(I don't see anything in the summary that establishes that the 911 call or Facebook posting were coincident with when she hit the guy; Hopefully she gets prosecuted for what she did do and not for what she did do+cyber-scare).
The way Watson was configured, the humans had options that Watson did not. Namely, anticipating the buzzer going live and buzzing in before knowing the answer.
Neither option proved to be an advantage in comparison to having machine reflexes.
It is certainly amazing that they made the answer finding fast enough that Watson buzzed in first most of the time and strong enough that it knew the answers to most of the questions, but all they demonstrated is that a smart enough machine will always win at Jeopardy, because it has better reflexes than a human. The smart enough machine part borders on damning them with faint praise, but it would be interesting to see how much Jeopardy-tweaking and hardware expansion they did to get to the point where they were confidence in the speed and strength of the answers (meaning that I find a more generalized Watson running on less hardware more impressive).
The "no open source licenses" thing is Slashdot hyperbole, they are only excluding licenses with copyleft like terms.
And have you read the GPL? If Microsoft hosted binary code for the apps, they would be the ones distributing the software and be on the hook for providing source code (this is clear from the text of either GPL2 or GPL3, GPL2 even talks about it in terms of distribution!).
They could work to ensure that apps that use GPL (or the like) code are providing the source, but why bother doing that auditing when those apps aren't exactly going to be high revenue?
The 2 goals of the GPL are to get people to use it and to confront the people that don't.
Of course, it doesn't work very well because software is usually very cheap (relative to the value it provides) and people do not universally share Stallman's vision of a doomed future if they use a little bit of closed software today.
The issue isn't lack of ideas, the issue is that studios take low risk ideas and compromise them in any way that they think will increase the box office.
Or the lawyer who wrote that part picked the most recent version of the GPL as an example, I'm not going to spend a lot of energy speculating about the motivations of a megacorp.
Of course, if it is about patents, it is a success for GPLv3, they have made a company with many software patents paranoid and defensive.
They specifically call out GPL3, but they also make it clear that the exclusion is not limited to GPL3 (after all, if they were using enumeration, I could sneak an app in by renaming the license...).
The reason we are all complaining about the reaction time is that there is nothing interesting about a machine having better reaction times.
The 'Jeopardy' part of the promotion was about as interesting as examining a spreadsheet containing the questions and the answers that Watson computed, with some statistics about how quickly Watson arrived at various confidence levels for each answer.
Watson is amazing. That it was usually ready to buzz in was impressive. That it nearly always buzzed in first when it was ready demonstrated that simple machine reflexes are quite highly developed.
There isn't very much interesting in building a computer button pusher that reacts faster than a human.
So it is really impressive that Watson was usually ready to buzz in when the buzzers went live, but it is really boring that it usually buzzed in first.
Jeopardy does give a trigger event. Watson has zero cameras and zero microphones.
So the humans do have every chance to anticipate, but in the 2 recorded games with 2 of the best human players, machine reflexes resulted in a lot more buzzing in first.
I would do something like record a few thousand of the best human buzz ins and then stick a box between Watson and the electronic thumb that picked one of those delays to use.
So it changes the game to ignore the machine's body, which might give a better look at its "mind".
If you go by the two games that were played, it is obvious that human anticipation was not a huge advantage over machine reflexes.
(I don't think it takes away from Watson, but it made the Jeopardy format sort of boring; kind of like watching Jennings in the middle of his streak, the other players were just standing there)
Fritz is a lot "smarter" than Deep Blue was; on hardware like a phone it calculates many fewer game trees than Deep Blue did, but makes much better use of them.
The correct answer to each question is fed to Watson after it has been answered, so next time that category is picked, it can use the answers from the previous questions in calculating its answer.
It probably isn't robbery, but locking the devices to the app store and then charging for presence in the app store is very much rent seeking behavior.
At a minimum, it is obnoxious. At least in my ridiculous opinion, I'd rather Apple try to make money selling the platform, not by controlling it.
But answering you more directly, I think there is a sliding scale, people who castrate themselves and give their life savings to some yahoo are pretty clearly harming themselves. I suppose you could compare that to tithing.
Slashdot Mirror
Where did you get 1 minute?
(I don't see anything in the summary that establishes that the 911 call or Facebook posting were coincident with when she hit the guy; Hopefully she gets prosecuted for what she did do and not for what she did do+cyber-scare).
The way Watson was configured, the humans had options that Watson did not. Namely, anticipating the buzzer going live and buzzing in before knowing the answer.
Neither option proved to be an advantage in comparison to having machine reflexes.
