- organisms that survived and procreated did something successful, and
- behavior is inherited.
This sounds to me like the ant climbs because the fungus is in its head and its trying to escape it by going higher. There's a similar organism reproduction cycle with ants where the ant goes to the top of grass, and the ant is said to be controlled to do that so it is easy prey for a bird where the organism continues the cycle in the intestines.
The way this should be viewed is that parasites that attacked certain areas of their host that resulted in host behavior that was most successful for the parasite to move to the next stage of growth survived, and others who didn't are not here. Neither "controlled" the host, it is blind evolutionary luck.
Similar can be said about organisms that release toxins that force a flushing action for their onward journey. Did they "control" the host to develop diarrhea? No, those that perform actions that allow for survival and procreation survived and procreated. Unfortunately for both ants and humans, with devastating, but thoughtless, effectiveness.
But seriously, I have always thought that AI was an unfortunate name for the field of study because it caused many people to misperceive what it can and can not do.
That in essence is the answer. It is actually not AI to you, but a useful algorithm.
Apparently TBS is a Turner-owned TV station, who got bought by Time Warner at some point, so it's probably more accurate to say that they had a common parent- except that AOL was sold off by them at the end of 2009, so it doesn't affect them any more. Though I assume they lost assloads on the ludicrous price they paid for it at the height of the dotcom boom anyway.
Technically, AOL bought Time Warner, and Ted Turner was a significant owner of Time Warner at the time coming in with acquisition of his empire. They were all high on the AOL merger, talking about synergy and such. I don't know how wrestling on a TBS station plays into all that. Not synergistic enough?
By: 1) focusing on the approaches that actually work; 2) stripping the window-dressing of these approaches; 3) perhaps overloading the term "generically".
Russel and Norvig, 2003. Paraphrasing (because I don't have the book with me), AI systems perceives its environment and works to maximize its chances of success. As a matter of technical implementation, this is traditionally framed as an error minimization problem.
Interesting. So given that this is artificial intelligence, real intelligence is an error minimization problem to maximize chances of success?
He would probably make more money writing a book about who killed JonBenet than he would have by selling his software. I wonder if that's what he's planning to do, because he boldly said that he was wrong in thinking that the mother killer her, but he did not say who the evidence led him to believe actually did it.
I haven't RTFA, but just as a point one could make a personal determination that the mother wasn't the murderer without being able to determine who was the murderer. In other words, believed to be sufficient info to exclude mother but insufficient info to isolate the murderer.
Expert Systems and AI really shouldn't be in the same category. AI is, essentially, smart/clever ways to generically find a minimum/maximum of a function (which can, mathematically, be used for a lot of things). Expert systems were an attempt to mimic some human decision processes by hard-coding "expert knowledge" with a few parameters. In the field of meteorology, expert systems have been largely discarded, while AI systems are still researched and studied.
Botnet herders have access to a very large number of computers, it was only a matter of time until they realized that the data on these computers is worth far more than the few pence they are making from Viagra spam and blackmailing gambling sites with DDOS attacks.
I happened to be working on my site at 4am (EDT) this morning and got hit simultaneously by several bots that turned out to be from major US universities. Not only do they own university networks, but use them to recruit others, so to speak.
Yeah, I guess they're educational activists, but they're also leading physicists and have tons of research to back up their claims.
Thank you for the insight and links. I looked at Mazur's "Farewell, Lecture?". Certainly I agree that a question response dialogue is more engaging and useful than a dry lecture, although I have never been shy about asking questions anyway. And professors trying new techniques and reporting on the results if educational activism is activism of the most welcome kind.
However, turning a lecture series into chat sessions "Students continually discuss concepts among themselves and with the instructor during class." is pretty dumbed down. The example given of result of a truck and car colliding seem to be in the Intro area, maybe to students who have to take Intro to Physics and aren't all that interested in it?
Having a clicker response from everyone to questions every few minutes in your lecture I guess is feedback that your points are getting across or not, but I still think it's dumb. It was the open conversation chatting amongst each other and lecturer that was engaging in Mazur's class, not primarily the clicker. A clicker alone to periodic questions is merely mildly entertaining / annoying depending on perspective and I do not think more useful as being "interactive" and "tech" as the OP of this thread puts it than traditional "pop quizzes" in the lower grades.
