Which means he's old enough to have sex (by three years in the UK), have children, marry, have a house, a mortgage, a credit card, a car, drink alcohol (18 in the UK), enter pubs, represent himself in court, sign legally-binding contracts (18), get loans, gamble, smoke and (most importantly) understand the standard police caution which states he's doesn't have to say anything and is entitled to access to a lawyer (even a free one appointed by the government if necessary).
This *MAN* isn't a kid. He's legally responsible and has been for quite a while. And I doubt the police would go to such public and extraordinary lengths if they couldn't pin a convictable offence on him already - especially when it involves the co-operation of many different police sections across country borders and legal systems (England/Scotland have different legal systems - the Shetlands are in Scotland).
My guess would be that he was caught either encouraging others to DDoS or as a major part of the DDoS itself and now they have charges they can squeeze him for names/identities of others involved (I would guess they have reasonable expectation that he knows or organised others, thus he was more of a "ringleader" than his mother would like to make out). Also, they probably want to seize his computer because he's more likely to have information about his own sources and contacts which could lead to others in the group (a private message / email from someone else discussing the attacks could be evidence enough to convict them upon, for instance).
I crossed a road today without looking and didn't get run over. Hey, it's obviously perfectly safe to do! Hey, kids, lets all cross the road without looking!
Dick.
Even if the MAJORITY of cases it works out fine, the risk attached is still real and present and vastly outweighs the benefits. Renting your house to unchecked strangers that you're not verifying will ALWAYS, ultimately end up in a loss for you. Trashing your apartment and stealing your credentials (as the article says) without insurance that covers it (and I'm pretty certain that no insurance will) will cost you vastly more than you would EVER make from renting your place over your entire life.
Hence my complaint that a) she's probably not insured or isn't covered for those events, b) she should never have left personal documents in the house anyway, c) she shouldn't have let it out to someone she had never met or couldn't verify the identity of. Sure, my mother-in-law got away with it. But if she hadn't the consequences would have been on a par (or worse) than this article states - and would make it so that you could NEVER recoup your losses from continuing that activity and hoping it never happens again.
What I can't believe is not that someone would trash an apartment "just because", but that someone else wouldn't think it was possible. Have they seriously been living in cloud-cuckoo-land?
My ex-mother-in-law rented out her house to complete strangers for six months while she was on the other side of the planet. We all said she was incredibly stupid to do such a thing - not least because in that amount of time you could do ANYTHING, i.e. discover house deeds and sell the house to someone else, sublet it out to complete strangers (it was in the middle of a tourist area and used as a guest house when they were home) and there was no-one to check on what happened (she lived hundreds of miles away from where we did).
Although everything went fine, why on earth would you consider doing such a thing, especially in somewhere that's still housing your clothes, a safe with your personal documents, personal possessions, etc.? You've got to be really stupid or incredibly naive.
I bet your normal house insurance doesn't cover such events. I bet airbnb's insurance doesn't cover such events. I bet its difficult to even find rental insurance that covers you when you have no knowledge of who's renting from you.
It's a horrible thing to happen, and it *shouldn't* happen, but equally if I leave my car out in the road with a "Borrow my car for only £10 an hour" scheme where I never see who borrows my car, it's OBVIOUS that the chances are I will never see my car again or, if I do see it, I won't want to. And a car is a replaceable thing. It's not a house. It doesn't contain safes with all my identification documents (what a stupid idea to leave those, even in a safe, in a house you're renting out).
Seriously, it's a horrendous thing to have happen to you but, more seriously, you *DIDN'T* see it coming?
4) BT gives him an estimated bill, and impact on customer bills, for creating an infrastructure that reads every byte of every customer's traffic and blocks anything to/from a given central blacklist of websites (because this surely wouldn't be the only one), anything to any IP listed on their DNS A records, and anything that looks like a reasonable way to get around the traffic.
Because they want to follow the court order to the letter and make sure their users can't just change their DNS etc. and get around the filtering, obviously.
The judge sees that it will cost more than the ISP is worth, and finds them "guilty" with a £10 fine, or not responsible at all.
