The symbol grounding 'problem' isn't a problem for AI at all. It is merely a fundamental misunderstanding of the world born out of the arrogance that our consciousness and sentience are somehow special and must arise from something non-physical. If you disagree, I challenge you to define 'meaning' and show me how an artificial neural net cannot possess it.
Beyond the above, even if a sufficiently advanced AI being was somehow devoid of 'understanding' or 'meaning' (in the Searle's Chinese Room sense), it would be impossible for us to know and it would have no effect on its behavior.
I've downloaded the data and as a way of getting contact info of your friends, it is utterly useless. Basically just a list of plaintext names of which a whopping 2 had an email next to them. They were gmail addresses, though.
Facebook does have the option to 'download your data', which should include a list of 'Friends' with the email addresses they have chosen to disclose. I hadn't ever used the functionality, so I am curious what the archive will contain when they have compiled it and I am able to download it. I would be sortof surprised if indeed I found only @facebook.com addresses in there, but if so, it's a real dick move by FB.
On the other hand, the contacts in my Android contacts list do have info (email addresses and phone numbers) from their associated FB accounts. Exporting the whole contact list to.vcf is trivial. I will add that I sync them using HaxSync, but I would be surprised if it made any difference if I were to use the official Facebook application to sync the contacts.
Sounds pretty awesome, actually! Screw the Russians with their dashcams. Now we get the view from onlookers AND First Person Road Rage shots!
BTW, what kind of stupid asshole would expect "making pretty photo's from your car whilst driving" to be a reasonable use case for Google Glass? I bet it would work great for traffic jam flirting, though. Keep your window-sized QR codes of your facebook url handy!
What most Europeans don't understand is that Louisiana is about as foreign too 95% of the US as Romania is to the UK.
Don't be silly. (People in) States in the US have only had several hundred years to diverge from each other. European cultures have been able to do that for millennia (it is no wonder that so many different languages are spoken in Europe). And let's not forget two huge recent wars fought on European soil between majorly different political mindsets. Some European countries were Soviet ruled states less than three decades ago. Some Europeans still alive today were nazis that played their part in the Holocaust. The effects of recent history are obvious. Minimum monthly wage in Romania is about 160 EUR. In Austria, it is about 1000 EUR and in France it is about 1450 EUR: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_sovereign_states_in_Europe_by_minimum_wage
The distance between Austria and Romania is about 250 miles.
The animosity between European inhabitants can be very strong. I'd be surprised if New Yorkers complained about all those poor people from Lousiana coming to their state and stealing all their jobs, undercutting their wages and being useless criminals in general. Because that is exactly how an alarming amount of Western Europeans feels about Romanians and other Eastern Europeans. Ironically, the main solutions to the problems people complain about lie in more (synchronization of) legislation at the European level instead of less (which is what populists tell the gullible is the answer).
Simplest thing to do is to use a 8 char string as the base password and append, prepend or insert a three char string based on the web site name into it.
I used to do this, but the problem is that it only protects against automated attempts to abuse a compromised password. If I happen to have bought something at EvilWebshopHosterX and made an account with BasePasswordEWHX, it's easy for anyone that gets their hands on the password to figure out all my other passwords based on the scheme.
Rotate the base password once a year or so.
This is a terrible hassle and generally leads to having to try multiple base passwords before giving up and using the password reset mechanism because at that particular website, none of the base passwords plus the website specific scheme were allowed by retarded password restrictions.
The main point is that I just don't want to trust any entity with key information that can be used for doing other things. Things like LastPass generated unique tokens and application specific tokens are things that remove that risk, although of course pretty much everything is compromised if your emailaccount used in password reset mechanisms is compromised.
That is why you use LastPass generated passwords for the millions of accounts you don't really give a fuck about and can ultimately always access through password reset mechanisms. This allows you to focus on creating and remembering unique passwords that you know for truly important accounts, such as emailaccounts and banking accounts.