Still, efforts of professors to be more effective are commendable and we are not paying for that, the students are. The education activists I am referring to who want to make half-baked ideas such as clickers and blogs mandatory we are usually on the hook for.
This is the dumbest thing I've seen lately. Figures it's from education activists. I didn't think they could screw things any more than they have but apparently they're still at it.
Blogging? Taking tests with clickers? These people are pathetic. Please don't tell me we're paying for these a$$hats.
'We don't have sufficiently bright people moving into this field to support those national security objectives as we move forward in time,' says James Gosler, a veteran cybersecurity specialist who has worked at the CIA, the National Security Agency, and the Energy Department."
That's ok, just click on brightness and adjust. Works for my monitor.
If you can't get them bright enough for when you move backward in time, that's when we have a problem.
$10,000 is a chunk of change in former Soviet Union. For that matter, it's a chunk of change for me too even being in the States but not as enriching as former USSR.
In any event my understanding from info I read (mostly here on/.) is that the big money is made from herding botnets to sell time on for spam, phishing, etc. activities. The same people who put together these exploits in packages to sell are already using them to build gigantic botnets.
I would not be surprised if they are able to tap into the botnets built with exploit packages they sell.
FWIW, the range of IP addresses my web site has been targeted from for phpBB spamming is truly awesome, I haven't seen anything like it before in the eight years I've had the site up. Also the amount of money reported in news as stolen from bank accounts is staggering.
I don't know what kind of happy talk article this is, but botnets are alive and well and thriving, and someone is getting rich at the expense of lots of victims who also unknowingly supply bots for the net. Whether $10,000 from an exploit package sale, or for a multi-billion spam run, or transferred out of a bank account, it adds up.
There's lots I don't understand about this. This seems to me to be only valid for long term funds invested in bonds and Treasuries or something.
Isn't what these people do is change their decision making constantly with shifting criteria? Isn't the bulk of what brought the house of cards down either unknowable, in denial, or covered over with Enron type mark to market delusions?
I understand the theoretical aspect of codifying some set parameters around an investment fund under which returns could be computed on a range of conditions, and that it couldn't be an attempt to capture business method criteria used in trading. I just don't see how the mortgage backed funds such as derivatives fo example could be codified since these people didn't know and quite frankly didn't care what was in them, they counted on a sham ratings scam to say that they were of such and such value by paid off people up and down the chain of deceit.
How do you codify a sham such as ratings backed sliced and diced subprime mortgages? No one could know how bad it was, they could only guess, and make sure the hot potatoes got tossed before the music stopped.
There are now three groups: HP, Cisco, and Oracle. Each hopes to have complete ownership of the server room including network, server, software and storage.
Are you and I the only ones who think IBM would have been better ?
It would have been better for IBM, so much better that I doubt it would have cleared anti-trust. They would have just bought Sun for Java, and to eliminate any vestige of Sun server and OS competition. Of course what was released to open source by Sun would still be out there, but would be abandoned by IBM except for MySQL.
Instead Oracle is now in the postion of out AS/400'ing the AS/400, with built in Oracle instead of DB2 and Oracle / Sun's software stack instead of IBM's. Oracle will try to do that by including the ERP stack they own with the unified Java ERP infrastructure / apps. IBM lost billions trying to do that with the San Francisco project.
I don't think Oracle will outdo IBM in that OS/400 - I5/OS - Power i / DB2/400, which includes AIX as a subset and Linux partitions, is vastly superior to what Oracle can do with Solaris / Oracle as an OS (from this veteran AS/400 programmer's perspective), but Solaris is no slouch and other OS/400 Oracle now owns best of breed in both hardware and software and network services from top to bottom, including ERP software. Truly breathtakingly unprecedented. It's what Microsoft was also trying to do but only has succeeded at much more limited levels, which would continue unless they are somehow able to obtain SAP.