It is certainly amazing that they made the answer finding fast enough that Watson buzzed in first most of the time and strong enough that it knew the answers to most of the questions, but all they demonstrated is that a smart enough machine will always win at Jeopardy, because it has better reflexes than a human. The smart enough machine part borders on damning them with faint praise, but it would be interesting to see how much Jeopardy-tweaking and hardware expansion they did to get to the point where they were confidence in the speed and strength of the answers (meaning that I find a more generalized Watson running on less hardware more impressive).
On the other hand, what if Moore's law has placed limits on ambition?
The "no open source licenses" thing is Slashdot hyperbole, they are only excluding licenses with copyleft like terms.
And have you read the GPL? If Microsoft hosted binary code for the apps, they would be the ones distributing the software and be on the hook for providing source code (this is clear from the text of either GPL2 or GPL3, GPL2 even talks about it in terms of distribution!).
They could work to ensure that apps that use GPL (or the like) code are providing the source, but why bother doing that auditing when those apps aren't exactly going to be high revenue?
The 2 goals of the GPL are to get people to use it and to confront the people that don't.
Of course, it doesn't work very well because software is usually very cheap (relative to the value it provides) and people do not universally share Stallman's vision of a doomed future if they use a little bit of closed software today.
The issue isn't lack of ideas, the issue is that studios take low risk ideas and compromise them in any way that they think will increase the box office.
You are misreading the terms. They ban any license that requires one of those clauses, not any license that allows one of the clauses.
Or the lawyer who wrote that part picked the most recent version of the GPL as an example, I'm not going to spend a lot of energy speculating about the motivations of a megacorp.
Of course, if it is about patents, it is a success for GPLv3, they have made a company with many software patents paranoid and defensive.
You hopped, skipped and jumped over the "requiring".
They specifically call out GPL3, but they also make it clear that the exclusion is not limited to GPL3 (after all, if they were using enumeration, I could sneak an app in by renaming the license...).
The surface justification here is that they don't want the obligation to distribute the source files.
The reason we are all complaining about the reaction time is that there is nothing interesting about a machine having better reaction times.
The 'Jeopardy' part of the promotion was about as interesting as examining a spreadsheet containing the questions and the answers that Watson computed, with some statistics about how quickly Watson arrived at various confidence levels for each answer.
Watson is amazing. That it was usually ready to buzz in was impressive. That it nearly always buzzed in first when it was ready demonstrated that simple machine reflexes are quite highly developed.
There isn't very much interesting in building a computer button pusher that reacts faster than a human.
So it is really impressive that Watson was usually ready to buzz in when the buzzers went live, but it is really boring that it usually buzzed in first.
Jeopardy does give a trigger event. Watson has zero cameras and zero microphones.
So the humans do have every chance to anticipate, but in the 2 recorded games with 2 of the best human players, machine reflexes resulted in a lot more buzzing in first.
I would do something like record a few thousand of the best human buzz ins and then stick a box between Watson and the electronic thumb that picked one of those delays to use.
So it changes the game to ignore the machine's body, which might give a better look at its "mind".
If you go by the two games that were played, it is obvious that human anticipation was not a huge advantage over machine reflexes.
(I don't think it takes away from Watson, but it made the Jeopardy format sort of boring; kind of like watching Jennings in the middle of his streak, the other players were just standing there)
Fritz is a lot "smarter" than Deep Blue was; on hardware like a phone it calculates many fewer game trees than Deep Blue did, but makes much better use of them.
The correct answer to each question is fed to Watson after it has been answered, so next time that category is picked, it can use the answers from the previous questions in calculating its answer.
Right, an IBM researcher says Watson has no advantage on the buzzer.
Yet in two actual games against two of the very best human players, it was able to buzz in first an obvious majority of the time.
So apparently the researcher's comparison of Watson's electronic reflexes and human anticipation picked the less successful buzz in strategy.
I don't know what the progress is, but they do have a goal of moving IO out of the main thread (which should help with the UI locking up).
It probably isn't robbery, but locking the devices to the app store and then charging for presence in the app store is very much rent seeking behavior.
At a minimum, it is obnoxious. At least in my ridiculous opinion, I'd rather Apple try to make money selling the platform, not by controlling it.
People pay more attention to the comments that make them angry, so people with a tendency to anger easily perceive a strong bias against their views.
I don't think that explains it all, but I think that explains quite a lot of the complaining about how Slashdot leans one way or the other.
Colbert presents informative entertainment and makes no attempt to pass it off as anything other than entertainment.
Beck presents paranoia and fear and works to pass it off as information.
There is a difference.
There is a distinguish up there.
But answering you more directly, I think there is a sliding scale, people who castrate themselves and give their life savings to some yahoo are pretty clearly harming themselves. I suppose you could compare that to tithing.