This has got to be one of the most disgustingly chauvanistic things I've seen written on Slashdot in... well, months. Let's dissect:
As others have pointed out, consciousness may well be an emergent property of our biological system, but there's no guarantee that an equally complex machine would have the same emergent property.
Complexity is by no means the only requirement. Self-reflection (introspection) is a requirement; indeed, for anything to be "self-aware," this is a requirement by definition.
The intelligence that machine exhibits, however, is really just the sum total of all the programmers who have worked on it.
That's a gross assumption you're making there, and I don't even think you are aware you're making it. Specifically, you're assuming that an AI is entirely programmed and has no ability to learn and self-modify. But machine learning is already a subject of great study, with quite a few success stories (some of them even in commercial products). Genetic algorithms are quite successful, and applying them to machine learning and cognition is an area of intense study.
At some point, an AI must become more than its initial programming in order to be useful. The initial programming can be thought of as an initial state, and only that.
Machines, however, are unable to make "irrational" decisions, or decisions with inadequate data, or decisions based on ethics or compassion.
Assuming you would want an AI to make an irrational decision, what is an irrational decision? You don't really offer an explicit definition, but you imply that irrationality is the output of some kind of mysterious "noise function." There's nothing mystical about irrationality, though. It means many things to many people, but in general, a good working definition is: Making a decision based upon beliefs not supported by evidence (deductive logic with shaky axioms), or in some cases, rejecting logic altogether (evidenced by people in a delirious mental state, for example -- this might be simulated with a noise function).
Making decisions with inadequate data? Been done, quite well. Ever hear about fuzzy logic? Heuristics? There are several strategies for dealing with incomplete data. Neural networks can solve some of those problems, and other, more mathematically rigorous techniques can solve others. There are areas of overlap between the different techniques.
Ethics and compassion? Ethics can be codified as rules (fuzzy or not), and compassion can be taught. Even human children don't come "out of the box" with compassion fully loaded -- it's something they learn from family and friends. If an AI has an "emotion engine" (to coin a phrase), it can empathize. Emotions are states that can be denoted in various ways -- it's really immaterial if the underlying representation is neurochemical, electrical, or symbolic. It's how they're connected up with the rest of the cognitive apparatus that counts, how they affect behavior and perception.
Certainly, it is unlikely that a machine would ever "notice" that it has been ordered to self-destruct.
And you're a biomechanical machine made up of proteins and other chemicals. You're telling me you wouldn't notice if I handed you a gun and told you to blow your brains out?
But ignoring your blithe pejorative use of the term "machine," I refer back to Kurzweil's own words (which I already echoed once in this comment): an AI needs to be able to reflect upon itself, which is the basis for self-awareness. It is entirely plausible, mathematically, that a system capable of self-reflection could build a mental model of the effects that commands/orders given to it would have upon itself. "Shooting myself would damage me and cause me to cease to function."
Well, I think that if they have mastered things like interstellar travel or telepathy, are remembering their memories from the previous lives, and are in almost every single aspect technologically and spiritually superior from us, they would have some way of keeping the moon from imploding, keeping the mass/size ratio intact, etc., wouldn't they?
So, ignoring all the "spiritualism" stuff, which is (as yet) scientifically unprovable and therefore pointless to bring up in a discussion involving questions of science and engineering... This basically amounts to a hand-waving exercise. "They're advanced, so they must have some kind of technology to make the moon appear solid, when it's in fact hollow." Yeah, I'm sure a clever human engineer could think up a way to make this happen, even if we don't have the means to actually do it.
In fact, anyone can easily do a few calculations, given the apparent mass of the moon and picking some arbitrary thickness for the hollow shell you want to construct it out of, and back-solve for the required density. Then you can figure out what, if anything, can be used to make such a shell. Then you can play engineer and figure out if that material has the tensile strength to keep from tearing itself apart.
Implosion is a non-issue because anyone who's taken basic physics or calculus can figure out that all gravitational forces cancel out inside a uniform hollow sphere. This is in fact one of the first problems they give you to solve in those classes. The same calculus shows that if you dig down inside a solid planet, you only experience gravitational forces for the portion of the planet that is contained within a sphere that has, as its radius, your distance from the center of the planet.
The only problem with all this is that we've done seismic experiments with the moon, which tells us quite a bit about its interior structure, and those experiments do not support the idea that the moon is hollow. The Apollo astronauts left behind quite a few instrument packages, including reflectors for Earth-based lasers (to detect even minute vibrations of that body, for example).
This is where Occam's Razor comes in handy, not to mention critial thinking skills. Yeah, some advanced aliens could have conspired to make the moon seem solid to us, but the more likely explanation is that the moon is really solid. In the absence of other compelling evidence, that's a reasonable conclusion to draw.
Instead of adopting a passive "wait and see" attitude, why don't you be proactive and do a little research? If these are the things I thought of just off the top of my head, based on what I remember from school, what might you turn up if you actually did a bit of research on the subject?
Actually, the Enterprise insignia eventually became the Starfleet insignia, and this is well documented in many of the reference books that came out... circa TNG, I believe. You'll notice that by the time of TNG, everybody was wearing the same insignia -- there were no separate emblems for different ships in the fleet. As for the films, the Reliant and Enterprise crews had the same insignia in Star Trek II, so we can extrapolate about the approximate time when this transition happened inside the Trek universe.
I'm interested to see if, since this new film takes place during TOS time period, there are Starfleet personnel walking around with different symbols pinned to their chests. But I suspect they will have done away with that bit of canon from TOS. I guess we'll see when the new movie actually is released.
He signed the non-compete. *HE* gave away his freedom. Not the State.
IANAL, but there's a principle in contract law that you cannot sign away your legal rights. That's why most contracts contain boilerplate to the effect that if a section of the contract is found to be unenforceable, the rest remains in force. Invariably, some clause is found to violate some law somewhere where someone is attempting to enforce the contract.
