No. There are no agreements when Frozzle1093 uploads a "radiohead" album. There aren't any ads at all on those videos.
Does Radiohead want there to be ads on those videos? It's their choice; they (or their label, depending on those agreements) set the policy and Google just enforces it. Somehow I think you actually already knew that, else you wouldn't have picked "Radiohead", since they are a rather unique group who takes an unusually light hand with copyright, and has actually switched to self-publishing rather than using a label, in large part to give them more freedom in how they handle such matters.
You may not reduce the pre-meditated homicide rate by much, and indeed many countries haven't, but you eliminate an entire class of crimes of hot-headedness, mass murder, and give victims a fighting chance.
If this is true, then we should see a significantly lower homicide rate in countries with lower gun ownership rates. In fact, there appears to be no such correlation.
I'll note, though, that this is the way the subject should be addressed, with facts and numbers, and testing the effect of firearms ownership on overall rates of violence, not with emotional appeals and a wrongheaded focus on "gun violence" as somehow worse than all other forms of violence.
The reason guns were banned? Two people pulled a gun on each other during a technical argument about an engineering design.
Both, or at least the guy who initiated the use of deadly force, were fired for cause and prosecuted for assault with a deadly weapon, right?
And in that case do you really think that your modified AR15 is going to be of any use against whatever the government chooses to throw at you?
50 million AR15s, etc.,... yes. Particularly since it's quite likely that many members of the military and police forces will join the opposition and bring their weapons with them.
If things get so bad that you have to rely on your gun rights then you've already lost.
You should review the history of guerilla warfare. There are lots of ways for a hidden, embedded force to fight a better-armed force. This is doubly true if the better-armed force is an order of magnitude smaller.
They hardly even scratch the surface of copyright violations. Go look for any album on Youtube, they are all there and have been there for years. They just don't care.
Google doesn't care, the copyright owners do. They care a lot, and they make Google handle it. If the copyright owners were unhappy with those albums being there, they would be taken down. But they're okay with it because they have agreements in place, so Google sends the copyright owner a piece of the ad revenue. All of this is automated so you can upload any random music video and odds are very good that it will stay up... but various restrictions will be applied to comply with the agreements.
For example, I made a tribute video for my mother in law's funeral recently, and used three songs that she loved as the soundtrack. I uploaded it to YouTube to make it easy to share with the extended family, and if I go look at it in my video manager, I note that it is flagged as "not eligible for monetization" and "blocked in some countries". If I click on it to get details, I find that Google has automatically identified the songs in it, and their owners, and applied rules based on agreements with those owners. Specifically, one of the songs in monetized by the copyright owner, which is why I can't make money off of it (not that I care, or that there would be any money to be made) and two others are blocked in Germany because Google doesn't have agreements with the copyright owners in that jurisdiction. Oh, and my video also apparently can't be played on set top boxes, again because Google's licensing agreements don't cover that usage.
So, your perception that all of that music on YouTube is somehow sliding under the radar and that Google will "crack down" in the future is completely wrong. It isn't "under the radar" at all, and Google not only does "crack down" on copyrighted content that may be infringing, but has the cracking thoroughly automated. But, Google has arranged such comprehensive licenses that you don't notice because it seems like everything is there.
Not true, multiple studies have shown that increased availability of guns increase gun violence
Which is irrelevant (and disputed by other studies anyway). The question of interest is whether the increased availability of guns increases violence. Obviously taking away guns decreases gun violence, but that doesn't necessarily make society any safer.
I'm decidedly pro-gun, but I think we have to be careful with that line of argument. What happens if you cherry-pick the most violent regions of those other countries and shut them down? I don't actually know, but I suspect that the bulk of their violence (including gun violence) also happens in a few bad areas and that their statistics would drop, putting the US back toward the top of the list.
It should also be noted, though, that statistics measuring rates of firearms homicides are inherently biased from the outset. What we should be measuring is rates of homicides (and attempted homicides) with any weapon. Draconian gun control laws do actually reduce the number of guns in the hands of the populace, and therefore do reduce gun deaths... but that really doesn't matter at all to everyone who gets stabbed or beaten to death instead of shot. Now, there's an argument that the presence of guns increases the total homicide rate, and that's an argument worthy of discussion. (However, I haven't seen any compelling evidence that it's correct, and if you plot the nations of the world on a graph of gun ownership rates against homicide rates, you'll find no correlation.)