So what your saying is that DRM is a complete waste of money anyway - because DRM or not, it will get pirated. And with DRM, the chances of someone pirating it are higher because they want to avoid this sort of crap even if they are a legitimate customer. So why bother with it at all?
I've yet to see an effective DRM scheme. In fact, I can't even name a title that got cracked/pirated AFTER it was out in stores - the only news stories I've ever seen were "Unreleased game X on pirate sites already".
But I do boycott overbearing DRM schemes. Seriously, this serves nobody's interest at all. It's now more difficult for me to even *look* at buying your games because I have to check if it has junk like this attached to it. So when it comes to purchasing decisions, if I see "Ubisoft" I have to expend more effort to check the product first before I buy it. That means that unless it's something fabulous, the chances are I just won't bother, and the name Ubisoft will put me off everything (it's already starting to now!).
And this time next year Ubisoft will be saying that sales of game X slumped because of completely unverifiable piracy when in fact it was just people annoyed with either previous or new purchases that have shite like that and either pirate or stop buying that and other, completely unrelated, products from Ubisoft.
Not everyone has a perfectly stable Internet connection, not everyone has a perfectly stable wireless connection, not everybody wants their PC constantly communicating online and taking up bandwidth for no good reason (how small the bandwidth is is irrelevant - it's more than it should be and adds up if every game were to go this route, you play a lot, and you have low bandwidth caps in the nation you're in). Just someone uploading photos as you try to do something can kill the average ADSL connection, now it means the game pause/saves/quits.
The people who don't have that stuff will be buying single-player games or games with lots of single-player content and still you force a completely ridiculous requirement on them.
A reliance on a constantly-available Internet connection to a third-party server in order to play a game is ridiculous. Hell, I might as well VNC into a damn computer on the other side of the world and play that way, there's little difference in practical terms between that and this DRM. Connection lost? Bye-bye game, or at best constant pauses and saves because it thinks it's gone.
In work, I have literally told companies to get lost after they tell me that the new iteration of their software is an online-only, access over the Internet, lose your session if it dies, affair. It's not that it won't work most of the time, but the point is that we lose control over when it does work. If local software dies, I can restore an image, or rebuild a machine, or do something to get it back and working. If remote software dies, we just have to twiddle our thumbs until their support line frees up.
It's a ridiculous thing and solves no problem that exists. Pirates will crack round it in days. Consumers don't have any problems without it but have massive ones with it. And console versions OF THE SAME GAME don't have that stupid requirement, despite consoles being online nowadays.
I loved the original Driver. The series got a bit lost after that but I was actually eyeing this up on Steam with the intent to buy it. Saw a thread on the steam forums pointing to those same articles, read them, saw the Twitter comment from Ubisoft itself and instantly removed it from my wishlist. My life is too short for that shit, my gaming time is gaming time, not tech support time. Ubisoft has forgotten that they are providing entertainment - that means "get everything out of my way because I want to have fun". Strangely, I don't want to be diagnosing my wireless/Internet in the middle of a game session, and will just choose a game that doesn't require that.
P.S. The game also doesn't support steering wheel controllers. A driving game. Seriously.
We have the same over here in the UK. Guess what? The opposition will support the opposite, and then in 5 years their opposition will support the opposite again. Hell, the biggest change in the last hundred years of UK politics happened lately when we elected the LibDem's into partial power. Guess what? Nothing changed, and they've gone back on their words, and their opponents are still the same people and still decrying the same (as they perceive them) problems.
In fact, there was a TV comedy series called "Yes, Minister" following a politician character (later "Yes, Prime Minister" as the character was elected to lead the UK). It has jokes in it about the exact same topics that are in the news, now, today. Do we renew Trident? We're still asking the EXACT same questions that that character did to mock the politicians of the day. When was it produced? 1980. You can actually watch it today as someone up on current affairs and believe it's a new program aimed at today's politicians (if it wasn't for the aged-film look to it).
They're politicians. They will say anything that gets public support and gets them into power. Once there, all bets are off (How's Guantanamo Bay? Still in operation? Still holding people against their will, without charge and withour fair trial, on foreign soil against most humanitarian conventions?).
