failed to take into account differences in earth's gravitational field
Even if they didn't account for it, so what? The Schwarzschild solution for Time dilation has a C squared in the divisor. Unless I'm doing the math wrong, It wouldn't even amount to 1 nanosecond, much less 60.
THE Turing test requires 2 people and 1 test subject. Convincing a single person in chat is at most A Turing test, and a piss poor one at that.
Want a better idea of how Cleverbot would do in real Turing test? Post some sample chat logs on a web site, and let people vote for which one they think is the human. Although really everyone should know that that is what is going to happen, since people might chat differently if they know they are being judged, but I doubt it would matter.
Micro-transactions are a tool, a method of payment. Can we reasonably assign a moral value to something that can be used for either good or evil? Well, yes we can. In fact, the courts have already done just that when they ruled against Napster, and in favor of video taping. We look at what the tool is primarily used for, and what other uses it has.
The thing about micro-transactions is that they work on scale which humans have difficulty making rational decision in. Deciding if, for example, 1/10 of cent is a good price for a piece of paper is not something easy to do. Slashdot readers are more likely than most to get it right, but that's beside the point. The point is that many humans get it wrong. And getting it wrong is where most of the money is being made in micro-transaction. In other words, the primary reason micro-transactions are viewed favorably by business and unfavorably by their customers is because people end up spending a lot more money than they would have if they were better at making decisions on such a small scale.
The primary reason businesses like micro-transactions is because they cause people to make mistakes. It's like putting a 1 silver item in the auction house for a thousand gold, hoping that someone will accidentally buy it because of the crappy AH interface.
Micro-transactions are bad. I'm not talking about bad in the moral sense, rather, bad in the efficiency sense. There's a cost associated with every transaction. That cost includes the cost of deciding to make the transaction. More transactions, more cost of deciding. To put it another way, the smaller the cost of the other things, the greater the percentage cost of making the decision to pay.
Rather than test for what can and can't be patented, I'd rather have a test for something that can't be subject to a patent. Suppose, for example, I could say "My software runs on hardware that existed before your patent was filed, and therefore my software doesn't violate your patent.". Then it would be possible for me to write software and be relatively certain it didn't violate any patents.
See, I don't want to invalidate your stupid patent, I want to avoid being sued. I only decide to invalidate it after you sue me. Which means I have to read and understand your stupid patent. Which means you have a strong incentive to make your stupid patent as difficult to understand and as confusing as possible.
Even a very restrictive affirmative test is better than a lax negative one.
Computers these days can go from completely off to working within 30 seconds, and in some cases much faster
30 seconds is something to be ashamed of, not brag about.
The Apple II had a boot time measured in milliseconds, and most of that was making the beep sound. As time wore on, boot times got longer.
A thing of the past? No, long boot times are a relatively recent phenomena. They will be with us as long as software quality is less important than time to market. I predict they will die, but not until Moore's law stops, or at least slows down enough that we start thinking of a computer as something we won't replace until it breaks. Only then will we care about software quality, size, and efficiency.
... since harvesting large amounts of spider silk is not practical.
No problem, just cross-breed spiders with goats to make a goat that can be milked for silk. Or you could just buy one pre-bred. ISTR Nexia selling theirs.
They are still in business. They have not demonstrated any products or prototypes. Many believe that the tech doesn't / can't work. Some believe they are frauds. Some believe they are real. The site theeestory.com follows the company, though in the absence of any actual news, the site has devolved into other topics.
However that's a product of the Kindle store, not the device.
Is it? I mean, I don't understand the Kindle all that well, but it seems to me that if they can remove something from your device, then they can remove anything and everything from your device. It might not be legal or ethical for them to do so, and they might not plan on ever doing so, but isn't it technically possible for them to remove a non DRM book?
Even video cameras need to be protected from the water.
It's not the water that's the problem, it's the pressure. And the pressure is mainly a problem for things with air in them, like you and your eyeballs, CCDs, not so much.
Many security filtering systems use lists of public IPv4 addresses to identify 'undesirable' hosts on the Internet. As more ISPs deploy LSN systems, the effectiveness of these IPv4 filtering systems will be hurt."
In other words, as IPv4 dies, using IPv4 for stuff won't work as well.
Using an IP address to determine the content of a message is a bad idea anyway. It's like determining what cars are carrying drugs by looking at the license plates, and then punishing the car dealer for selling the car.