All three are hamfisted in their attempt to strangle the customer, and all three not surprisingly are very profitable as a result. I've seen the slashdot posts that consider the possibility of Oracle offering an integrated platform more for furthering Oracle and their ERP sales than ramping up Oracle type pricing for every component in the offering, and the potential in my opinion to offer some compellingly cost effective integrated solutions that will rival the best the AS/400 and its third party ERP offerings had through the years, one of the primary ones, JDE, which Oracle acquired but still supports on the IBM AS/400 iseries.
Oracle is also in the unique position of enjoying the largesse of Sun's open source offerings while only making moves going forward which are highly profitable. They have significant opportunity to take mind and market share from IBM and Microsoft systems offerings with an integrated competitive system to IBM's systems, but it won't be out of the goodness of their hearts.
Sun was a unique occurrence. If even Sun was considered evil, and posts here suggested it was, then you will find more, not less, evil going forward. The good that has been done has been done.
I had a friend who was once asked to write a network protocol as an 'exercise'. He was hired based on his example code. The funny thing is, when he came to work, he noticed his code was actually being used in their software. Sometimes it's an exercise, sometimes it's free work, sometimes it's both.
Did your friend tell you how long he worked on this 'exercise'?
Maybe I'm a good programmer or maybe I'm not, but I'm with you that programmers will be more likely to take a test when the risk/reward balance is topped to the correct side.
Well put. Excellent comparison. And it's clear you are a good programmer. A one hour estimate taking seven hours to do correctly is par for our industry.
Slashdot Mirror
We know that:
- organisms that survived and procreated did something successful, and
- behavior is inherited.
This sounds to me like the ant climbs because the fungus is in its head and its trying to escape it by going higher. There's a similar organism reproduction cycle with ants where the ant goes to the top of grass, and the ant is said to be controlled to do that so it is easy prey for a bird where the organism continues the cycle in the intestines.
The way this should be viewed is that parasites that attacked certain areas of their host that resulted in host behavior that was most successful for the parasite to move to the next stage of growth survived, and others who didn't are not here. Neither "controlled" the host, it is blind evolutionary luck.
Similar can be said about organisms that release toxins that force a flushing action for their onward journey. Did they "control" the host to develop diarrhea? No, those that perform actions that allow for survival and procreation survived and procreated. Unfortunately for both ants and humans, with devastating, but thoughtless, effectiveness.
rd
Your house is real, unless you're talking about your Second Life house, in which case it's not real.
Hope that helps straighten that out for you.
rd
well, it was true when they named it.
But seriously, I have always thought that AI was an unfortunate name for the field of study because it caused many people to misperceive what it can and can not do.
That in essence is the answer. It is actually not AI to you, but a useful algorithm.
Thanks for the insight.
rd
Apparently TBS is a Turner-owned TV station, who got bought by Time Warner at some point, so it's probably more accurate to say that they had a common parent- except that AOL was sold off by them at the end of 2009, so it doesn't affect them any more. Though I assume they lost assloads on the ludicrous price they paid for it at the height of the dotcom boom anyway.
Technically, AOL bought Time Warner, and Ted Turner was a significant owner of Time Warner at the time coming in with acquisition of his empire. They were all high on the AOL merger, talking about synergy and such. I don't know how wrestling on a TBS station plays into all that. Not synergistic enough?
By: 1) focusing on the approaches that actually work; 2) stripping the window-dressing of these approaches; 3) perhaps overloading the term "generically".
This is your definition of AI?
Approaches that actually work at what?
rd
Russel and Norvig, 2003. Paraphrasing (because I don't have the book with me), AI systems perceives its environment and works to maximize its chances of success. As a matter of technical implementation, this is traditionally framed as an error minimization problem.
Interesting. So given that this is artificial intelligence, real intelligence is an error minimization problem to maximize chances of success?
rd
There is a statement at the bottom of this /. page, I guess we could call it the random thought of the moment. For this page it is:
Men seldom show dimples to girls who have pimples.
For equal opportunity purposes, this should be accompanied by:
Girls seldom show nipples to men who have pimples.
I'm wondering when slashdot started indoctrinating the faithful in close encounters with the female kind.
He would probably make more money writing a book about who killed JonBenet than he would have by selling his software. I wonder if that's what he's planning to do, because he boldly said that he was wrong in thinking that the mother killer her, but he did not say who the evidence led him to believe actually did it.