It's still far from certain that non-compete clauses are even legal in most jurisdictions. (California happens to have come down on the side of free enterprise.) Besides, if signing such an agreement were a non-negotiable precondition for being hired, then you can't exactly say that the employee was signing entirely of his own free will. "You could always not work or change your field" isn't really a compelling argument to me.
I was once in a situation where a former landlord was trying to extract more money from me, and they tried to play the contractual obligation card -- their lease agreement contained a clause that, they hoped, would give them an end-run around Arizona landlord-tenant law. (The property management company was in Colorado.) I spoke to an attorney who specialized in landlord-tenant cases, and she assured me that the clause in the contract did not trump state law. I'm not saying this is directly analogous -- merely that just because someone is made to sign a contract stripping them of the right to work wherever they please, doesn't mean that their rights are actually stripped.
"Copyrights restrict us from playing this video outside the U.S." Pfft! Pfft, I say!
It's pretty ludicrous, since copyrights are internationally recognized under the Berne convention. Now, if there's some license restriction such that the record label doesn't want something distributed in a certain locale, that's another thing -- but it's disingenuous to lay this at the feet of copyright. There's no such thing as an "American copyright" that prevents media from being sold or distributed outside of the United States. There are, however, restrictions imposed technologically by certain entities to enforce regional lock-out (e.g., the region codes on DVDs). But again, this has nothing to do with copyright.
The BBC article makes the claim that IP addresses are unique to a particular computer. That hasn't been true in general for a decade or more! Many savvy users have routers (wireless or otherwise) which allow multiple machines on a private network to share a single public IP using NAT. And most ISPs recycle IP addresses, even for broadband users -- I can guarantee you my public IP address changes every few months, sometimes more frequently.
This urban legend has been thoroughly debunked. An amorphous solid (which is what glass is) is still a solid.
As for the other posters in this thread and in parallel branches who claim that there's no melting point for glass... this is also factually untrue. See this article for details.
OSX does not support 64 bit applications yet. Our last project required 64 bit rendering. We literally could not have completed it on schedule with OSX.
This is factually untrue. Leopard has full 64-bit support, and it's the latest version of OS X. This page at ArsTechnica compares the partial 64-bit support in Tiger with the full 64-bit support in Leopard. True, the GUI portions of the Carbon API won't be 64-bit, but that didn't stop Adobe from releasing Lightroom as a 64-bit Cocoa app for OS X. So maybe your favorite application (or vendor) doesn't have 64-bit native support for OS X, but it's well-established that Leopard is a 64-bit OS. Carbon is pretty much deprecated; the only reason to use it is that your code base predates Mac OS X.
If they wanted their writings available for free, then why would they bother to publish in the first place?
This same argument has been used against public libraries. Fortunately, the Founding Fathers of the United States saw the value in libraries (Ben Franklin founded the first lending library in America in 1731), and so the law was crafted so as to preserve this institution. That is why libraries today enjoy many privileges, including some (narrow) DMCA exemptions.
Book publishers still hate the public library system (at least many do, whether they say so publicly or not), and even some authors, but some things have to be viewed in light of the greater good. In this case, that's the good of society.
Some authors, usually authors of works of fiction, are more happy to see people read their stuff and enjoy it than they are to make huge amounts of bank. That's one difference between artistry and craftsmanship, IMHO.
You're born as intelligent as you'll ever be; your capacity to learn is at its maximum. However, you are also as ignorant as you'll ever be, as you know absolutely nothing whatever.
Depends on how you define "intelligent." Certainly, a newborn doesn't have all the neurons that they'll ever have -- that peaks later on. (The brain has grown to 90% of its eventual mass by the age of 6.) And standardized intelligence test results can fluctuate wildly for a given person throughout life, though they supposedly converge to some reliable value in adulthood, barring mishap. (There are counter-examples, which is why I used the "supposedly" qualifier.) Some intelligent behavior definitely relies upon a large fund of general knowledge, something people commonly refer to as "wisdom" or even "common sense." Consider that there are many different kinds of intelligence that have been identified, and that many of these are not normally tested for.
Even ignoring that not all neural structures are there at birth, I would also say that genetics are not the sole governor of future intelligence. A stimulating, challenging environment can help. Studies have shown some children improve their intelligence test scores after a substantial environmental change/improvement.
I don't think "capacity to learn" is a good definition of intelligence, although it's a component. (Imagine a person who has a seemingly infinite capacity to absorb knowledge, but lacks advanced reasoning skills.)
Words of caution are always appropriate for any new scientific discovery, but you totally fail in your final paragraph:
There is no "should" in science. There is only theory, and it is necessary to emphasize that theories are only that, theories.
On the contrary, "should" is entirely appropriate when discussing predictions, which any scientific theory must make in order for it to be a useful theory. As for your treatment of the word theory, you fail for using the term in a pejorative sense (e.g., "it's only a theory"). Universal Gravitation is "only a theory," too.
Obviously, further research is warranted to verify these predictions. So no, this is not pseudo-science.
What is pseudo-science is you bringing up a personal anecdote which you can't even verify, because the man you spoke to gave you second-hand information -- you have no way to verify that his claims are valid.
Incorrect. His boss isn't breaking the Terms of Service, he is. When the website in question terminates their access, guess who's gonna get the flak? The person who *implemented* the system, not the one who designed/thought of it, especially if they are non-technical and rely on lower-order technical beings to do things for them.
Well, hang on a second. What the GP was referring to as "liability" was pretty clearly legal liability. And in that regard, sorry, the company is liable, not the poor schmuck that the boss ordered to write the scraping application. That's one of the reasons that corporations exist -- to limit liability and shield constituent members of the corporation.
You're trying to conflate a discussion of legal liability with a discussion of "what happens when the blame rolls downhill." And the latter case is why the employee always covers his ass and is sure to inform his superiors of what consequences, if any, might ensue because of implementing a request of management.