Moreover, it would even be CONSTITUTIONAL. The authors of the Second Amendment even proposed standardizing and mandating weapons to be distributed to citizens so that they could be conscripted in case of an armed conflict.
It may have been constitutional then, when the 2A, like the whole Bill of Rights, was mostly about communitarian rights rather than individual rights. That all changed with the 14th amendment, which fundamentally rewrote the Bill of Rights as well as radically changing the federal government's role with respect to individual rights (it previously had no significant role). Now that it's an individual right, it's less clear that it can be regulated that strongly. As of yet the courts have articulated to specific standard of review, but it's hard to see how the 2A could get anything other than strict scrutiny, like the rest of the core rights in the Bill of Rights, and I don't think your proposed measures would meet that standard's requirements of either necessity or effectiveness.
It's not like someone had to figure out who flew the planes into the WTC towers, right?
Umm, yes, we did have to figure it out. Al Queda and Bin Laden not only didn't claim responsibility, they denied it for three years. The FBI was able to conclude within a few weeks after the incident who it was, though, by identifying the hijackers and then discovering links to Al Qaeda.
So if you use 9/11 as a guide, there's no reason to believe that the group responsible would claim it. And it would be a lot easier for people to plant a bomb and detonate it without leaving a paper trail.
Ok but that's what I was asking.. how many people actually have families? If most people feel the housing is inadequate for a family, then they are being prevented from having a family. Assuming you have a boy and a girl and you don't want either of them sleeping in your room, you need to be able to afford at least a three bedroom house.
Sure, so when you decide to have a family you move out of the city.
Just out of interest, how many people doing that long commute have families? You know, with kids.
Not many, I don't think. Most of my colleagues with families live in the burbs where the price of enough space to house their kids is a bit less insane (still insane, but a bit less).
The thing is that Watson can do a few specific things very well, none of which require intelligence.
What is intelligence? For that matter, you claim there is no "thought" in Watson... what is "thought"?
We don't actually know, yet. Thought is computation... is that all it is? Dunno. We have our own experience of perceiving ourselves as thinking, is that all it is, computation plus introspection?
You can't say there's no intelligence or thought, because we don't actually know what those things are. What Watson and AlphaGo do is probably at least a part of what is involved in "general intelligence". I suspect that as we learn more about what intelligence is and is not, we're going to learn a huge amount about our own brains and what our limitations are, including many things which we don't have the context to perceive.
Okay, maybe if you literally get a job with Google, move there. But otherwise, why? The pay premium you get from living there doesn't make up for the sky-high housing costs. And most of these people live in San Fransisco and then do a long commute out to a suburban area. It's really not worth it.
The above is a mixture of factual statements and value judgements stated as facts. The factual statements are true... the value judgements are value judgments and what's true for you is not true for everyone.
You mentioned Google. I work for Google, and so I know and work with a lot of Google employees who live in San Francisco. Most of them do exactly what you said: Live in San Francisco and then do a long commute out to a suburban area (Mountain View), where they work. You say "it's really not worth it"... but they say it absolutely is worth it. They like living in San Francisco and are perfectly happy to pay ridiculous rents and spend two hours per day commuting. Some of them accept the commute because they get to ride on a nice company-provided bus, but most of them would still do it if the bus weren't available, using mass transit or even driving themselves. They like the city that much.
This is the bottom line: You can't tell people what to want, not if you want them to listen. They want what they want, and lots of people like living in the city. Hell if I know why. I live in rural Utah and love it; I can afford a nice house with plenty of space, ten miles from a world-class ski resort. Living cheek-by-jowl with millions of others sounds like a nightmare to me, but obviously I'm in the minority because the reason it's cheap to live where I do and expensive to live in SF is because few people want the former and lots want the latter.
Well, part of the reason not many people want to live where I do is because of limited employment opportunities, but that's clearly not the issue with the tech employees who live in SF and work in the bay area. If I had to work in the Mountain View office, I'd live in Gilroy or similar, where I could have the wide open spaces and lower cost of living I prefer, and I'd have about the same commute on the same sort of bus that my colleagues in SF have. And they could totally do that, too, but they don't because they like the city.
You can try to make a moral argument -- and maybe that's what you were trying to do -- that people who are able to live anywhere should choose not to live in SF to avoid being the evil "gentrifiers", but I don't think you're going to have much luck with that. There's a moral argument that I should live in a small apartment in the city in order to reduce my environmental impact, and while I see the point I will still live where I do because life's too short to be miserable if you have the ability to choose.