Your IPv4 black list is broken. IPv6 makes it more broken. Cry me a river.
People like to get paid. Google will pay them to put advertising on their web pages. Therefore, people put advertising on their web pages. A libre search engine isn't going to change that.
Maybe Google is responsible for pages that are designed to get a high page rank. Maybe. But yet another alternative to Google wouldn't make those pages go away. If it had any effect at all, it would be to create even more useless pages designed to get a high "page rank" on that search engine.
The Lobner prize competition isn't even close to what Turing proposed as a test. Turing's imitation game is when a person and a computer both try to convince an examiner that they're human. There's also a tacit assumption that the human contestant and the interrogator want to win the game. If a computer could pass that test, even once, it would be quite an achievement.
I've often thought about entering the Lobner competition with a bot that's 100% up front about being a bot, and simply offers to split the prize money with the judge.
Seems that the clever programs simply repeat memorised snippets of conversation. After a while this will give a realistic human conversation,
Maybe in the same way that monkey will type the works of Shakespeare "after a while".
I've yet to see a chat bot that can reasonably respond to "Could you rephrase that?". Chat bots still haven't convinced more than half of untrained, inexpert judges. Tell the judges they can and should grade based on responsiveness and chat bots don't convince anybody.
How many people actually want this new feature? How many people do not want this new feature? If more people hate it than like it, then adding the feature will reduce the customer base.
I haven't heard anyone say how much more enjoyable things will be once RealID is in place. I have heard a lot of bitching. Why then, does blizzard want to implement it?
Once you go from photovoltaic to solar thermal, you have to add the capacity to store heat in your heat reservoir and extract it. That increases costs significantly...
Does it? I'd think heat storage could be as simple as a lined hole in the ground. Digging a hole the size of a 10 story building (which is about what you'd need for a 100 megawatt steam plant) and lining it with concrete isn't free, but no where near the cost of everything else you need. I'd estimate less than a 10% increase in cost. And that's without imagining "high-tech" solutions like molten salt.
Two micro controllers sounds like at least one too many to me, and it looks like they're using reed switches instead of the much cheaper membrain type.
Let's face it, $35 isn't cheap. $20 is a lot better (you're now in impulse purchase range) but it's still not cheap - there's a link to a $12 computer on the same page as the article.
I like the idea, but if you're going to wish for 10,000 units, then you might as well wish for enough units to support full scale integration and put everything on a single chip.
... themes and plugins that 'extend' WordPress violate the GPL if they are not themselves distributed under the GPL.
Forget GPL for a moment - if it wasn't licensed at all, would a releasing a plugin violate copyright on the thing it's a plugin for?
My gut says "no", which means no infringement, which means no need to consider GPL (or any other license) and WordPress can pound sand. But there is so much stupidity in copyright law that I wonder. Anyone know of any actual case law where a plugin was considered a copyright violation?
Only if inventions can be traded, their true value can be assessed.
So his point is, that since he can't think of any other way to assess true value, there is no other way? And patents are justified because otherwise we'd have to use an approximation of value?
Maybe it's just me, but I don't find that a very compelling argument.
If a caching DNS server that serves multiple users in multiple countries, then suddenly, it's not caching anymore. If there are multiple possible IP addresses that I can be directed to, why not just send all of them to me, and let me (my DNS server) decide which one is best? What if have more than one IP? Which one should I use? How often is it, really, that the route to the DNS server isn't the best route anyway? I.e. is the tiny benefit of a slightly better route for a handful of people really worth making a change to something as basic as the DNS protocol?
I'd rather see a way to redirect the connection - cut out the DNS middleman.
The killer problem for battery powered cars isn't weight, or energy density, it's cost. The battery pack in the Tesla model S is an estimated $30,000 of it $55,000 price.
Slashdot Mirror
There's an important difference between more books created, and more books available.
Why should I care how many books exist that cost more than I'm willing to spend?
Seriously though, WhyTF can't the world simply agree on a date format?
I use the ISO standard YYYY-MM-DD. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ISO_8601
More than once I've had people complain that it's "non standard"
failed to take into account differences in earth's gravitational field
Even if they didn't account for it, so what?
The Schwarzschild solution for Time dilation has a C squared in the divisor.
Unless I'm doing the math wrong, It wouldn't even amount to 1 nanosecond, much less 60.