Yes, there is a way to hold individuals liable inside a corporation -- something my lawyer friend explained to me as "piercing the corporate veil." In a case like that, it's absolutely essential to make sure that the employee covers his ass by documenting any consequences and making sure that management has been informed, then retaining that information for his own CYA file. If the employee does this right, when litigation starts, the blame will go right where it belongs: on the manager who instigated the unethical project in the first place.
If the company still, as you suggest, fires the employee as a scapegoat, there's every chance they were planning to sacrifice him all along. In that case, his days were numbered at the company anyway -- it's just a question of whether he raises ethical objections and refuses a project, and is therefore fired immediately, or whether he does the project and is eventually canned in a corporate face-saving gesture once the malfeasance is exposed. In an economy like this, I'd rather have the guarantee of income in the immediate future while starting to look for other opportunities before my current job is terminated.
Hmm, from what I remember of that, the problem wasn't detectable until it was in zero G.
Actually, no, this is not true. The error was in fact detectable on the ground, and in fact was detected on the ground, but the measurement that showed the error was ignored -- the assumption was that the dissenting measurement must surely itself be an error. You can find out more from Wikipedia, or from Time Magazine's article.
Some blame goes to Perkin-Elmer for assuming that the obviously (in hindsight) flawed null corrector was more accurate than the other two null correctors employed, and should be trusted.
It is just not in the mainstream, so there is little reason to include it on a machine that is primarily made to [meet] a price point.
So is that why my fiancee bought an $800 HP "artist edition" laptop and got HDMI and FireWire as ports? (Granted, it's only 4-pin IEEE 1394, but still...) Oh, and unlike the previous generation MacBook, this HP laptop doesn't have anemic Intel graphics, but a GeForce 8400 mobile-class graphics chip. (She wanted to play WoW on it.)
If companies can manufacture laptops cheaper than Apple's with similar or better features, then the argument that Apple cut the FireWire 400 port to save money really doesn't hold water. And since Apple is a rights holder for FireWire, they pay less than another company to include these ports! (Obviously, they don't need to pay a license fee to themselves.)
I'm with the folks who think it's to differentiate the MacBook from the "Pro" line.
Yes, the religion teaches that the Quran must not recited in conjunction with music. It must be vocal only, although most of the reciters inflect their voice so that it is beautiful to hear, much like music is. The musician that Sony licensed it from should be contacted about it.
The musician in question is, as others have commented in other threads, a Muslim. What brand of Muslim, I couldn't say. (Many of the linked sites are blocked here where I work, alas.) Clearly, that practitioner didn't get the message that he shouldn't be doing what he's doing, or else his brand of Islam doesn't have that particular prohibition.
So, where does this supposed prohibition come from? The Koran itself? (And if so, does this require interpretation, or is the meaning absolutely plain?) Or does it come from the hadith, and if so, whose version?
Sufis, who incorporate song and dance into their practice, are often derided as not being "true" Muslims; they are considered heretics by conservatives. So I know this hatred of music isn't universal among Muslims, but then the question becomes, who gets to define which version of a religion is legitimate and which version is not?
We Muslims consider the mixing of music and words from our Holy Quran deeply offending.
Ah, so this explains some of the enmity directed toward Sufis, then. FWIW, I don't think this view that mixing sacred scripture and music is a bad thing is entirely universal, merely a view held by the conservative elements within Islam. Which seem to be the most vocal. (That said, I am also aware that many Wahabbists view music in general as un-islamic or anti-islamic, so Sufis get a lot of hate just for that...)
My ISP sells an add-on for providing 3G. It also works on Macbook. The options are ExpressCard, PCMCIA, USB. No FireWire.
Nobody was saying that 3G adapters required a FireWire port, nor was anyone asking for such a beast. The GP was bemoaning the lack of FireWire on the new MacBooks, and then separately, he was commenting that Apple did not provide Blu-Ray drives or a 3G option.
Incidentally, Apple stopped supporting PCMCIA a long time ago, favoring ExpressCard, so of the above options that you mentioned, the only one that would work on a MacBook is USB, and the only two that would work on a MacBook Pro are ExpressCard and USB... and the ExpressCard option only works if the card is the narrower/34 format. I know AT&T Wireless provides a 3G data card in ExpressCard/34 format that works with the MacBook Pro.
Although TCP/IP can run over FireWire, I don't believe anyone's been making network adapters (wireless or otherwise) that use IEEE 1394 as their connection to the host computer.
Firewire is actually fairly common on even budget PC notebooks
Shocking, but true! My fiancee bought herself an HP laptop (tempted to say craptop, but don't want her to clobber me), and I was amazed at what it included. Among the niceties: an HDMI port, and a 4-pin IEEE 1394 port.
When we were shopping for her for a cheap (sub-$1000) notebook that could play WoW with reasonable graphics settings, I was amazed at how many laptops now include HDMI and IEEE 1394, especially the cheap ones! For Apple to omit FireWire 400 on the MacBook is truly outrageous considering I can buy a Vista laptop for $800 or less and hook it up to a DV camcorder via FireWire to do video editing.
Seems to me that if a user attempts to download a file that happens to have the same hash as a "known bad" file, they could be in for a world of hurt unless the system does verification of some kind. And if the verification step is conducted manually rather than automatically -- in the interest of expediency, of course -- what do you bet the odds are that some law enforcement types aren't going to be bothered with niceties like actually checking that some file is indeed prohibited material?
Try mounting your own defense when you are systematically blocked from obtaining a copy of the file that you attempted to download in the first place. (Yes, surely our hypothetical user's attorney could find this file, even if they needed to use an ISP outside the country to do it. This assumes that Joe User has an attorney and can afford to mount a defense.)