I haven't RTFA, but just as a point one could make a personal determination that the mother wasn't the murderer without being able to determine who was the murderer. In other words, believed to be sufficient info to exclude mother but insufficient info to isolate the murderer.
Regardless, the ransom note is priceless.
rd
Expert Systems and AI really shouldn't be in the same category. AI is, essentially, smart/clever ways to generically find a minimum/maximum of a function (which can, mathematically, be used for a lot of things). Expert systems were an attempt to mimic some human decision processes by hard-coding "expert knowledge" with a few parameters. In the field of meteorology, expert systems have been largely discarded, while AI systems are still researched and studied.
where did you come up with this definition of AI?
Botnet herders have access to a very large number of computers, it was only a matter of time until they realized that the data on these computers is worth far more than the few pence they are making from Viagra spam and blackmailing gambling sites with DDOS attacks.
I happened to be working on my site at 4am (EDT) this morning and got hit simultaneously by several bots that turned out to be from major US universities. Not only do they own university networks, but use them to recruit others, so to speak.
rd
Pretty much everything in this discussion has been assertions.
point taken. The proof is in the results, so to speak. Lots of good info you've shared.
rd
Yeah, I guess they're educational activists, but they're also leading physicists and have tons of research to back up their claims.
Thank you for the insight and links. I looked at Mazur's "Farewell, Lecture?". Certainly I agree that a question response dialogue is more engaging and useful than a dry lecture, although I have never been shy about asking questions anyway. And professors trying new techniques and reporting on the results if educational activism is activism of the most welcome kind.
However, turning a lecture series into chat sessions "Students continually discuss concepts among themselves and with the instructor during class." is pretty dumbed down. The example given of result of a truck and car colliding seem to be in the Intro area, maybe to students who have to take Intro to Physics and aren't all that interested in it?
Having a clicker response from everyone to questions every few minutes in your lecture I guess is feedback that your points are getting across or not, but I still think it's dumb. It was the open conversation chatting amongst each other and lecturer that was engaging in Mazur's class, not primarily the clicker. A clicker alone to periodic questions is merely mildly entertaining / annoying depending on perspective and I do not think more useful as being "interactive" and "tech" as the OP of this thread puts it than traditional "pop quizzes" in the lower grades.
Still, efforts of professors to be more effective are commendable and we are not paying for that, the students are. The education activists I am referring to who want to make half-baked ideas such as clickers and blogs mandatory we are usually on the hook for.
regards,
rd
This is the dumbest thing I've seen lately. Figures it's from education activists. I didn't think they could screw things any more than they have but apparently they're still at it.
Blogging? Taking tests with clickers? These people are pathetic. Please don't tell me we're paying for these a$$hats.
rd
'We don't have sufficiently bright people moving into this field to support those national security objectives as we move forward in time,' says James Gosler, a veteran cybersecurity specialist who has worked at the CIA, the National Security Agency, and the Energy Department."
That's ok, just click on brightness and adjust. Works for my monitor.
If you can't get them bright enough for when you move backward in time, that's when we have a problem.
The fact of the matter is that these are high-tech jobs that require a great deal of skill and knowledge.
I didn't see anything high tech in what he described. Making sure the programmer is on course, I need a new title for that? Give me a freaking break.
rd
The robot fires the device, which lands along a dirt road, exploding after a few seconds. A voice is then heard, 'Road clear; proceed forward.'"
That's fine, as long as RoboCop goes first.
$10,000 is a chunk of change in former Soviet Union. For that matter, it's a chunk of change for me too even being in the States but not as enriching as former USSR.
In any event my understanding from info I read (mostly here on /.) is that the big money is made from herding botnets to sell time on for spam, phishing, etc. activities. The same people who put together these exploits in packages to sell are already using them to build gigantic botnets.
I would not be surprised if they are able to tap into the botnets built with exploit packages they sell.
FWIW, the range of IP addresses my web site has been targeted from for phpBB spamming is truly awesome, I haven't seen anything like it before in the eight years I've had the site up. Also the amount of money reported in news as stolen from bank accounts is staggering.
