the capital of New York, and you mentioned that you were going to New York on a trip next week, the most likely response would be "Albany is the capital of New York." I think kids do this instinctively, to check their understanding against others.
But it would be simple to mimic human conversation by the simple trick of parsing the input for symbols and then regurgitating facts known about that symbol. "You're Willow. You are my friend, and recently gay." If you're wise to it, this sort of Turing crutch doesn't mislead for long.
The same goes for Eliza, which tries to ask questions about the symbols it finds without actually comprehending them. "And how does Scumway Box with a side of feathers make you feel?"
In other words, in order to hold a truly believable conversation, the updating of the symbols in the book has to be done in a very accurate and sophisticated fashion which leads to an apparently accurate picture of the external world. This includes self-awareness on the part of the box, and an awareness of you as the interviewer. If this is happening, then it seems impossible to argue that the chinese box doesn't really "understand" the world, or that it's really "just" shuffling symbols around. Even though that is what is actually happening, the process is also creating a strong correlation to reality.
The problem I see with the Turing test comes from the false negative side. I imagine that a computer could be truly intelligent, and have a perfect picture of the world, but fail the Turing test because it either doesn't try to mimic humans, or does so in an unconvincing way. For example, I ask, "What are you?" and it responds, "I am a cluster of 4000 Intel processors in a basement at MIT." Or it gives me near-instantaneous answers to complex mathematical problems.
In reality, the Turing test is more widely applicable than most people think. All you need is att
No, no. See, it was supposed to be funny because One Louder was pointing out how people always want to try and control others by keeping them from expressing opinions the controller finds distasteful. So here comes this guy who finds that opinion distasteful and wants to have it censored... Ah, never mind. Some people are just too dumb to moderate.:)
Kids need to be bored out of their minds by the elementary education process so that they can be prepared to be bored out of their minds in the college education process. Got it.
Okay, but what did we actually learn from Oregon Trail?
Historical Facts: * There was a trail. * It went to Oregon. * It was *exactly* 2000 miles long. * People traveled along the trail. * Sometimes they died. * There was something called "dysentery," but nobody will tell you what it was.
Game Facts: * Buy at least two spare wagon wheels before you get started. * Less food, more ammo. * An untrained pioneer could shoot forty rounds a minute with his musket. * Don't bother shooting at birds. Deer and buffalo only.
Carmen Sandiego is a little closer to what I would call an educational game (as opposed to "pseudohistorical simulator that leaves real historians shaking in silent, geeky rage").
Sure, educational software is mostly crap. But the problem isn't that they're "too educational." Let's face it, Oregon Trail wasn't popular because it turned kids into literate historians of the frontier, but because it kept kids out of the teacher's hair.
One problem is the lack of negative feedback in most games. I remember the proud parents of a four year old, showing me how he played on the computer. He was in some game where the computer speaks a number, and the player clicks on the square that has that number of objects. But the kid simply kept clicking on boxes until he hit the right answer. He didn't care, which is fine because, hey, he's four. He just likes making the computer make noises.
There were lots of other little games in the same software package, but they could all be conquered by clicking on things at random. It was sad, because the kid spent hours and hours playing these games, and they weren't coming close to teaching what the software claimed to be teaching.
I've come up with occasional ideas for games. Like a puzzle game that teaches basic circuit design (and/or/not gates, maybe xor, etc.) by having the player wander around a maze, turning water pipes off and on. Or a simple programming language like Turtle Tracks that could make the computer do fun and interesting things. But I'm really not seeing a whole lot of application for computers outside the realm of administering quizzes and teaching typing.
The problem is, natural language is inherently messy and ambiguous. This suits it perfectly for the task of day-to-day living (which is necessarily a messy problem space), but science and mathematics both thrive on absolute precision in language. You can translate from one highly precise language to another without losing certainty, but translating into natural language of the more conversational sort requires all sorts of simplifications and omissions.
Again, that's fine for teaching purposes. But if you want a child to be able to characterize a problem of their own, well enough for a computer to recognize what exactly was wanted, they'll have to be taught to make their language more rigorous, perhaps even to the point where it would have been easier for everyone involved to teach the full blown scientific notation in the first place.
I don't find anything compelling about your religious/missionary parallels. Here's how I see it: Ethiopia needs a technological infrastructure if they're to have any hope of raising their standard of living. This means not only having the fruits of technology (the software) but the freedom to do with it whatever their ingenuity will allow, and the ability to educate themselves on how that software works.