A malicious actor could craft a file that will generate a hash collision with some known prohibited file, and if the sender/creator is suitably crafty and hides his tracks, such techniques could be easily used to grief our hypothetical user with virtually no chance of reprisal against the originator of the bogus file.
Recent measurements suggest that the universe is flat, and so may have infinite mass.
OK, as a former physics major (got my BS in physics and then moved on to computer science for my MS), this bugs me. The Wikipedia article you cite is interesting, but about as opaque to the non-technical reader as you can make it. And I certainly take exception to the conclusion that "flat universe = infinite mass" (which conclusion I don't think even the Wikipedia article you cited supports).
The way I always understood this, posed in the least technical way possible, is as follows:
An open universe is one in which the total mass, M, is smaller than the threshold necessary for gravitational attraction to counteract the expansion. Such a universe continues to expand indefinitely.
A closed universe is one in which the total mass, M, is greater than the threshold necessary for gravitational attraction to counteract expansion. Such a universe will eventually stop expanding and will ultimately collapse (a so-called "big crunch").
A flat universe is one in which the total mass, M, is exactly equal to the threshold necessary for gravitational attraction to counteract expansion. Such a universe continues expanding, but the expansion decelerates over time, such that the universe approaches some asymptote beyond which it can not expand.
Granted, this was what I learned before dark energy was even considered, and when dark matter was still a pretty new concept; furthermore, I note that the Wikipedia article makes some mention of dark energy and dark matter. Nevertheless, an infinite amount of matter (if that were even possible, which in a finite universe, is an impossibility) would indicate a closed topology for the universe, not a flat topology.
As I said, though, the very notion of an infinite amount of matter simply doesn't agree with observation, nor with any of the currently popular cosmological models I'm aware of. (Yeah, I try to keep up on this stuff even though it's not my field anymore.) Everything we know and assume in physics is built upon the premise of the universe being finite (albeit large). An infinite amount of mass would require an infinite amount of energy during the Big Bang. That's just absurd.
So yes, based on observation, the universe appears arbitrarily close to a flat topology. (I fondly remember attending an Alan Guth lecture about inflation in the early universe, and back then he was trying to explain the apparent flatness of the universe, so this is not exactly a new idea.) However, flat topology does not mean "infinite amount of mass." It means that the mass of the universe is almost exactly at some threshold value (which astronomical observations don't bear out, hence the search for dark matter), or else our local universe has been driven by early forces to appear topologically flat, while the universe at large is not really flat. And if you throw dark energy into the mix, then the consequences of the universe's topology that I enumerated above can go out the window, since dark energy provides an accelerating force for the expansion of the universe.
(Also, as I review the last paragraph, I'm aware that on the one hand, I'm saying that observations tell us that the universe looks flat, while on the other hand, I'm saying that observations tell us that there can't be enough mass in the universe to make it "flat." Sounds contradictory, and it is, but those two conclusions are based on two different sets of observations. AFAIK, nobody has really satisfactorily reconciled the two.)
The staffing companies specializing in the H1B candidates are using shills for the interviews.
This happened to my company. We had a guy lined up to come here to do DB work for us, and after less than a month, it was pretty clear this guy was totally underqualified even as a junior DBA. We found out that a "friend" of his did the phone screen.
Once this was discovered, we kicked the phony out; I'm not so sure what happened to the "friend" who did the phone screen.
A common trend I've seen is that our hiring managers start getting lazy and share the technical interview questions with the recruiting companies we rely on (domestic and foreign); this allows the recruiters to prepare candidates to sound really good, even during in-person technical interviews. It's when they actually start doing the jobs that you find out some of these guys who gave textbook-perfect answers in the technical interview can't actually code their way out of a proverbial paper bag. And since the pool of technical questions doesn't get changed much, it becomes really easy for marginal talent to slip through.
It's a humorous essay, though I'm sure some real economists might take issue with how it portrays taxation. Regardless, it would be better to not repost something that has been making the Internet rounds and may have landed in your inbox at some point. Although it was pretty damn funny.
Yes, but with the Laffer Curve, there's an optimum tax rate that sits at the peak of the curve. Reducing tax rates below that optimum value will once again decrease tax revenue. (This is pretty much straight from the Wikipedia article you cited, incidentally.) So it is by no means universally true that tax revenue always decreases when you decrease the tax rate, something you strongly implied. The question then becomes, what is the optimum tax rate? There seems to be quite a bit of disagreement among economists about that, and many are still assuming we're on the left-hand side of the curve.
[...] Apple has a reputation for being rather zealous about their software patents [...] as Microsoft might remember [...] I don't know if anybody else remembers Apple's patent frenzy on people who used a 'Recycle Bin', let alone an entire GUI.
Just to set the record straight, the lawsuit you're alluding to was not hinged on patent law. The lawsuit was Apple Computer, Inc. v. Microsoft Corporation, and was a copyright infringement lawsuit. Apple was asserting a "Look and Feel copyright" over GUI elements found in Microsoft Windows and in HP's NewWave software. Apple lost on all claims, except for two icons in HP's software that were found to be infringing.
So no, historically, Apple hasn't historically tried to litigate with patents on UI elements -- at least, not in the examples you've cited. It's probably because of that court case that they've resorted to patenting GUI innovations (if you can call them innovations), in much the same way as Adobe has patented certain GUI elements (e.g., tabbed palettes) and sued Macromedia (and Macromedia had patented other elements and countersued Adobe). Clearly, copyright law won't do the job here because it didn't work for them in the past, so Apple probably feels it has a valid reason to go the patent route now.
In a list like this the writer upgrades the commas in the names to semicolons. You do respect the comma and use them in their more important role as list separators. It's not pretty, but it's right. It's not easy being an English Major.