But yet, people still vote for parties that have a history of this ping-pong opinion-changing as if it's their moral duty to vote in a liar who they've never met to lead their entire country.
If you're shocked by such U-turns, you haven't watched many politicians over the years and compared what they say to what they do. If you're not shocked, I would guess that you hardly, if ever, vote.
It would take a manned mission over 200 days just to get to Mars. This is my point. You would need 400 days of food, water, oxygen and a lot of luck and boredom just to get them there for that day.
And they would need to bring samples back for analysis, they wouldn't be able to do what the rovers do and analyse on-site (sending their results back to Earth within hours) - if you sent them with equipment that could analyse on-site, well... they could have just sent the rover with the same equipment instead, because it's not like the humans added anything.
Distance covered isn't that much of a factor if you're not actually looking at what you're rolling over. How much of that 7.2 manned miles was filmed, recorded, analysed, sampled? Next to nothing. Just because you cover a greater area in less detail doesn't mean it's more useful for science. And the fact is that the rovers have collected consistent data over 12 years - several winters on Mars - whereas Apollo only sampled a handful of days. How do you know those conditions weren't just a one-off, especially if you're going to plan your lunar base around such measurements?
With rovers you can have a one-way mission (saving 50% of the cost) and analysis on-site. With manned missions, you end up bringing everything back again at huge expense (as we saw - hundreds to thousands of times more than a rover) and all you gain is literally a handful of days of human dexterity. The rovers could have done 200mph if anyone had needed them to. The fact is that it's worthless if you want to be safe, stay working, and actually collect useful data.
"Worse off"? Nowhere near it. It's still a nonsense to send men (and always was nothing more than political oneupmanship) and will be until putting them in orbit is essentially an every-day operation with every-day costs. When you have those Virgin spacecraft and everything touching a vacuum on a daily basis, even if only for rich businessmen, then you can start looking at pushing humans elsewhere. Until then, it's prohibitively expensive and dangerous (from a mission point of view) to send a squelchy air-dependent bag of water somewhere just so they can turn a drill.
Better yet - one that can't organise refuse collections in Naples because the resident Mafia are the incumbent refuse collectors, and they just dump it around the country wherever they like (including commercial/toxic waste).
Naples has been up to its neck in household rubbish for a few years now, to the point where the residents are marching in front of government buildings demanding a cleanup.
Of course you can do that - if you WRITE a SPECIFIC program to do just that. That's not intelligence inside that program. The intelligence in that case is sitting in front the keyboard deciding what to write, not plugged into it.
Your spam filter is literally just a Bayesian filter. That's it. Nothing fancy, just a statistic. If "penis" is found in enough things that you mark spam, anything with "penis" in it will be marked as spam. That's not intelligence, the intelligence that does that is the one writing the program (and deciding to use Bayesian as opposed to anything else) or clicking the Spam/Not Spam button because it spots something that shouldn't be in that category.
What you describe is an heuristic (most of which are statistical). Clippy is heuristic. Spam blockers are heuristic. Your "exam graders" are heuristic. That's why they, on the whole, suck in terms of accuracy, have to have extremely limited options (try starting a letter Dear with Clippy enabled, then try starting one with My dearest...) and have to be spoon-fed for their whole lives.
An heuristic like that is *ONE* measure of *ONE* element that an "AI" can take into account - no intelligence involved, just a number and a threshold. What you're describing is an input - a function of certain facts. An intelligence (broadly speaking) is something that can proscribe those functions, see non-logical knock-on effects of those facts, and describe how to collate them in the first place.
I work in education. Trust me, everything that you hear about that is heuristically-based is being fought against tooth-and-nail by people who want children to learn - but because of budgets, skills shortages and just plain government-enforced stupidity, the ticksheet-grading is taking the place of kids actually KNOWING what they are being taught. Nothing in the world can make your kids learn better than a human - they are DESIGNED to copy other humans, adapt their techniques and learn from them - they are intelligent in themselves, and outpace any computer in the first 10 years of their lives.