The alternative of using a single throwaway password for all those crap accounts instead of LastPass 'tokens' will inevitably lead to using a terribly weak password due to differing password restrictions on different websites and still allows all the accounts in the crap zone to be compromised by a hack of one of them.
This was something like 5-6 big boxes worth of parts, and involved some assembly that was a real challenge to do by myself.
That is besides the point. The IKEA-construction meme revolves around having parts left over and lack of understanding of the intended assembly process. That is markedly different from construction being difficult when done alone.
Oh I know the problem! IKEA manuals assume you have a brain!
This is exactly right.
In reality, assembling IKEA stuff isn't much (if any) harder than assembling a certain LEGO design (which most 8 year old children have very little difficulties with). The whole bitching about assembling IKEA furniture is nothing more than a popular meme originating from and perpetuated by people who consider everything that requires slightly more mental effort than scratching their ass and operating a TV remote a burden.
These are the same people who find operating a microwave or a washing machine mystifying ("How DO they work??").
That said, a lot of it is similar to how the police do investigations, the 'internet' just had less information. We didn't get to see things like CCTV footage and such.
This.
There is no doubt in my mind that if the CCTV footage had been publicly accessible, it would have been a matter of hours or minutes before the crowd came to the same conclusions as the officials did.
It all boils down to the physical exertion of lifting my arm to perform input vs resting my arm on a desk and lightly moving my wrist.
You shouldn't have to. Considering the precision of Leap Motion, it could behave like sort of a 3D touchpad that you mainly operate by moving your finger(s) slightly (although large arm based motions should be easy to support simultaneously). It should even be possible to put a Leap Motion unit in a monitor and then interpret the movements of your hand on your desk as if you were moving a mouse.
The awesomeness of the sensing technology simply cannot be contested. The challenges lie in where to physically put the technology and how to interpret the data.
a civil war similar to the mid-19th century civil war in the United States. The United States of Europe will go through the same thing.
What the fuck are you talking about? How on earth are a bunch of cowboys with muskets (or slave owners with revolvers, whatever, fuck you) in a sticks and stones society on a recently sortof-civilized continent similar to millions of 9 to 5 schmucks in highly advanced societies where smartphones, computers and TVs pretty much rule life?
Some people see the advancement of mankind as something they want to contribute to, even if they don't instantly gain anything other than satisfaction from it.
I, for one, wouldn't mind if somebody makes stacks of money off my contributed CPU cycles. In fact, I'd applaud it if worldwide solar power production would increase because of it.
My tip: VistaSwitcher (no affiliation). Especially useful for multiple monitor situations as it can be set to display the list of programs to switch between on the monitor where the mouse cursor is.
It even brings back the ability to CTRL+click on multiple programs and subsequently perform Tile Horizontally/Vertically (I still fail to see why this functionality was stripped from the Windows 7 taskbar).
Where can I get this Windows 1.0 you speak of? It looks way more functional than Windows 8. I mean, being able to have more than two windows on the same screen? That is revolutionary!
If you're not coming up with something near optimal, then you're wasting time and resources.
1. That does not make 'near optimal' any less of a straw man.
2. Any improvement over the current situation with a positive return on investment is not a waste by definition. It can only be less profitable than other improvements. I.e.: the baseline is not 'the best we can do', but 'changing nothing'.
3. You imply that markets driven by private entities automatically lead to 'near optimal' solutions. The reality is that the strategies of manipulating demand by playing on the primitive drives of humans and the already mentioned one of colluding and/or consolidating are the most effective ones. Again, in unregulated markets, progress slows down due to these strategies.
You ignored most of my previous comment. I'd like to believe that means that you agree with what I wrote, but considering your reply it seems that you are simply closing your mind for other points of view and wish to cling on to an irrational antipathy against 'government'.
The fundamental problem is that even if governments were economically competent, and they aren't, they wouldn't be competent enough to understand the complexity of everyone's needs and desires and somehow magically come up with a near optimal solution to that.