I call shenanigans. Yeah, I have a writing degree too, and what you're saying contradicts Strunk and White, and just about every other style guide I've ever read. And it contradicts every English textbook I've ever read. I can't find a decent copy of The Elements of Style online -- the only versions I can find are the original written by William Strunk, before E. B. White jumped in and expanded the book. However, I found plenty of other grammar-related sites online that agree with me:
Wikipedia (yes, I know, but bear with me): Use a semicolon between items in a series containing internal punctuation: "There are several Waffle Houses in Atlanta, Georgia; Greenville, South Carolina; Gainesville, Florida; and Mobile, Alabama."
From Grammar Monster's English Grammar Lessons: "Items in lists are usually separated with commas (as in the first example below). However, if the list items themselves contain commas, then semicolons can be used as separators." Interestingly enough, this article does discuss "promoting" commas to semicolons, but indicates clearly that the commas being promoted are the ones in between the list items and not the ones inside the list items themselves.
Grammar Girl's blog: "I don't want to confuse you, but there is one situation where you use semicolons with coordinating conjunctions, and that's when you are writing a list of items and commas just don't do the job of separating them all. Here's an example: 'This week's book winners are Herbie in Milligan College, Tennessee; Matt in Irvine, California; and Jan in Oklahoma City, Oklahoma.' Those are the real winners in this week's special Scott Sigler book giveaway, and they've each won a copy of his novel Earthcore, but the list also provides a great example of using semicolons in a list. Because each item in the list requires a comma to separate the city from the state, you have to use a semicolon to separate the items themselves."
How to use the semicolon properly: "When you have a series of three or more items that normally would be separated by commas except that each individual item already has a comma in it, you use the semicolon between items."
The University Writing Center at UCF: "Semicolons also separate elements of a list, if those elements contain internal commas. Semicolons replace commas in a list if using commas would make the list more ambiguous."
So since you're hiding behind Anonymous Coward, either (a) you're not really an English Major, or (b) you are one, but apparently lack the conviction of certitude in your answer to sign your "name" to it. And that list I gave above isn't even comprehensive, it's just what I managed to find after a few minutes of searching with Google. I will, however, point out that at least two of the citations I gave are from respected educational institutions.
Slashdot Mirror
This has got to be one of the most disgustingly chauvanistic things I've seen written on Slashdot in ... well, months. Let's dissect:
Complexity is by no means the only requirement. Self-reflection (introspection) is a requirement; indeed, for anything to be "self-aware," this is a requirement by definition.
That's a gross assumption you're making there, and I don't even think you are aware you're making it. Specifically, you're assuming that an AI is entirely programmed and has no ability to learn and self-modify. But machine learning is already a subject of great study, with quite a few success stories (some of them even in commercial products). Genetic algorithms are quite successful, and applying them to machine learning and cognition is an area of intense study.
At some point, an AI must become more than its initial programming in order to be useful. The initial programming can be thought of as an initial state, and only that.
Assuming you would want an AI to make an irrational decision, what is an irrational decision? You don't really offer an explicit definition, but you imply that irrationality is the output of some kind of mysterious "noise function." There's nothing mystical about irrationality, though. It means many things to many people, but in general, a good working definition is: Making a decision based upon beliefs not supported by evidence (deductive logic with shaky axioms), or in some cases, rejecting logic altogether (evidenced by people in a delirious mental state, for example -- this might be simulated with a noise function).
Making decisions with inadequate data? Been done, quite well. Ever hear about fuzzy logic? Heuristics? There are several strategies for dealing with incomplete data. Neural networks can solve some of those problems, and other, more mathematically rigorous techniques can solve others. There are areas of overlap between the different techniques.
Ethics and compassion? Ethics can be codified as rules (fuzzy or not), and compassion can be taught. Even human children don't come "out of the box" with compassion fully loaded -- it's something they learn from family and friends. If an AI has an "emotion engine" (to coin a phrase), it can empathize. Emotions are states that can be denoted in various ways -- it's really immaterial if the underlying representation is neurochemical, electrical, or symbolic. It's how they're connected up with the rest of the cognitive apparatus that counts, how they affect behavior and perception.
And you're a biomechanical machine made up of proteins and other chemicals. You're telling me you wouldn't notice if I handed you a gun and told you to blow your brains out?
But ignoring your blithe pejorative use of the term "machine," I refer back to Kurzweil's own words (which I already echoed once in this comment): an AI needs to be able to reflect upon itself, which is the basis for self-awareness. It is entirely plausible, mathematically, that a system capable of self-reflection could build a mental model of the effects that commands/orders given to it would have upon itself. "Shooting myself would damage me and cause me to cease to function."
So, ignoring all the "spiritualism" stuff, which is (as yet) scientifically unprovable and therefore pointless to bring up in a discussion involving questions of science and engineering... This basically amounts to a hand-waving exercise. "They're advanced, so they must have some kind of technology to make the moon appear solid, when it's in fact hollow." Yeah, I'm sure a clever human engineer could think up a way to make this happen, even if we don't have the means to actually do it.
In fact, anyone can easily do a few calculations, given the apparent mass of the moon and picking some arbitrary thickness for the hollow shell you want to construct it out of, and back-solve for the required density. Then you can figure out what, if anything, can be used to make such a shell. Then you can play engineer and figure out if that material has the tensile strength to keep from tearing itself apart.
Implosion is a non-issue because anyone who's taken basic physics or calculus can figure out that all gravitational forces cancel out inside a uniform hollow sphere. This is in fact one of the first problems they give you to solve in those classes. The same calculus shows that if you dig down inside a solid planet, you only experience gravitational forces for the portion of the planet that is contained within a sphere that has, as its radius, your distance from the center of the planet.
The only problem with all this is that we've done seismic experiments with the moon, which tells us quite a bit about its interior structure, and those experiments do not support the idea that the moon is hollow. The Apollo astronauts left behind quite a few instrument packages, including reflectors for Earth-based lasers (to detect even minute vibrations of that body, for example).