You can also try to convince people that they'd be just as happy in, say, Chicago, as in SF. You may have a slightly higher success rate there, but there are big differences between Chicago and SF, and many people do prefer SF.
The real solution here, as has been stated many times, is for the city of San Francisco to stop restricting the construction of new housing. It's the more or less fixed housing supply in the face of increasing demand that has created the problem. Rent control is another big piece of the problem, even though it's intended to be part of the solution. Start approving high-density housing construction and phase out rent controls and the problem will go away. There will still be people who are priced out of living in the city. That's just reality. But there will be far fewer such people.
Remember, the government can now do stuff and order you not to talk about it. It's very easy to envision them going to a tech and saying "open that wiring closet" knowing that if anyone hears about it, he's going to Leavenworth.
Cite?
I only know of two forms of gag orders under US law [national security letter] / [court order]
So which one of those are you talking about, or are you referring to another that the public hasn't been made aware of?
There are also:
Patent secrecy orders under 37 CFR 5.2
Valid point, but not relevant to this discussion.
Suspicious activity reports, under Housing and Community Development Act of 1992
Also valid but not relevant.
18 U.S.C. 2705(b) -- The Electronic Communications Privacy Act of 1986 / Stored Communications Act; this is where all the security "canaries" in the disclosure reports from companies tend to originate.
18 U.S.C. 3123(d)(2) -- The Electronic Communications Privacy Act of 1986; this is what prevents disclosure of pen registers.
Yes, this is the legislation that authorizes the FBI to issue NSLs seeking metadata. It's exactly the first form of gag order that I mentioned. Thank you for providing the details, but calling it an additional example is misleading to the point of deceptive.
California Electronic Communications Privacy Act -- gag orders on all cases concerning electronic search warrants.
This is state, not federal, and it requires a search warrant, which means that it's just a codification of the judge's extant authority to issue gag orders. So this is a special sub-case of the other form I mentioned.
So... you have not been able to cite any additional relevant situations in which gag orders can be issued. But at least you got a +5 out of it, so there's that.
There are, in fact others, some of which I'm prohibited from sharing with you...
Remember, the government can now do stuff and order you not to talk about it. It's very easy to envision them going to a tech and saying "open that wiring closet" knowing that if anyone hears about it, he's going to Leavenworth.
Cite?
I only know of two forms of gag orders under US law. The first is associated with National Security Letters. The legislation behind those specifies that they may only be used to compel the delivery of metadata that is in the recipient organization's possession, and it says that the recipient may be ordered not to divulge the fact that the request was received or responded to. NSLs don't authorize arbitrary demands like "open that wiring closet". The other is a court order. Judges have very wide latitude in what they can order. However, such orders can be appealed, and judges generally do not make such blanket orders.
So which one of those are you talking about, or are you referring to another that the public hasn't been made aware of?
As an example, the Watson triumph in Jeopardy was entirely expected but not very significant in terms of comparing human vs. computer thought.
Absolutely wrong.
Watson's win was *far* from expected, and it was very significant. Okay, sure, the machine is faster at buzzing in, but that's not what was interesting or significant. What was interesting was that Watson was able to do fairly free-form natural language processing, and able to draw on not just direct knowledge, but indirect inference, context and even metaphor. What was amazing was that Watson was able to compete on something like a level playing field against humans in this contest of very fuzzy questions, er, answers. Whether Watson won or lost didn't actually matter much. What was amazing was that it was able to compete at all.
Most AI researchers would actually have predicted that Jeopardy was a tougher game for a computer to win than Go.
Slashdot Mirror
No. There are no agreements when Frozzle1093 uploads a "radiohead" album. There aren't any ads at all on those videos.
Does Radiohead want there to be ads on those videos? It's their choice; they (or their label, depending on those agreements) set the policy and Google just enforces it. Somehow I think you actually already knew that, else you wouldn't have picked "Radiohead", since they are a rather unique group who takes an unusually light hand with copyright, and has actually switched to self-publishing rather than using a label, in large part to give them more freedom in how they handle such matters.
You just got caught.
Huh?
You may not reduce the pre-meditated homicide rate by much, and indeed many countries haven't, but you eliminate an entire class of crimes of hot-headedness, mass murder, and give victims a fighting chance.