You move from 'greater command and control' to 'come up with a near optimal solution'. This is clearly a straw man. Giving a government more power in a market doesn't entail that private entities immediately become completely irrelevant and that the only thing influencing what is put to market is that government. Things like taxing, subsidizing and regulating are simple examples of how a government can steer a market away from or towards undesirable or desirable behaviour without being the sole player in that market. In addition to that: for some markets, the latter is the most effective strategy to maximize economic growth (public infrastructure etc.).
Note here that OPEC is a collection of countries, not for profit businesses.
Stop kidding yourself. The behaviour of the OPEC is driven by profit-seeking lobbyists and oil sheikhs, not bureaucracy. Were it not for regulations against colluding and enforcement of those regulations by governments, almost all markets would eventually be run and exploited by cartels or monopolists. The OPEC just happens to be an incredibly powerful international cartel.
Compare it to slowing the economy such that we lose 10 or 20 years' worth of tech every 100 years.
If the assumption that 'greater government command-and-control' retards economic growth were true, you may have had a point. Your belief that it is true is not enough.
In the real world, the element that slows down progress the most is protectionism by profit-driven oligarchies and monopolies. Imagine how economies around the world would have looked if oil prices hadn't been kept artificially high by the OPEC.
There is a difference between corrupt cops and cops that 'murder', 'rape suspects' or 'run over kids'.
I can't remember having seen _any_story like that about cops in my country in my entire lifetime. Sure, things like drug trafficking, nepotism and corruption certainly exist within our police force, but murder and rape? No.
And don't even try to assume that I must live in some totalitarian state where such stories are swept under the mat. My country is in the top 5 of the Press Freedom Index. Maybe you should broaden your horizon and come visit us.
Slashdot Mirror
The symbol grounding 'problem' isn't a problem for AI at all. It is merely a fundamental misunderstanding of the world born out of the arrogance that our consciousness and sentience are somehow special and must arise from something non-physical. If you disagree, I challenge you to define 'meaning' and show me how an artificial neural net cannot possess it.
Beyond the above, even if a sufficiently advanced AI being was somehow devoid of 'understanding' or 'meaning' (in the Searle's Chinese Room sense), it would be impossible for us to know and it would have no effect on its behavior.
I've downloaded the data and as a way of getting contact info of your friends, it is utterly useless.
Basically just a list of plaintext names of which a whopping 2 had an email next to them. They were gmail addresses, though.
Facebook does have the option to 'download your data', which should include a list of 'Friends' with the email addresses they have chosen to disclose.
I hadn't ever used the functionality, so I am curious what the archive will contain when they have compiled it and I am able to download it. I would be sortof surprised if indeed I found only @facebook.com addresses in there, but if so, it's a real dick move by FB.
On the other hand, the contacts in my Android contacts list do have info (email addresses and phone numbers) from their associated FB accounts. Exporting the whole contact list to .vcf is trivial.
I will add that I sync them using HaxSync, but I would be surprised if it made any difference if I were to use the official Facebook application to sync the contacts.
Sounds pretty awesome, actually!
Screw the Russians with their dashcams. Now we get the view from onlookers AND First Person Road Rage shots!
BTW, what kind of stupid asshole would expect "making pretty photo's from your car whilst driving" to be a reasonable use case for Google Glass?
I bet it would work great for traffic jam flirting, though. Keep your window-sized QR codes of your facebook url handy!
Yeah, that is almost the same thing.
What most Europeans don't understand is that Louisiana is about as foreign too 95% of the US as Romania is to the UK.
Don't be silly. (People in) States in the US have only had several hundred years to diverge from each other. European cultures have been able to do that for millennia (it is no wonder that so many different languages are spoken in Europe).
And let's not forget two huge recent wars fought on European soil between majorly different political mindsets. Some European countries were Soviet ruled states less than three decades ago. Some Europeans still alive today were nazis that played their part in the Holocaust. The effects of recent history are obvious.