I don't know what kind of happy talk article this is, but botnets are alive and well and thriving, and someone is getting rich at the expense of lots of victims who also unknowingly supply bots for the net. Whether $10,000 from an exploit package sale, or for a multi-billion spam run, or transferred out of a bank account, it adds up.
rd
There's lots I don't understand about this. This seems to me to be only valid for long term funds invested in bonds and Treasuries or something.
Isn't what these people do is change their decision making constantly with shifting criteria? Isn't the bulk of what brought the house of cards down either unknowable, in denial, or covered over with Enron type mark to market delusions?
I understand the theoretical aspect of codifying some set parameters around an investment fund under which returns could be computed on a range of conditions, and that it couldn't be an attempt to capture business method criteria used in trading. I just don't see how the mortgage backed funds such as derivatives fo example could be codified since these people didn't know and quite frankly didn't care what was in them, they counted on a sham ratings scam to say that they were of such and such value by paid off people up and down the chain of deceit.
How do you codify a sham such as ratings backed sliced and diced subprime mortgages? No one could know how bad it was, they could only guess, and make sure the hot potatoes got tossed before the music stopped.
rd
Okay, I could see a problem if it were a female breast ... but who the fuck thinks that sending a picture of a male breast is "sexting"?
I applaud Microsoft for their equal opportunity sexting.
I'm curious about the project you forked from. Were they interested in including your code, merging branches, etc.?
There are now three groups: HP, Cisco, and Oracle. Each hopes to have complete ownership of the server room including network, server, software and storage.
Why is IBM not in this list?
So my question to /. is this:
Are you and I the only ones who think IBM would have been better ?
It would have been better for IBM, so much better that I doubt it would have cleared anti-trust. They would have just bought Sun for Java, and to eliminate any vestige of Sun server and OS competition. Of course what was released to open source by Sun would still be out there, but would be abandoned by IBM except for MySQL.
Instead Oracle is now in the postion of out AS/400'ing the AS/400, with built in Oracle instead of DB2 and Oracle / Sun's software stack instead of IBM's. Oracle will try to do that by including the ERP stack they own with the unified Java ERP infrastructure / apps. IBM lost billions trying to do that with the San Francisco project.
I don't think Oracle will outdo IBM in that OS/400 - I5/OS - Power i / DB2/400, which includes AIX as a subset and Linux partitions, is vastly superior to what Oracle can do with Solaris / Oracle as an OS (from this veteran AS/400 programmer's perspective), but Solaris is no slouch and other OS/400 Oracle now owns best of breed in both hardware and software and network services from top to bottom, including ERP software. Truly breathtakingly unprecedented. It's what Microsoft was also trying to do but only has succeeded at much more limited levels, which would continue unless they are somehow able to obtain SAP.
All three are hamfisted in their attempt to strangle the customer, and all three not surprisingly are very profitable as a result. I've seen the slashdot posts that consider the possibility of Oracle offering an integrated platform more for furthering Oracle and their ERP sales than ramping up Oracle type pricing for every component in the offering, and the potential in my opinion to offer some compellingly cost effective integrated solutions that will rival the best the AS/400 and its third party ERP offerings had through the years, one of the primary ones, JDE, which Oracle acquired but still supports on the IBM AS/400 iseries.
Oracle is also in the unique position of enjoying the largesse of Sun's open source offerings while only making moves going forward which are highly profitable. They have significant opportunity to take mind and market share from IBM and Microsoft systems offerings with an integrated competitive system to IBM's systems, but it won't be out of the goodness of their hearts.
Sun was a unique occurrence. If even Sun was considered evil, and posts here suggested it was, then you will find more, not less, evil going forward. The good that has been done has been done.
rd
I had a friend who was once asked to write a network protocol as an 'exercise'. He was hired based on his example code. The funny thing is, when he came to work, he noticed his code was actually being used in their software. Sometimes it's an exercise, sometimes it's free work, sometimes it's both.
Did your friend tell you how long he worked on this 'exercise'?
Maybe I'm a good programmer or maybe I'm not, but I'm with you that programmers will be more likely to take a test when the risk/reward balance is topped to the correct side.
Well put. Excellent comparison. And it's clear you are a good programmer. A one hour estimate taking seven hours to do correctly is par for our industry.
rd