Remember the second law of thermodynamics - you can't get something for nothing.
Sorry, wrong. The three laws of thermodynamics;
1. You can't win.
2. You can't tie.
3. You can't get out of the game.
THE Turing test requires 2 people and 1 test subject.
Convincing a single person in chat is at most A Turing test, and a piss poor one at that.
Want a better idea of how Cleverbot would do in real Turing test?
Post some sample chat logs on a web site, and let people vote for which one they think is the human.
Although really everyone should know that that is what is going to happen, since people might chat differently if they know they are being judged, but I doubt it would matter.
Micro-transactions are a tool, a method of payment.
Can we reasonably assign a moral value to something that can be used for either good or evil?
Well, yes we can. In fact, the courts have already done just that when they ruled against Napster, and in favor of video taping.
We look at what the tool is primarily used for, and what other uses it has.
The thing about micro-transactions is that they work on scale which humans have difficulty making rational decision in.
Deciding if, for example, 1/10 of cent is a good price for a piece of paper is not something easy to do.
Slashdot readers are more likely than most to get it right, but that's beside the point. The point is that many humans get it wrong.
And getting it wrong is where most of the money is being made in micro-transaction.
In other words, the primary reason micro-transactions are viewed favorably by business and unfavorably by their customers is because people end up spending a lot more money than they would have if they were better at making decisions on such a small scale.
The primary reason businesses like micro-transactions is because they cause people to make mistakes.
It's like putting a 1 silver item in the auction house for a thousand gold, hoping that someone will accidentally buy it because of the crappy AH interface.
-- ABH
Micro-transactions are bad.
I'm not talking about bad in the moral sense, rather, bad in the efficiency sense.
There's a cost associated with every transaction.
That cost includes the cost of deciding to make the transaction.
More transactions, more cost of deciding.
To put it another way, the smaller the cost of the other things, the greater the percentage cost of making the decision to pay.
-- ABH
Rather than test for what can and can't be patented, I'd rather have a test for something that can't be subject to a patent.
Suppose, for example, I could say "My software runs on hardware that existed before your patent was filed, and therefore my software doesn't violate your patent.".
Then it would be possible for me to write software and be relatively certain it didn't violate any patents.
See, I don't want to invalidate your stupid patent, I want to avoid being sued.
I only decide to invalidate it after you sue me.
Which means I have to read and understand your stupid patent.
Which means you have a strong incentive to make your stupid patent as difficult to understand and as confusing as possible.
Even a very restrictive affirmative test is better than a lax negative one.
Computers these days can go from completely off to working within 30 seconds, and in some cases much faster
30 seconds is something to be ashamed of, not brag about.
The Apple II had a boot time measured in milliseconds, and most of that was making the beep sound.
As time wore on, boot times got longer.
A thing of the past? No, long boot times are a relatively recent phenomena.
They will be with us as long as software quality is less important than time to market.
I predict they will die, but not until Moore's law stops, or at least slows down enough that we start thinking of a computer as something we won't replace until it breaks.
Only then will we care about software quality, size, and efficiency.
-- Should you believe authority without question?
... since harvesting large amounts of spider silk is not practical.
No problem, just cross-breed spiders with goats to make a goat that can be milked for silk.
Or you could just buy one pre-bred. ISTR Nexia selling theirs.
They are still in business.
They have not demonstrated any products or prototypes.
Many believe that the tech doesn't / can't work.
Some believe they are frauds.
Some believe they are real.
The site theeestory.com follows the company, though in the absence of any actual news, the site has devolved into other topics.
If it's not an unreasonable search to attach a tracker to someones car, does that mean ordinary citizens can do it too?
However that's a product of the Kindle store, not the device.
Is it?
I mean, I don't understand the Kindle all that well, but it seems to me that if they can remove something from your device, then they can remove anything and everything from your device.
It might not be legal or ethical for them to do so, and they might not plan on ever doing so, but isn't it technically possible for them to remove a non DRM book?
Even video cameras need to be protected from the water.
It's not the water that's the problem, it's the pressure.
And the pressure is mainly a problem for things with air in them, like you and your eyeballs, CCDs, not so much.
Many security filtering systems use lists of public IPv4 addresses to identify 'undesirable' hosts on the Internet. As more ISPs deploy LSN systems, the effectiveness of these IPv4 filtering systems will be hurt."