Minimum monthly wage in Romania is about 160 EUR. In Austria, it is about 1000 EUR and in France it is about 1450 EUR: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_sovereign_states_in_Europe_by_minimum_wage
The distance between Austria and Romania is about 250 miles.
The animosity between European inhabitants can be very strong. I'd be surprised if New Yorkers complained about all those poor people from Lousiana coming to their state and stealing all their jobs, undercutting their wages and being useless criminals in general. Because that is exactly how an alarming amount of Western Europeans feels about Romanians and other Eastern Europeans. Ironically, the main solutions to the problems people complain about lie in more (synchronization of) legislation at the European level instead of less (which is what populists tell the gullible is the answer).
Simplest thing to do is to use a 8 char string as the base password and append, prepend or insert a three char string based on the web site name into it.
I used to do this, but the problem is that it only protects against automated attempts to abuse a compromised password. If I happen to have bought something at EvilWebshopHosterX and made an account with BasePasswordEWHX, it's easy for anyone that gets their hands on the password to figure out all my other passwords based on the scheme.
Rotate the base password once a year or so.
This is a terrible hassle and generally leads to having to try multiple base passwords before giving up and using the password reset mechanism because at that particular website, none of the base passwords plus the website specific scheme were allowed by retarded password restrictions.
The main point is that I just don't want to trust any entity with key information that can be used for doing other things. Things like LastPass generated unique tokens and application specific tokens are things that remove that risk, although of course pretty much everything is compromised if your emailaccount used in password reset mechanisms is compromised.
That is why you use LastPass generated passwords for the millions of accounts you don't really give a fuck about and can ultimately always access through password reset mechanisms. This allows you to focus on creating and remembering unique passwords that you know for truly important accounts, such as emailaccounts and banking accounts.
The alternative of using a single throwaway password for all those crap accounts instead of LastPass 'tokens' will inevitably lead to using a terribly weak password due to differing password restrictions on different websites and still allows all the accounts in the crap zone to be compromised by a hack of one of them.
This was something like 5-6 big boxes worth of parts, and involved some assembly that was a real challenge to do by myself.
That is besides the point. The IKEA-construction meme revolves around having parts left over and lack of understanding of the intended assembly process.
That is markedly different from construction being difficult when done alone.
Furthermore, I just looked at the type of bed you mentioned and the second page of the assembly instructions actually very intuitively makes clear that assembly should be done with two people:
http://www.ikea.com/us/en/assembly_instructions/brimnes-bed-frame-with-storage__AA-473492-10_pub.pdf
http://www.ikea.com/us/en/assembly_instructions/mandal-bed-frame-with-storage__AA-261173-9_pub.PDF
You might want to check whether the instructions you have contain a similar indication.
Oh I know the problem! IKEA manuals assume you have a brain!
This is exactly right.
In reality, assembling IKEA stuff isn't much (if any) harder than assembling a certain LEGO design (which most 8 year old children have very little difficulties with).
The whole bitching about assembling IKEA furniture is nothing more than a popular meme originating from and perpetuated by people who consider everything that requires slightly more mental effort than scratching their ass and operating a TV remote a burden.
These are the same people who find operating a microwave or a washing machine mystifying ("How DO they work??").
That said, a lot of it is similar to how the police do investigations, the 'internet' just had less information. We didn't get to see things like CCTV footage and such.
This.
There is no doubt in my mind that if the CCTV footage had been publicly accessible, it would have been a matter of hours or minutes before the crowd came to the same conclusions as the officials did.
It all boils down to the physical exertion of lifting my arm to perform input vs resting my arm on a desk and lightly moving my wrist.
You shouldn't have to. Considering the precision of Leap Motion, it could behave like sort of a 3D touchpad that you mainly operate by moving your finger(s) slightly (although large arm based motions should be easy to support simultaneously). It should even be possible to put a Leap Motion unit in a monitor and then interpret the movements of your hand on your desk as if you were moving a mouse.