If this is true, then we should see a significantly lower homicide rate in countries with lower gun ownership rates. In fact, there appears to be no such correlation.
I'll note, though, that this is the way the subject should be addressed, with facts and numbers, and testing the effect of firearms ownership on overall rates of violence, not with emotional appeals and a wrongheaded focus on "gun violence" as somehow worse than all other forms of violence.
The reason guns were banned? Two people pulled a gun on each other during a technical argument about an engineering design.
Both, or at least the guy who initiated the use of deadly force, were fired for cause and prosecuted for assault with a deadly weapon, right?
It may have been constitutional then, when the 2A, like the whole Bill of Rights, was mostly about communitarian rights rather than individual rights
So you're saying that gun ownership has no basis in the Constitution? OK, let's go on with that.
You need to work on your reading comprehension and English language skills. In particular, learn about verb tenses. "Was" is not the same as "Is".
And in that case do you really think that your modified AR15 is going to be of any use against whatever the government chooses to throw at you?
50 million AR15s, etc., ... yes. Particularly since it's quite likely that many members of the military and police forces will join the opposition and bring their weapons with them.
If things get so bad that you have to rely on your gun rights then you've already lost.
You should review the history of guerilla warfare. There are lots of ways for a hidden, embedded force to fight a better-armed force. This is doubly true if the better-armed force is an order of magnitude smaller.
They hardly even scratch the surface of copyright violations. Go look for any album on Youtube, they are all there and have been there for years. They just don't care.
Google doesn't care, the copyright owners do. They care a lot, and they make Google handle it. If the copyright owners were unhappy with those albums being there, they would be taken down. But they're okay with it because they have agreements in place, so Google sends the copyright owner a piece of the ad revenue. All of this is automated so you can upload any random music video and odds are very good that it will stay up... but various restrictions will be applied to comply with the agreements.
For example, I made a tribute video for my mother in law's funeral recently, and used three songs that she loved as the soundtrack. I uploaded it to YouTube to make it easy to share with the extended family, and if I go look at it in my video manager, I note that it is flagged as "not eligible for monetization" and "blocked in some countries". If I click on it to get details, I find that Google has automatically identified the songs in it, and their owners, and applied rules based on agreements with those owners. Specifically, one of the songs in monetized by the copyright owner, which is why I can't make money off of it (not that I care, or that there would be any money to be made) and two others are blocked in Germany because Google doesn't have agreements with the copyright owners in that jurisdiction. Oh, and my video also apparently can't be played on set top boxes, again because Google's licensing agreements don't cover that usage.
So, your perception that all of that music on YouTube is somehow sliding under the radar and that Google will "crack down" in the future is completely wrong. It isn't "under the radar" at all, and Google not only does "crack down" on copyrighted content that may be infringing, but has the cracking thoroughly automated. But, Google has arranged such comprehensive licenses that you don't notice because it seems like everything is there.
Not true, multiple studies have shown that increased availability of guns increase gun violence
Which is irrelevant (and disputed by other studies anyway). The question of interest is whether the increased availability of guns increases violence. Obviously taking away guns decreases gun violence, but that doesn't necessarily make society any safer.
I'm decidedly pro-gun, but I think we have to be careful with that line of argument. What happens if you cherry-pick the most violent regions of those other countries and shut them down? I don't actually know, but I suspect that the bulk of their violence (including gun violence) also happens in a few bad areas and that their statistics would drop, putting the US back toward the top of the list.
It should also be noted, though, that statistics measuring rates of firearms homicides are inherently biased from the outset. What we should be measuring is rates of homicides (and attempted homicides) with any weapon. Draconian gun control laws do actually reduce the number of guns in the hands of the populace, and therefore do reduce gun deaths... but that really doesn't matter at all to everyone who gets stabbed or beaten to death instead of shot. Now, there's an argument that the presence of guns increases the total homicide rate, and that's an argument worthy of discussion. (However, I haven't seen any compelling evidence that it's correct, and if you plot the nations of the world on a graph of gun ownership rates against homicide rates, you'll find no correlation.)
Do you see no other political solution to your grievance than buying a gun?
Sure there are lots of other solutions... until the day those break down. Hopefully that will never happen. Hopefully.
Moreover, it would even be CONSTITUTIONAL. The authors of the Second Amendment even proposed standardizing and mandating weapons to be distributed to citizens so that they could be conscripted in case of an armed conflict.