Linux is both a good operating system and a good teaching tool. It's the sort of thing budding IT professionals really ought to be cutting their teeth on. It is also important that a country as poor as Ethiopia not be flushing money down a giant tube that leads straight to Redmond, Washington.
I see the efforts of this article as only slightly more "religious" than if they were going around teaching crop rotation and demonstrating ingenious water purification techniques.
No, this is the part where the guy we thought was the end boss crumples into a heap, and the victory music starts playing. But in fact, all it has done is force the real end boss to confront the player directly, which is when you really start wishing you'd saved all those powerups you used in the last fight.
You obviously need to play more video games. Everything always goes back to video games.
It's simplistic to say that "capitalism" is the source of most intellectual property, just as it is simplistic to blame capitalism for all corporate misbehavior.
The problem here is, the whole idea of applying the principles of capitalism to the field of intellectual property leads to an untenable situation: we pretend that IP is the same as real, physical property, even though it is no such thing.
Intellectual property amounts to nothing more than the tangible manifestation of ideas. The cost of replicating IP is vastly, vastly lower than the cost of creating it in the first place. We put legal impediments to wholesale copying under the guise of copyright law, with the goal of making it worthwhile to create more IP. As a legal fiction, it's a workable and desirable one.
But the problem comes when you start pushing IP too far into the "real property" model. An example Lessig gives in Free Culture involves the rise of amateur photography. There were honest-to-god court cases to decide whether or not a shutterbug had to compensate the owner of the thing being photographed. After all, it is my house, my person, my property which is providing the opportunity for you to create value through your picture, so why shouldn't I get a slice of the pie?
Can you imagine what it would be like if the courts had decided in favor of that view? Ick. Only professionals would be able to navigate the legal landmine such a system would create. You just cannot pretend that IP is the same thing as physical property. Read any of Lessig's books; they're excellent primers on what happens when property laws get conflated.
You just don't get it. Is my speeding around at three times the speed limit affecting the bottom line of *EVEN ONE CORPORATION*? Not in the least. So corporations don't feel a need to buy stiffer fines from their legislature.
But when some thieving scumbag goes into a theater and videotapes a movie, they are having a direct, negative effect on the profits that the movie studio expects. Given the massive investment that it takes to produce a quality cinematic experience like "Scooby Doo 2: Destroy All Monsters", I have to wonder how those thieves can sleep at night.
How many of you have downloaded a pre-release copy of a spectacular movie, watched the jittery, pixellated footage complete with "crying babies and ringing cell phones" ambient noise? And how many of us have said, "Wow, what a wonderful movie! I'm glad I don't have to watch it on the big screen!" That's cash straight out of the pockets of the dedicated, hardworking people in Hollywood.
There is no more grievous outrage than harming the profits of the entertainment industry. It is only just that our laws should reflect this.
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No can do. Ever since Strongbad imagined what he would be like as a "moderately hot chick", I'd repressed all memory of his existence. Now if you'll excuse me, I'm going to go spend a few hours driving him back into the deepest recesses of my mind.
My Linux box is named Tux, but the rest of the computers ended up named after Homestar Runner characters. Mom's laptop is The Cheat, the 800MHz Pentium from UofU surplus was blessed with the Strongbad moniker, and my brother's new machine is called Coach Z because it had a giant chrome Z on the front of the case.
It's a workable system, so long as I don't get too many more machines. I cringe to think of the sort of machine that would get "The Poopsmith," and eventually you have to start using minor characters like "Gremlin," "YelloDello," "Thnicka-man," and "The Cheat's Lightswitch."
Your insightful, constructive advice should act as a role model for everyone. Marriage counselors, diplomats, CEOs, guys trying to talk their way out of a barfight, the Los Angeles Clippers. Everyone.
Dammit! The first thing every English teacher has ever told me was, "Remember who your audience is, and write with an eye towards their understanding."
Mr. Jensen, Ms. Argus, in my foolishness I forgot your wise counsel. I hang my head in shame.
Okay, let's say I offered you the choice between a current 40Gigger iPod and a hypothetical iPod:Spiffarino Edition. The Spiffarino holds 120G of songs and has three times the battery life. But it weighs nine pounds and comes in a color best described as "goat-vomit green." User interface and everything else is the same.