The awesomeness of the sensing technology simply cannot be contested. The challenges lie in where to physically put the technology and how to interpret the data.
a civil war similar to the mid-19th century civil war in the United States. The United States of Europe will go through the same thing.
What the fuck are you talking about? How on earth are a bunch of cowboys with muskets (or slave owners with revolvers, whatever, fuck you) in a sticks and stones society on a recently sortof-civilized continent similar to millions of 9 to 5 schmucks in highly advanced societies where smartphones, computers and TVs pretty much rule life?
--
I am a crackpot
Never mind.
Some people see the advancement of mankind as something they want to contribute to, even if they don't instantly gain anything other than satisfaction from it.
I, for one, wouldn't mind if somebody makes stacks of money off my contributed CPU cycles. In fact, I'd applaud it if worldwide solar power production would increase because of it.
My tip: VistaSwitcher (no affiliation).
Especially useful for multiple monitor situations as it can be set to display the list of programs to switch between on the monitor where the mouse cursor is.
It even brings back the ability to CTRL+click on multiple programs and subsequently perform Tile Horizontally/Vertically (I still fail to see why this functionality was stripped from the Windows 7 taskbar).
Where can I get this Windows 1.0 you speak of? It looks way more functional than Windows 8.
I mean, being able to have more than two windows on the same screen? That is revolutionary!
If you're not coming up with something near optimal, then you're wasting time and resources.
You ignored most of my previous comment. I'd like to believe that means that you agree with what I wrote, but considering your reply it seems that you are simply closing your mind for other points of view and wish to cling on to an irrational antipathy against 'government'.
The fundamental problem is that even if governments were economically competent, and they aren't, they wouldn't be competent enough to understand the complexity of everyone's needs and desires and somehow magically come up with a near optimal solution to that.
You move from 'greater command and control' to 'come up with a near optimal solution'. This is clearly a straw man. Giving a government more power in a market doesn't entail that private entities immediately become completely irrelevant and that the only thing influencing what is put to market is that government. Things like taxing, subsidizing and regulating are simple examples of how a government can steer a market away from or towards undesirable or desirable behaviour without being the sole player in that market. In addition to that: for some markets, the latter is the most effective strategy to maximize economic growth (public infrastructure etc.).
Note here that OPEC is a collection of countries, not for profit businesses.
Stop kidding yourself. The behaviour of the OPEC is driven by profit-seeking lobbyists and oil sheikhs, not bureaucracy. Were it not for regulations against colluding and enforcement of those regulations by governments, almost all markets would eventually be run and exploited by cartels or monopolists. The OPEC just happens to be an incredibly powerful international cartel.
Compare it to slowing the economy such that we lose 10 or 20 years' worth of tech every 100 years.
If the assumption that 'greater government command-and-control' retards economic growth were true, you may have had a point. Your belief that it is true is not enough.
In the real world, the element that slows down progress the most is protectionism by profit-driven oligarchies and monopolies. Imagine how economies around the world would have looked if oil prices hadn't been kept artificially high by the OPEC.
Millions of untrained, starving peasants
Does Foxconn have a factory in South Korea?
There is a difference between corrupt cops and cops that 'murder', 'rape suspects' or 'run over kids'.
I can't remember having seen _any_story like that about cops in my country in my entire lifetime. Sure, things like drug trafficking, nepotism and corruption certainly exist within our police force, but murder and rape? No.
And don't even try to assume that I must live in some totalitarian state where such stories are swept under the mat. My country is in the top 5 of the Press Freedom Index. Maybe you should broaden your horizon and come visit us.
This happens everywhere
It does not.
but they have weapons and personell in quantity
Half of them are photoshopped, though.
They might not have the most modern equipment but there are a lot of them and they are fanatical.
Half of them may be photoshopped, though.
What what is to what, now?
It could be me, but I'm not sure your analogies are helping!