This is where Occam's Razor comes in handy, not to mention critial thinking skills. Yeah, some advanced aliens could have conspired to make the moon seem solid to us, but the more likely explanation is that the moon is really solid. In the absence of other compelling evidence, that's a reasonable conclusion to draw.
Instead of adopting a passive "wait and see" attitude, why don't you be proactive and do a little research? If these are the things I thought of just off the top of my head, based on what I remember from school, what might you turn up if you actually did a bit of research on the subject?
Actually, the Enterprise insignia eventually became the Starfleet insignia, and this is well documented in many of the reference books that came out... circa TNG, I believe. You'll notice that by the time of TNG, everybody was wearing the same insignia -- there were no separate emblems for different ships in the fleet. As for the films, the Reliant and Enterprise crews had the same insignia in Star Trek II, so we can extrapolate about the approximate time when this transition happened inside the Trek universe.
I'm interested to see if, since this new film takes place during TOS time period, there are Starfleet personnel walking around with different symbols pinned to their chests. But I suspect they will have done away with that bit of canon from TOS. I guess we'll see when the new movie actually is released.
IANAL, but there's a principle in contract law that you cannot sign away your legal rights. That's why most contracts contain boilerplate to the effect that if a section of the contract is found to be unenforceable, the rest remains in force. Invariably, some clause is found to violate some law somewhere where someone is attempting to enforce the contract.
It's still far from certain that non-compete clauses are even legal in most jurisdictions. (California happens to have come down on the side of free enterprise.) Besides, if signing such an agreement were a non-negotiable precondition for being hired, then you can't exactly say that the employee was signing entirely of his own free will. "You could always not work or change your field" isn't really a compelling argument to me.
I was once in a situation where a former landlord was trying to extract more money from me, and they tried to play the contractual obligation card -- their lease agreement contained a clause that, they hoped, would give them an end-run around Arizona landlord-tenant law. (The property management company was in Colorado.) I spoke to an attorney who specialized in landlord-tenant cases, and she assured me that the clause in the contract did not trump state law. I'm not saying this is directly analogous -- merely that just because someone is made to sign a contract stripping them of the right to work wherever they please, doesn't mean that their rights are actually stripped.
It's pretty ludicrous, since copyrights are internationally recognized under the Berne convention. Now, if there's some license restriction such that the record label doesn't want something distributed in a certain locale, that's another thing -- but it's disingenuous to lay this at the feet of copyright. There's no such thing as an "American copyright" that prevents media from being sold or distributed outside of the United States. There are, however, restrictions imposed technologically by certain entities to enforce regional lock-out (e.g., the region codes on DVDs). But again, this has nothing to do with copyright.
The BBC article makes the claim that IP addresses are unique to a particular computer. That hasn't been true in general for a decade or more! Many savvy users have routers (wireless or otherwise) which allow multiple machines on a private network to share a single public IP using NAT. And most ISPs recycle IP addresses, even for broadband users -- I can guarantee you my public IP address changes every few months, sometimes more frequently.
Yes, it has.
Here are some links:
http://sciencegeekgirl.wordpress.com/2007/09/07/liquid-glass/
http://www.sciencenews.org/sn_arc98/5_30_98/fob3.htm
http://www.thefoa.org/tech/glass.htm
http://dwb.unl.edu/Teacher/NSF/C01/C01Links/www.ualberta.ca/~bderksen/florin.html
This urban legend has been thoroughly debunked. An amorphous solid (which is what glass is) is still a solid.
As for the other posters in this thread and in parallel branches who claim that there's no melting point for glass... this is also factually untrue. See this article for details.
This is factually untrue. Leopard has full 64-bit support, and it's the latest version of OS X. This page at ArsTechnica compares the partial 64-bit support in Tiger with the full 64-bit support in Leopard. True, the GUI portions of the Carbon API won't be 64-bit, but that didn't stop Adobe from releasing Lightroom as a 64-bit Cocoa app for OS X. So maybe your favorite application (or vendor) doesn't have 64-bit native support for OS X, but it's well-established that Leopard is a 64-bit OS. Carbon is pretty much deprecated; the only reason to use it is that your code base predates Mac OS X.
This same argument has been used against public libraries. Fortunately, the Founding Fathers of the United States saw the value in libraries (Ben Franklin founded the first lending library in America in 1731), and so the law was crafted so as to preserve this institution. That is why libraries today enjoy many privileges, including some (narrow) DMCA exemptions.
Book publishers still hate the public library system (at least many do, whether they say so publicly or not), and even some authors, but some things have to be viewed in light of the greater good. In this case, that's the good of society.
Some authors, usually authors of works of fiction, are more happy to see people read their stuff and enjoy it than they are to make huge amounts of bank. That's one difference between artistry and craftsmanship, IMHO.
Depends on how you define "intelligent." Certainly, a newborn doesn't have all the neurons that they'll ever have -- that peaks later on. (The brain has grown to 90% of its eventual mass by the age of 6.) And standardized intelligence test results can fluctuate wildly for a given person throughout life, though they supposedly converge to some reliable value in adulthood, barring mishap. (There are counter-examples, which is why I used the "supposedly" qualifier.) Some intelligent behavior definitely relies upon a large fund of general knowledge, something people commonly refer to as "wisdom" or even "common sense." Consider that there are many different kinds of intelligence that have been identified, and that many of these are not normally tested for.
Even ignoring that not all neural structures are there at birth, I would also say that genetics are not the sole governor of future intelligence. A stimulating, challenging environment can help. Studies have shown some children improve their intelligence test scores after a substantial environmental change/improvement.
I don't think "capacity to learn" is a good definition of intelligence, although it's a component. (Imagine a person who has a seemingly infinite capacity to absorb knowledge, but lacks advanced reasoning skills.)