Say the 40 gigger costs $400, and the Spiffarino costs $500. Why not buy it when 20% more gets you 3x as much machine? Some might. But it would be useless for jogging, unless you bought two of them to keep you balanced. Nor is the extra battery life a frequently appreciated feature, given that the lesser model will get you through even a heavy day of listening.
The point is, once something is "good enough," beefing it up further cannot come at even a moderate premium in price, weight, or other features.
Proud to say, I got it from the beginning.
It's not that average consumers are actually afraid of "too much hard drive space." It's just that, once you can fit several hundred songs on the player, it's enough. Other things like price and size become more important than yet another doubling in size of an already capacitous drive.
It's like the way most guys select girls. If she's "pretty enough" (doesn't matter where on your priority list this one stands, because it's usually the first thing you find out) then you move on to checking out her intelligence specs, then check to see if she has a serviceable sense of humor. One might be willing to upgrade his girlfriend to the deluxe supermodel edition, if the upgrade was totally free. But if the upgrade seriously degrades the performance of the "sense of humor" or "not totally full of herself" features, no right-thinking guy would make the exchange.
I'm thinking the mini is a better value for me. One thousand songs (fifty hours of music?) is about enough for a cross-country drive. If you drive back, you might have to suffer through repeats. That's an absolutely sick amount of music, and I don't feel a compelling need for more.
Probably not.
The difference is, Microsoft caught onto this idea only after a decade of giving everyone complete rights to everything. Don't think that tradition isn't relevant.
Last Christmas, my mom got herself a laptop. I tried to set it up right, with her as a limited user with access to an administrative account. A couple of months back, my brother installed a wireless card on my mom's laptop. But the software installed kept popping up this message box every thirty seconds. After a good deal of hunting, the only solution my brother could find was to give mom's account full administrative privileges. The software simply assumed that it had write access to the registry.
Multiply that by thousands of lazy application writers, each demanding elevated privileges for common user tasks, and suddenly Microsoft has this huge cultural inertia to overcome.
Whether widespread adoption of Linux will drag it in the opposite direction remains to be seen. Though, given the whole "Lindows" thing, I'm certainly concerned.
You can't have my break. I'm keeping it so I'll have something to fall back on when dealing with illiterates. All the poster was saying was that his chosen profession requires a somewhat higher degree of knowledge and sophistication than waiting tables at the local Cracker Barrel.
In my experience as a CS undergrad, people who harp on their "twenty years of coding" and go out of their way to denigrate formal education are the sort who get insecure around people who actually know what an algorithm is.
But let's put our respective insecurities aside for a moment. You don't know anything about this guy, except you know he's dismayed that entry level coders are being offered $8-10/hr for their services. I'm dismayed too. That's about the amount I earned both as a construction worker and as a telemarketer.
I'm not sure what your deal is about community college graduates. I did my time at the community college before transferring to the University. The classes were cheaper, the instruction was comparable, and both scenes offered students ranging from very smart to very un-smart. I certainly wouldn't reject an entry level applicant on the basis of having come from the wrong school. But I do see a couple of differences between the two:
1) There are classes and degrees at a university that a community college simply don't have the ability to provide. My community college offered nothing beyond an A.S.
2) There's no actual research going on at most community colleges, hence no opportunities for students to participate in said research.
So is it the chance to participate in research that turns the CS University grads into "complete wastes of time?" Or is it the extra two years studying compilers, operating systems, algorithms and data structures, graphics, numerical analysis, and AI that saps them of their potential?*
If you would be so kind as to go beyond the inflammatory one-liners, and describe your dealings with the products of modern education in some degree of detail, I'm sure your perspective would be quite helpful to us young'uns. You know, things like, "What sort of tasks did you ask these new employees to perform?" "What sort of knowledge did you assume they already possessed?" "What sort of personality conflicts emerged, and why?" "Was their code any good?" "Was the problem that they didn't learn what they were taught in school, or that the material being taught isn't suited to the realities of software production?"
Somehow, I expect another one-liner instead. But I can always hope.
* This is actually a pretty good summary of my degree program. I feel fortunate, because it appears to be one of the better ones.
Really, to a great extent, your salary doesn't matter. It's your attitude towards the salary that makes the difference. You can blow through $200K a year with only a bit more effort than blowing through $30K. If you're smart and keep your expenses down, in five years you could very well be better off financially than the guy who earns seven times as much, and lives like he does.