Private schools shy away from IT and have less computers than state schools, even though they have orders of magnitude more funds and freedom available. There's a reason for that.
The same could be said for quite a lot of things, for instance World of Warcraft characters. But some of those have sold for hundreds of thousands of dollars.
Not everything has to be tangible to have a value (the entire concept of copyright, for instance, credit cards, pyramid schemes). And not everything that is tangible has value (Zimbabwean currency, for instance).
To the right buyer, a bit of paint slapped on a canvas in a vague square is worth millions. It's just a question of finding a buyer. Considering BitCoin has started to be featured in the Money/City sections of newspapers now (e.g. Metro.co.uk this morning), it doesn't need to have anything tangible or concrete behind it. Value does not always mean cash, either.
That said, I bet you could find *someone* who wanted to part with money in exchange for a certain amount of Bitcoins. Thus it has value. Everything else is just negotiation.
You'd also have to be stupid to believe that: This makes it right.
The problem is not that others are doing this (that's a matter for THOSE cases), it's a problem that this one was known to be doing this for years, even up to the top levels of the police force, and nothing was done about it by the judiciary or politicians until everyone started to say "Now, hold on, that's not right".
They believed they could get away with it and, well, now it turns out that they can't. The fact that every other major newspaper is probably shitting themselves and shredding evidence of similar stuff right now (which would also be illegal, by the way) is neither here nor there. They shouldn't have been doing it in the first place, and they were allowed to get away with it, and allowed to pay off certain settlements, and allowed to continue as if it was a mere nuisance having to pay off the settlements rather than a punishment for a big illegal operation. It's like big companies that deliver goods in Central London - they all get park where they like and get parking fines and just pay them as part of operational life (even adding it to the cost of delivery) - the parking doesn't benefit any, and nobody really suffers except some poor sod who lives/works in the wrong place.
The "freedom of the press" is one of the things that's ALWAYS bugged the shit out of me. Yes, you need to be able to report in case we get a corrupt government, but equally you should have no more access to information than I do. If I can't access something, there should be a DAMN GOOD reason behind that, and that reason should apply to the press too. I am *NOT* allowed to flash my camera through the windows of vans that are in motion, get photographs of people I haven't asked permission of, and publish those front-page nationwide with whatever kind of assertions I like without bothering to check facts just by adding "allegedly". I'd be in jail before I got past the first step.
And when it came to the UK super-injunctions (where the press were banned from identifying anything or anyone about a particular series of perfectly true events, or even the existence of such an injunction, because footballer X couldn't keep it in his pants) they did the media a disservice - they held the junctions where necessary and kept pointing to their jobs and saying "we need this to provide proper freedom of press", but didn't bother to breach them for months because they would be shouldering the risk and burden of those actions (and creating so much fuss that EVERYONE knows it was Ryan Giggs now, even if they didn't give a shit and wouldn't have cared if it hadn't been the subject of a super-injunction). When it comes to freedom of the press, they didn't care. But when it comes to freedom to obtain juicy gossip illegally, suddenly all the bets are off.
And when it comes to actual *news*, it does not mean you can tap into people's phones, even "accidentally", camp outside their house and harass them, take photos over the garden fence, obstruct their exit from buildings, chase them on public highways in cars through tunnels, or whatever else you "think" is necessary.
Why is it one rule for the press and another for anyone else? The rules should allow ME to do those same actions, otherwise the press becomes this special little clique that are allowed to break laws because they are in favour with the politicians of the moment. And if there's something that the press can't report, I shouldn't be able to report it either and vice versa - and the reasons for not being able to report that should be open enough that a government CAN'T just censor everything in the hopes of not having frauds and expense claims and everything else found out.
The press are worthless, as they currently stand, and are allowed to break laws that we aren't. As such, they grew complacent, and greedy, and believed themselves to be powerful. Now, however, it's got to the point where the public are recognising this and will (with any luck) fight for equality. If a N
The kind of AI that the OP is referring to is essentially an artificial human - reading text perfectly, understanding the concept that the text describes (which suggests a real-world understanding and self-awareness), formulating mathematical models with inaccuracies, identifying the inaccuracies, seeking out potential solution avenues and arriving at a solution, negotiating that solution into a human-understandable context and explaining it back to a human.