It may have been constitutional then, when the 2A, like the whole Bill of Rights, was mostly about communitarian rights rather than individual rights. That all changed with the 14th amendment, which fundamentally rewrote the Bill of Rights as well as radically changing the federal government's role with respect to individual rights (it previously had no significant role). Now that it's an individual right, it's less clear that it can be regulated that strongly. As of yet the courts have articulated to specific standard of review, but it's hard to see how the 2A could get anything other than strict scrutiny, like the rest of the core rights in the Bill of Rights, and I don't think your proposed measures would meet that standard's requirements of either necessity or effectiveness.
It's not like someone had to figure out who flew the planes into the WTC towers, right?
Umm, yes, we did have to figure it out. Al Queda and Bin Laden not only didn't claim responsibility, they denied it for three years. The FBI was able to conclude within a few weeks after the incident who it was, though, by identifying the hijackers and then discovering links to Al Qaeda.
So if you use 9/11 as a guide, there's no reason to believe that the group responsible would claim it. And it would be a lot easier for people to plant a bomb and detonate it without leaving a paper trail.
Ok but that's what I was asking.. how many people actually have families? If most people feel the housing is inadequate for a family, then they are being prevented from having a family. Assuming you have a boy and a girl and you don't want either of them sleeping in your room, you need to be able to afford at least a three bedroom house.
Sure, so when you decide to have a family you move out of the city.
No one is being prevented from having a family.
Just out of interest, how many people doing that long commute have families? You know, with kids.
Not many, I don't think. Most of my colleagues with families live in the burbs where the price of enough space to house their kids is a bit less insane (still insane, but a bit less).
There is nothing in Watson that can have a thought. It is not an entity, just a collection of parts.
As is your brain.
tlambert and I go way back; we met almost 30 years ago in school. You would definitely find him interesting to talk to.
The thing is that Watson can do a few specific things very well, none of which require intelligence.
What is intelligence? For that matter, you claim there is no "thought" in Watson... what is "thought"?
We don't actually know, yet. Thought is computation... is that all it is? Dunno. We have our own experience of perceiving ourselves as thinking, is that all it is, computation plus introspection?
You can't say there's no intelligence or thought, because we don't actually know what those things are. What Watson and AlphaGo do is probably at least a part of what is involved in "general intelligence". I suspect that as we learn more about what intelligence is and is not, we're going to learn a huge amount about our own brains and what our limitations are, including many things which we don't have the context to perceive.
Well, I'm certainly not going to claim to know your reasons better than you do :-)
Okay, maybe if you literally get a job with Google, move there. But otherwise, why? The pay premium you get from living there doesn't make up for the sky-high housing costs. And most of these people live in San Fransisco and then do a long commute out to a suburban area. It's really not worth it.
The above is a mixture of factual statements and value judgements stated as facts. The factual statements are true... the value judgements are value judgments and what's true for you is not true for everyone.
You mentioned Google. I work for Google, and so I know and work with a lot of Google employees who live in San Francisco. Most of them do exactly what you said: Live in San Francisco and then do a long commute out to a suburban area (Mountain View), where they work. You say "it's really not worth it"... but they say it absolutely is worth it. They like living in San Francisco and are perfectly happy to pay ridiculous rents and spend two hours per day commuting. Some of them accept the commute because they get to ride on a nice company-provided bus, but most of them would still do it if the bus weren't available, using mass transit or even driving themselves. They like the city that much.
This is the bottom line: You can't tell people what to want, not if you want them to listen. They want what they want, and lots of people like living in the city. Hell if I know why. I live in rural Utah and love it; I can afford a nice house with plenty of space, ten miles from a world-class ski resort. Living cheek-by-jowl with millions of others sounds like a nightmare to me, but obviously I'm in the minority because the reason it's cheap to live where I do and expensive to live in SF is because few people want the former and lots want the latter.
Well, part of the reason not many people want to live where I do is because of limited employment opportunities, but that's clearly not the issue with the tech employees who live in SF and work in the bay area. If I had to work in the Mountain View office, I'd live in Gilroy or similar, where I could have the wide open spaces and lower cost of living I prefer, and I'd have about the same commute on the same sort of bus that my colleagues in SF have. And they could totally do that, too, but they don't because they like the city.