In other words, as IPv4 dies, using IPv4 for stuff won't work as well.
Using an IP address to determine the content of a message is a bad idea anyway.
It's like determining what cars are carrying drugs by looking at the license plates, and then punishing the car dealer for selling the car.
Your IPv4 black list is broken. IPv6 makes it more broken. Cry me a river.
People like to get paid.
Google will pay them to put advertising on their web pages.
Therefore, people put advertising on their web pages.
A libre search engine isn't going to change that.
Maybe Google is responsible for pages that are designed to get a high page rank.
Maybe.
But yet another alternative to Google wouldn't make those pages go away.
If it had any effect at all, it would be to create even more useless pages designed to get a high "page rank" on that search engine.
The Lobner prize competition isn't even close to what Turing proposed as a test.
Turing's imitation game is when a person and a computer both try to convince an examiner that they're human.
There's also a tacit assumption that the human contestant and the interrogator want to win the game.
If a computer could pass that test, even once, it would be quite an achievement.
I've often thought about entering the Lobner competition with a bot that's 100% up front about being a bot,
and simply offers to split the prize money with the judge.
Seems that the clever programs simply repeat memorised snippets of conversation. After a while this will give a realistic human conversation,
Maybe in the same way that monkey will type the works of Shakespeare "after a while".
I've yet to see a chat bot that can reasonably respond to "Could you rephrase that?".
Chat bots still haven't convinced more than half of untrained, inexpert judges.
Tell the judges they can and should grade based on responsiveness and chat bots don't convince anybody.
How many people actually want this new feature?
How many people do not want this new feature?
If more people hate it than like it, then adding the feature will reduce the customer base.
I haven't heard anyone say how much more enjoyable things will be once RealID is in place.
I have heard a lot of bitching.
Why then, does blizzard want to implement it?
Once you go from photovoltaic to solar thermal, you have to add the capacity to store heat in your heat reservoir and extract it. That increases costs significantly...
Does it? I'd think heat storage could be as simple as a lined hole in the ground.
Digging a hole the size of a 10 story building (which is about what you'd need for a 100 megawatt steam plant) and lining it with concrete isn't free, but no where near the cost of everything else you need. I'd estimate less than a 10% increase in cost. And that's without imagining "high-tech" solutions like molten salt.
Two micro controllers sounds like at least one too many to me, and it looks like they're using reed switches instead of the much cheaper membrain type.
Let's face it, $35 isn't cheap. $20 is a lot better (you're now in impulse purchase range) but it's still not cheap - there's a link to a $12 computer on the same page as the article.
I like the idea, but if you're going to wish for 10,000 units, then you might as well wish for enough units to support full scale integration and put everything on a single chip.
Our grades go to 11.
... themes and plugins that 'extend' WordPress violate the GPL if they are not themselves distributed under the GPL.
Forget GPL for a moment - if it wasn't licensed at all, would a releasing a plugin violate copyright on the thing it's a plugin for?
My gut says "no", which means no infringement, which means no need to consider GPL (or any other license) and WordPress can pound sand. But there is so much stupidity in copyright law that I wonder. Anyone know of any actual case law where a plugin was considered a copyright violation?
Only if inventions can be traded, their true value can be assessed.
So his point is, that since he can't think of any other way to assess true value, there is no other way?
And patents are justified because otherwise we'd have to use an approximation of value?
Maybe it's just me, but I don't find that a very compelling argument.
-- Should you believe authority without question?
Sounds like a terrible idea to me.
If a caching DNS server that serves multiple users in multiple countries, then suddenly, it's not caching anymore.
If there are multiple possible IP addresses that I can be directed to, why not just send all of them to me, and let me (my DNS server) decide which one is best?
What if have more than one IP? Which one should I use?
How often is it, really, that the route to the DNS server isn't the best route anyway? I.e. is the tiny benefit of a slightly better route for a handful of people really worth making a change to something as basic as the DNS protocol?
I'd rather see a way to redirect the connection - cut out the DNS middleman.
Lithium can be extracted from sea water, and even using current known methods, it would only raise the cost of lithium batteries by about 8%.
http://gas2.org/2008/10/13/lithium-counterpoint-no-shortage-for-electric-cars/
The killer problem for battery powered cars isn't weight, or energy density, it's cost.
The battery pack in the Tesla model S is an estimated $30,000 of it $55,000 price.
-- Should you believe authority without question?