Words of caution are always appropriate for any new scientific discovery, but you totally fail in your final paragraph:
On the contrary, "should" is entirely appropriate when discussing predictions, which any scientific theory must make in order for it to be a useful theory. As for your treatment of the word theory, you fail for using the term in a pejorative sense (e.g., "it's only a theory"). Universal Gravitation is "only a theory," too.
Obviously, further research is warranted to verify these predictions. So no, this is not pseudo-science.
What is pseudo-science is you bringing up a personal anecdote which you can't even verify, because the man you spoke to gave you second-hand information -- you have no way to verify that his claims are valid.
Well, hang on a second. What the GP was referring to as "liability" was pretty clearly legal liability. And in that regard, sorry, the company is liable, not the poor schmuck that the boss ordered to write the scraping application. That's one of the reasons that corporations exist -- to limit liability and shield constituent members of the corporation.
You're trying to conflate a discussion of legal liability with a discussion of "what happens when the blame rolls downhill." And the latter case is why the employee always covers his ass and is sure to inform his superiors of what consequences, if any, might ensue because of implementing a request of management.
Yes, there is a way to hold individuals liable inside a corporation -- something my lawyer friend explained to me as "piercing the corporate veil." In a case like that, it's absolutely essential to make sure that the employee covers his ass by documenting any consequences and making sure that management has been informed, then retaining that information for his own CYA file. If the employee does this right, when litigation starts, the blame will go right where it belongs: on the manager who instigated the unethical project in the first place.
If the company still, as you suggest, fires the employee as a scapegoat, there's every chance they were planning to sacrifice him all along. In that case, his days were numbered at the company anyway -- it's just a question of whether he raises ethical objections and refuses a project, and is therefore fired immediately, or whether he does the project and is eventually canned in a corporate face-saving gesture once the malfeasance is exposed. In an economy like this, I'd rather have the guarantee of income in the immediate future while starting to look for other opportunities before my current job is terminated.
Actually, no, this is not true. The error was in fact detectable on the ground, and in fact was detected on the ground, but the measurement that showed the error was ignored -- the assumption was that the dissenting measurement must surely itself be an error. You can find out more from Wikipedia, or from Time Magazine's article.
Some blame goes to Perkin-Elmer for assuming that the obviously (in hindsight) flawed null corrector was more accurate than the other two null correctors employed, and should be trusted.
So is that why my fiancee bought an $800 HP "artist edition" laptop and got HDMI and FireWire as ports? (Granted, it's only 4-pin IEEE 1394, but still...) Oh, and unlike the previous generation MacBook, this HP laptop doesn't have anemic Intel graphics, but a GeForce 8400 mobile-class graphics chip. (She wanted to play WoW on it.)
If companies can manufacture laptops cheaper than Apple's with similar or better features, then the argument that Apple cut the FireWire 400 port to save money really doesn't hold water. And since Apple is a rights holder for FireWire, they pay less than another company to include these ports! (Obviously, they don't need to pay a license fee to themselves.)
I'm with the folks who think it's to differentiate the MacBook from the "Pro" line.
The musician in question is, as others have commented in other threads, a Muslim. What brand of Muslim, I couldn't say. (Many of the linked sites are blocked here where I work, alas.) Clearly, that practitioner didn't get the message that he shouldn't be doing what he's doing, or else his brand of Islam doesn't have that particular prohibition.
So, where does this supposed prohibition come from? The Koran itself? (And if so, does this require interpretation, or is the meaning absolutely plain?) Or does it come from the hadith, and if so, whose version?
Sufis, who incorporate song and dance into their practice, are often derided as not being "true" Muslims; they are considered heretics by conservatives. So I know this hatred of music isn't universal among Muslims, but then the question becomes, who gets to define which version of a religion is legitimate and which version is not?
Ah, so this explains some of the enmity directed toward Sufis, then. FWIW, I don't think this view that mixing sacred scripture and music is a bad thing is entirely universal, merely a view held by the conservative elements within Islam. Which seem to be the most vocal. (That said, I am also aware that many Wahabbists view music in general as un-islamic or anti-islamic, so Sufis get a lot of hate just for that...)
Nobody was saying that 3G adapters required a FireWire port, nor was anyone asking for such a beast. The GP was bemoaning the lack of FireWire on the new MacBooks, and then separately, he was commenting that Apple did not provide Blu-Ray drives or a 3G option.
Incidentally, Apple stopped supporting PCMCIA a long time ago, favoring ExpressCard, so of the above options that you mentioned, the only one that would work on a MacBook is USB, and the only two that would work on a MacBook Pro are ExpressCard and USB... and the ExpressCard option only works if the card is the narrower /34 format. I know AT&T Wireless provides a 3G data card in ExpressCard/34 format that works with the MacBook Pro.
Although TCP/IP can run over FireWire, I don't believe anyone's been making network adapters (wireless or otherwise) that use IEEE 1394 as their connection to the host computer.
Shocking, but true! My fiancee bought herself an HP laptop (tempted to say craptop, but don't want her to clobber me), and I was amazed at what it included. Among the niceties: an HDMI port, and a 4-pin IEEE 1394 port.
When we were shopping for her for a cheap (sub-$1000) notebook that could play WoW with reasonable graphics settings, I was amazed at how many laptops now include HDMI and IEEE 1394, especially the cheap ones! For Apple to omit FireWire 400 on the MacBook is truly outrageous considering I can buy a Vista laptop for $800 or less and hook it up to a DV camcorder via FireWire to do video editing.
Seems to me that if a user attempts to download a file that happens to have the same hash as a "known bad" file, they could be in for a world of hurt unless the system does verification of some kind. And if the verification step is conducted manually rather than automatically -- in the interest of expediency, of course -- what do you bet the odds are that some law enforcement types aren't going to be bothered with niceties like actually checking that some file is indeed prohibited material?
Try mounting your own defense when you are systematically blocked from obtaining a copy of the file that you attempted to download in the first place. (Yes, surely our hypothetical user's attorney could find this file, even if they needed to use an ISP outside the country to do it. This assumes that Joe User has an attorney and can afford to mount a defense.)