You can try to make a moral argument -- and maybe that's what you were trying to do -- that people who are able to live anywhere should choose not to live in SF to avoid being the evil "gentrifiers", but I don't think you're going to have much luck with that. There's a moral argument that I should live in a small apartment in the city in order to reduce my environmental impact, and while I see the point I will still live where I do because life's too short to be miserable if you have the ability to choose.
You can also try to convince people that they'd be just as happy in, say, Chicago, as in SF. You may have a slightly higher success rate there, but there are big differences between Chicago and SF, and many people do prefer SF.
The real solution here, as has been stated many times, is for the city of San Francisco to stop restricting the construction of new housing. It's the more or less fixed housing supply in the face of increasing demand that has created the problem. Rent control is another big piece of the problem, even though it's intended to be part of the solution. Start approving high-density housing construction and phase out rent controls and the problem will go away. There will still be people who are priced out of living in the city. That's just reality. But there will be far fewer such people.
Sorry, but how democracy works is people have the ability to decide what their city is like. Democracy is more important than markets.
And the voters can vote that the sky should be a deeper shade of blue on Sundays, and that the value of pi should be a nice, round 3.
Democracy doesn't changes the laws of physics, mathematics or economics. If demand increases and supply stays constant, price goes up.
You should read my reply to his comment.
Remember, the government can now do stuff and order you not to talk about it. It's very easy to envision them going to a tech and saying "open that wiring closet" knowing that if anyone hears about it, he's going to Leavenworth.
Cite?
I only know of two forms of gag orders under US law [national security letter] / [court order]
So which one of those are you talking about, or are you referring to another that the public hasn't been made aware of?
There are also:
Patent secrecy orders under 37 CFR 5.2
Valid point, but not relevant to this discussion.
Suspicious activity reports, under Housing and Community Development Act of 1992
Also valid but not relevant.
18 U.S.C. 2705(b) -- The Electronic Communications Privacy Act of 1986 / Stored Communications Act; this is where all the security "canaries" in the disclosure reports from companies tend to originate.
18 U.S.C. 3123(d)(2) -- The Electronic Communications Privacy Act of 1986; this is what prevents disclosure of pen registers.
Yes, this is the legislation that authorizes the FBI to issue NSLs seeking metadata. It's exactly the first form of gag order that I mentioned. Thank you for providing the details, but calling it an additional example is misleading to the point of deceptive.
California Electronic Communications Privacy Act -- gag orders on all cases concerning electronic search warrants.
This is state, not federal, and it requires a search warrant, which means that it's just a codification of the judge's extant authority to issue gag orders. So this is a special sub-case of the other form I mentioned.
So... you have not been able to cite any additional relevant situations in which gag orders can be issued. But at least you got a +5 out of it, so there's that.
There are, in fact others, some of which I'm prohibited from sharing with you...
Bullshit.
Remember, the government can now do stuff and order you not to talk about it. It's very easy to envision them going to a tech and saying "open that wiring closet" knowing that if anyone hears about it, he's going to Leavenworth.
Cite?
I only know of two forms of gag orders under US law. The first is associated with National Security Letters. The legislation behind those specifies that they may only be used to compel the delivery of metadata that is in the recipient organization's possession, and it says that the recipient may be ordered not to divulge the fact that the request was received or responded to. NSLs don't authorize arbitrary demands like "open that wiring closet". The other is a court order. Judges have very wide latitude in what they can order. However, such orders can be appealed, and judges generally do not make such blanket orders.
So which one of those are you talking about, or are you referring to another that the public hasn't been made aware of?
Both of them are hard......unless you know the trick. If you only know the trick to one of them, then the other one is harder.
Ah, right, just need the "one weird trick" and you're golden.
As an example, the Watson triumph in Jeopardy was entirely expected but not very significant in terms of comparing human vs. computer thought.
Absolutely wrong.
Watson's win was *far* from expected, and it was very significant. Okay, sure, the machine is faster at buzzing in, but that's not what was interesting or significant. What was interesting was that Watson was able to do fairly free-form natural language processing, and able to draw on not just direct knowledge, but indirect inference, context and even metaphor. What was amazing was that Watson was able to compete on something like a level playing field against humans in this contest of very fuzzy questions, er, answers. Whether Watson won or lost didn't actually matter much. What was amazing was that it was able to compete at all.
Most AI researchers would actually have predicted that Jeopardy was a tougher game for a computer to win than Go.
He is probably referring to a Princeton study: http://www.bbc.com/news/blogs-...
Thanks! Though that study doesn't actually say what he said, it does look interesting.