In my opinion, your first goal after getting a job should be to build up a buffer of about three months of your current salary. We've all read the Ask Slashdots: "My company is about to do something of EXTREME ULTIMATE EVIL! What do I do?" Somebody always advises that they quit, and someone else responds with, "Are you crazy? In THIS economy?" Which is a valid point. Point blank: this buffer represents control over your life that living month to month can never give you. It's also nice to have for other potential emergencies.
I'm not going to bore you with great Ramen Noodle recipes. Just take a look at your life, decide on some valid, long-term goals, and then structure your finances so that you're working towards them. It's one thing to have a fast car, trendy clothes, and a large apartment. It's another to have a crappy, reliable car, sturdy but boring clothes, a crappy apartment in a less-than-ideal neighborhood, and $20K sitting in the bank, waiting for you to start your own business.
In the end, you are the sum of the choices you make. You can either sit back and gripe about the insultingly low salaries being offered (though you have a right to be unhappy), or you can make the choices that will make you rich, happy, famous-in-the-serial-killer-sense, or whatever your ultimate goals may be.
You confuse me. Which of the following are you claiming?
* You know "anonymous reader" personally, and are therefore able to comment on both his technical proficiency and his marketability when compared to 2-year college graduates.
* Having a CS degree automatically disqualifies him from having a high level of skill?
* Community college graduates are automatically (or likely to be) better qualified than graduates of a four year college?
* If an Indian can do it, it's not skilled work.
* You enjoy insulting people you've never met.
* You're jealous of people who get their questions on the front page.
Note: You didn't get modded down because of overly sensitive CS majors. You got modded down because your "advice" is either incoherently written, or simply gratuitously insulting. I haven't figured out which, but I'm leaning towards the latter.
Bah, nobody understands determinism.
I doubt there is any such thing as a "positronic brain." Not just in the literal sense, but also in the wider "magic box that is somehow endowed with the ability to perform 'original thought.'" Some forms of hardware (neural nets, grid computers, etc) may be more suited to intelligence than the processor->cache->RAM we're used to. But any Turing-complete architecture can emulate any other Turing-complete architecture. So no, it's not about finding the right style of hardware, nor is the current sort of hardware automatically disqualified from possessing intelligence.
To answer your question, what good is a human psychologist if a human is governed strictly by the contents of its programming (that is, its brain)? Personally, I think that our behaviors are in fact deterministic. The inputs that pour into our brains through our senses enter in a deterministic manner. They interact with its current contents according to the laws of physics and chemistry, strengthening and weakening neural connections. As the brain changes, the "us" that is represented within also changes. We can't choose to override the signals pouring through our brain, because those signals themselves are how we make decisions.
Some would argue that there are options for non-determinism: quantum indeterminacy, for example, could bubble upwards and create macroscopic effects. But that's not the same as "free will." You would have to postulate some external entity (a soul) that caused the indeterminacy to act in such a way that the result represented "your" wishes. Otherwise, quantum indeterminacy is just a sort of random number generator, creating variety but not intentionality.
So everything is going to happen the way it's going to happen, and therefore nothing matters, and you may as well jump in front of a bus. Right? Wrong. The most obvious fact is that your jumping in front of a bus makes the world a different place. If instead, you went on to be a Greenpeace activist, or a businessman, or a CIA assassin, you've made a difference.
But beyond that, consider science. Scientists keep performing experiments, knowing full well that their results are going to be absolutely and unequivocally determined by the physical and chemical laws governing the setup. Knowing that our own actions are a manifestation of physical laws tells us nothing about what those actions are going to be.
As an avowed determinist, I don't know what's going to happen today, or feel any sort of fatalism towards it. My decisions affect the world in unimaginably complex ways and the world affects me in ways I don't understand. My life will be different depending on whether my next act is to do my homework, browse Slashdot a while longer, or have lunch. I still haven't decided. But I do accept that--just as my understanding of the world is inherently incomplete--my understanding of myself is incomplete because the "I" I feel is only a representation of the real me.
I think that pointing out that robot action is predetermined by its software isn't a terribly helpful point to make. It's kind of an observation of the "water is wet" variety.
The most common attempt at refuting the Turing test is called "The Chinese Box" argument, invented by Dr. John Searle. It basically goes as follows: Imagine that you're sitting in a room with one opening. The opening allows in tiny slips of paper covered in chinese symbols. You have a big book which you use to decode the symbols into other chinese symbols, which you dutifully write on another piece of paper, then deposit it in the opening.