A malicious actor could craft a file that will generate a hash collision with some known prohibited file, and if the sender/creator is suitably crafty and hides his tracks, such techniques could be easily used to grief our hypothetical user with virtually no chance of reprisal against the originator of the bogus file.
OK, as a former physics major (got my BS in physics and then moved on to computer science for my MS), this bugs me. The Wikipedia article you cite is interesting, but about as opaque to the non-technical reader as you can make it. And I certainly take exception to the conclusion that "flat universe = infinite mass" (which conclusion I don't think even the Wikipedia article you cited supports).
The way I always understood this, posed in the least technical way possible, is as follows:
Granted, this was what I learned before dark energy was even considered, and when dark matter was still a pretty new concept; furthermore, I note that the Wikipedia article makes some mention of dark energy and dark matter. Nevertheless, an infinite amount of matter (if that were even possible, which in a finite universe, is an impossibility) would indicate a closed topology for the universe, not a flat topology.
As I said, though, the very notion of an infinite amount of matter simply doesn't agree with observation, nor with any of the currently popular cosmological models I'm aware of. (Yeah, I try to keep up on this stuff even though it's not my field anymore.) Everything we know and assume in physics is built upon the premise of the universe being finite (albeit large). An infinite amount of mass would require an infinite amount of energy during the Big Bang. That's just absurd.
So yes, based on observation, the universe appears arbitrarily close to a flat topology. (I fondly remember attending an Alan Guth lecture about inflation in the early universe, and back then he was trying to explain the apparent flatness of the universe, so this is not exactly a new idea.) However, flat topology does not mean "infinite amount of mass." It means that the mass of the universe is almost exactly at some threshold value (which astronomical observations don't bear out, hence the search for dark matter), or else our local universe has been driven by early forces to appear topologically flat, while the universe at large is not really flat. And if you throw dark energy into the mix, then the consequences of the universe's topology that I enumerated above can go out the window, since dark energy provides an accelerating force for the expansion of the universe.
(Also, as I review the last paragraph, I'm aware that on the one hand, I'm saying that observations tell us that the universe looks flat, while on the other hand, I'm saying that observations tell us that there can't be enough mass in the universe to make it "flat." Sounds contradictory, and it is, but those two conclusions are based on two different sets of observations. AFAIK, nobody has really satisfactorily reconciled the two.)
This happened to my company. We had a guy lined up to come here to do DB work for us, and after less than a month, it was pretty clear this guy was totally underqualified even as a junior DBA. We found out that a "friend" of his did the phone screen.
Once this was discovered, we kicked the phony out; I'm not so sure what happened to the "friend" who did the phone screen.
A common trend I've seen is that our hiring managers start getting lazy and share the technical interview questions with the recruiting companies we rely on (domestic and foreign); this allows the recruiters to prepare candidates to sound really good, even during in-person technical interviews. It's when they actually start doing the jobs that you find out some of these guys who gave textbook-perfect answers in the technical interview can't actually code their way out of a proverbial paper bag. And since the pool of technical questions doesn't get changed much, it becomes really easy for marginal talent to slip through.
Just to point out, David R. Kamerschen did not author the essay you quoted, and has no idea who did write it. There's an excellent article on Snopes about this essay and its history.
It's a humorous essay, though I'm sure some real economists might take issue with how it portrays taxation. Regardless, it would be better to not repost something that has been making the Internet rounds and may have landed in your inbox at some point. Although it was pretty damn funny.
Yes, but with the Laffer Curve, there's an optimum tax rate that sits at the peak of the curve. Reducing tax rates below that optimum value will once again decrease tax revenue. (This is pretty much straight from the Wikipedia article you cited, incidentally.) So it is by no means universally true that tax revenue always decreases when you decrease the tax rate, something you strongly implied. The question then becomes, what is the optimum tax rate? There seems to be quite a bit of disagreement among economists about that, and many are still assuming we're on the left-hand side of the curve.
Just to set the record straight, the lawsuit you're alluding to was not hinged on patent law. The lawsuit was Apple Computer, Inc. v. Microsoft Corporation, and was a copyright infringement lawsuit. Apple was asserting a "Look and Feel copyright" over GUI elements found in Microsoft Windows and in HP's NewWave software. Apple lost on all claims, except for two icons in HP's software that were found to be infringing.
So no, historically, Apple hasn't historically tried to litigate with patents on UI elements -- at least, not in the examples you've cited. It's probably because of that court case that they've resorted to patenting GUI innovations (if you can call them innovations), in much the same way as Adobe has patented certain GUI elements (e.g., tabbed palettes) and sued Macromedia (and Macromedia had patented other elements and countersued Adobe). Clearly, copyright law won't do the job here because it didn't work for them in the past, so Apple probably feels it has a valid reason to go the patent route now.
I call shenanigans. Yeah, I have a writing degree too, and what you're saying contradicts Strunk and White, and just about every other style guide I've ever read. And it contradicts every English textbook I've ever read. I can't find a decent copy of The Elements of Style online -- the only versions I can find are the original written by William Strunk, before E. B. White jumped in and expanded the book. However, I found plenty of other grammar-related sites online that agree with me:
Interestingly enough, this article does discuss "promoting" commas to semicolons, but indicates clearly that the commas being promoted are the ones in between the list items and not the ones inside the list items themselves.
So since you're hiding behind Anonymous Coward, either (a) you're not really an English Major, or (b) you are one, but apparently lack the conviction of certitude in your answer to sign your "name" to it. And that list I gave above isn't even comprehensive, it's just what I managed to find after a few minutes of searching with Google. I will, however, point out that at least two of the citations I gave are from respected educational institutions.
You, on the other hand, indirectly claim to be an authority when it's not at all clear whether you're truly an expert or not.