To the outside world (which you are utterly unaware of), it's an amazing thing. They're holding a conversation in Chinese, by putting their words into the box, and getting coherent responses back out. But according to the argument, all that is really happening is mundane, mechanized symbol manipulation. The manipulator of the symbols (you) has no clue as to what they actually mean. The conclusion we are meant to draw is that elaborate symbol manipulation doesn't require actual comprehension.
I've never liked the argument. The whole thing totally glosses over one critical fact: in order for it to be passing the Turing Test, the rule book cannot be static. It has to change with every input, just as our brains are subtly rewritten as we talk to others.
For example, if I put in the box, "New York is called 'The Big Apple' because there is a mile-high apple sitting in the middle of downtown," a naive book would update its 'New York' symbol to include the apple, and its 'apple' symbol to include the possibility of mile-high apples. Meanwhile, a smarter book would update the symbol 'guy I'm talking to' to include the information "Compulsive liar." A static book, on the other hand, wouldn't change, so the input would always return the same output (most likely, "How does that make you feel?").
So this book, sitting in the box, is slowly altering its representation of the world as the inputs flow into it. This representation is one of the hallmarks of intelligence.
Another hallmark is awareness of context. If you're having a conversation with a five year old who just learned that Albany is the capital of New York, and you mentioned that you were going to New York on a trip next week, the most likely response would be "Albany is the capital of New York." I think kids do this instinctively, to check their understanding against others.
But it would be simple to mimic human conversation by the simple trick of parsing the input for symbols and then regurgitating facts known about that symbol. "You're Willow. You are my friend, and recently gay." If you're wise to it, this sort of Turing crutch doesn't mislead for long.
The same goes for Eliza, which tries to ask questions about the symbols it finds without actually comprehending them. "And how does Scumway Box with a side of feathers make you feel?"
In other words, in order to hold a truly believable conversation, the updating of the symbols in the book has to be done in a very accurate and sophisticated fashion which leads to an apparently accurate picture of the external world. This includes self-awareness on the part of the box, and an awareness of you as the interviewer. If this is happening, then it seems impossible to argue that the chinese box doesn't really "understand" the world, or that it's really "just" shuffling symbols around. Even though that is what is actually happening, the process is also creating a strong correlation to reality.
The problem I see with the Turing test comes from the false negative side. I imagine that a computer could be truly intelligent, and have a perfect picture of the world, but fail the Turing test because it either doesn't try to mimic humans, or does so in an unconvincing way. For example, I ask, "What are you?" and it responds, "I am a cluster of 4000 Intel processors in a basement at MIT." Or it gives me near-instantaneous answers to complex mathematical problems.
In reality, the Turing test is more widely applicable than most people think. All you need is att
No, no. See, it was supposed to be funny because One Louder was pointing out how people always want to try and control others by keeping them from expressing opinions the controller finds distasteful. So here comes this guy who finds that opinion distasteful and wants to have it censored... Ah, never mind. Some people are just too dumb to moderate. :)
Your comment is pointless and illogical, and I demand that CmdrTaco delete it forthwith.
Kids need to be bored out of their minds by the elementary education process so that they can be prepared to be bored out of their minds in the college education process. Got it.
Okay, but what did we actually learn from Oregon Trail?
Historical Facts:
* There was a trail.
* It went to Oregon.
* It was *exactly* 2000 miles long.
* People traveled along the trail.
* Sometimes they died.
* There was something called "dysentery," but nobody will tell you what it was.
Game Facts:
* Buy at least two spare wagon wheels before you get started.
* Less food, more ammo.
* An untrained pioneer could shoot forty rounds a minute with his musket.
* Don't bother shooting at birds. Deer and buffalo only.
Carmen Sandiego is a little closer to what I would call an educational game (as opposed to "pseudohistorical simulator that leaves real historians shaking in silent, geeky rage").
Sure, educational software is mostly crap. But the problem isn't that they're "too educational." Let's face it, Oregon Trail wasn't popular because it turned kids into literate historians of the frontier, but because it kept kids out of the teacher's hair.
One problem is the lack of negative feedback in most games. I remember the proud parents of a four year old, showing me how he played on the computer. He was in some game where the computer speaks a number, and the player clicks on the square that has that number of objects. But the kid simply kept clicking on boxes until he hit the right answer. He didn't care, which is fine because, hey, he's four. He just likes making the computer make noises.
There were lots of other little games in the same software package, but they could all be conquered by clicking on things at random. It was sad, because the kid spent hours and hours playing these games, and they weren't coming close to teaching what the software claimed to be teaching.
I've come up with occasional ideas for games. Like a puzzle game that teaches basic circuit design (and/or/not gates, maybe xor, etc.) by having the player wander around a maze, turning water pipes off and on. Or a simple programming language like Turtle Tracks that could make the computer do fun and interesting things. But I'm really not seeing a whole lot of application for computers outside the realm of administering quizzes and teaching typing.
Apologies for the run-on sentence at the end. Ick.
The problem is, natural language is inherently messy and ambiguous. This suits it perfectly for the task of day-to-day living (which is necessarily a messy problem space), but science and mathematics both thrive on absolute precision in language. You can translate from one highly precise language to another without losing certainty, but translating into natural language of the more conversational sort requires all sorts of simplifications and omissions.
Again, that's fine for teaching purposes. But if you want a child to be able to characterize a problem of their own, well enough for a computer to recognize what exactly was wanted, they'll have to be taught to make their language more rigorous, perhaps even to the point where it would have been easier for everyone involved to teach the full blown scientific notation in the first place.
I don't find anything compelling about your religious/missionary parallels. Here's how I see it: Ethiopia needs a technological infrastructure if they're to have any hope of raising their standard of living. This means not only having the fruits of technology (the software) but the freedom to do with it whatever their ingenuity will allow, and the ability to educate themselves on how that software works.
Linux is both a good operating system and a good teaching tool. It's the sort of thing budding IT professionals really ought to be cutting their teeth on. It is also important that a country as poor as Ethiopia not be flushing money down a giant tube that leads straight to Redmond, Washington.
I see the efforts of this article as only slightly more "religious" than if they were going around teaching crop rotation and demonstrating ingenious water purification techniques.
No, this is the part where the guy we thought was the end boss crumples into a heap, and the victory music starts playing. But in fact, all it has done is force the real end boss to confront the player directly, which is when you really start wishing you'd saved all those powerups you used in the last fight.
You obviously need to play more video games. Everything always goes back to video games.
I've never actually seen the movie. Maybe I'm parroting some /.er who has.
It's simplistic to say that "capitalism" is the source of most intellectual property, just as it is simplistic to blame capitalism for all corporate misbehavior.
The problem here is, the whole idea of applying the principles of capitalism to the field of intellectual property leads to an untenable situation: we pretend that IP is the same as real, physical property, even though it is no such thing.
Intellectual property amounts to nothing more than the tangible manifestation of ideas. The cost of replicating IP is vastly, vastly lower than the cost of creating it in the first place. We put legal impediments to wholesale copying under the guise of copyright law, with the goal of making it worthwhile to create more IP. As a legal fiction, it's a workable and desirable one.
But the problem comes when you start pushing IP too far into the "real property" model. An example Lessig gives in Free Culture involves the rise of amateur photography. There were honest-to-god court cases to decide whether or not a shutterbug had to compensate the owner of the thing being photographed. After all, it is my house, my person, my property which is providing the opportunity for you to create value through your picture, so why shouldn't I get a slice of the pie?
Can you imagine what it would be like if the courts had decided in favor of that view? Ick. Only professionals would be able to navigate the legal landmine such a system would create. You just cannot pretend that IP is the same thing as physical property. Read any of Lessig's books; they're excellent primers on what happens when property laws get conflated.
You just don't get it. Is my speeding around at three times the speed limit affecting the bottom line of *EVEN ONE CORPORATION*? Not in the least. So corporations don't feel a need to buy stiffer fines from their legislature.
But when some thieving scumbag goes into a theater and videotapes a movie, they are having a direct, negative effect on the profits that the movie studio expects. Given the massive investment that it takes to produce a quality cinematic experience like "Scooby Doo 2: Destroy All Monsters", I have to wonder how those thieves can sleep at night.
How many of you have downloaded a pre-release copy of a spectacular movie, watched the jittery, pixellated footage complete with "crying babies and ringing cell phones" ambient noise? And how many of us have said, "Wow, what a wonderful movie! I'm glad I don't have to watch it on the big screen!" That's cash straight out of the pockets of the dedicated, hardworking people in Hollywood.
There is no more grievous outrage than harming the profits of the entertainment industry. It is only just that our laws should reflect this.