Damn, if we get that far, abandon humans entirely. It can do all our maths and physics research for us, write and direct successful books and plays and movies, and plot its own damn space missions to save us from problems we've never seen before. We just tell it "we want more electricity" and it will work out how to do it, using techniques and quantum mechanics we'd never thought of. Why bother trying to get it to teach our kids, who have limited brains and won't understand quantum theory until they're about 16, let alone be able to derive the equations for it?
This is why AI is such a problem area to understand - there is no definition. 50 years ago, computer-chess was "AI". Now it's more a graph theory exercise and a large database. I can write a program in BASIC that will beat you at chess - just give me enough cycles per second and a long-enough time limit. It's the same program I wrote to do the same job back in the 80's. Want me to beat a grandmaster? Just give me more cycles per second or a longer time limit. There's no "intelligence" in the system, it's just following mathematical orders to try every possibility fast enough to find things that our brains can't. The "intelligence" is in the shortcuts and application of graph/game theory to the problem in order to arrive at the code for the "AI" in the first place - all human-performed. When the program itself pops up unannounced and unplanned and says "Hey, I can eliminate this entire class of problems where the pawn is in KKn7 because I've noticed they always end in stalemate", then we have something to shout about - at the moment anything like that is us SPECIFICALLY telling it to look for that pattern explicitly (because we've told it to explicitly look for billions of potential patterns, for example).
We consider humans "intelligent". So does your brain literally track through every possible chess position even 2-3 moves ahead without you forcing it to do so? We believe not. It just has a natural way of determining patterns and using those to its own ends - it "knows" when something is a stupid move without having to try every possible path after it and see if it can force what results in a win for itself - it's an automated, reflexive action of a trained brain. It can also form those paths so that it KNOWS it's stupid to open with P - KR4 even if it's never tried every single possible game past that point. Current computer AI isn't close to that for even the simplest of tasks.
OCR - is that AI? It's considered not, but used to be. It's just looking for splines, analysing position and matching to a statistical database. There's no "intelligence", no "personal choice" being made - just a literal, specified decision.
We also have absolutely nothing that's even close to "understanding" the concept of a real world. Nothing. Not even remotely close at all.
There are elements of "true" AI dotted about in research. We have genetically-evolved chip designs that out-perform their human-designed peers. We have no idea how they do it (or didn't, until it had done it and we analysed the result) but they work faster in a smaller chip size to do the same job. (The classic was an experiment to design a chip to differentiate between two frequencies of AC signal - the "genetically-evolved" chip design actually confused us for years as to how it worked and/or how it was smaller than our best design).
But AI literally means what you what it to. "Artificial Intelligence" to a professional, however, in no way suggests brute-force-of-a-simple-algorithm, nor
The only permanent, extra-terrestrial life-supporting, man-made object is the ISS. That needed 14 years of construction (predicted to last only about 14 more once it's finished), needed the Americans, Soviets, Europeans and Japanese to all abandon their individual projects and concentrate on only that, costs about 100bn Euros, and is 200 miles away.
The Moon is 200,000 miles away. Mars is 150,000,000 miles away.
There will be no short-term supply trips to give people several years worth of food (i.e. the time until we can send a "real" supply) - hell, food would constitute the vast majority of their payload because you won't be growing anything self-sustainable on the Moon/Mars for at least a year even under ideal "Earth-like" conditions simulated inside some kind of greenhouse (it's called farming - plant stuff, wait a year, eat it).
There's a hell of a lot less heat and you're going to be constantly pumping heat into a cold void in order to keep things at room temperature (considering we can just about rustle-up a handful of watts for the Mars rovers, or a couple of hundred for the new ones using radioactive materials, your heating bill is going to be... well... astronomical). We just about managed it for a handful of days in the past, for just spacesuits. The Apollo astronauts barely stayed a day.
There will be a bit more than the ISS's 10 major incidents in that time (not counting the VASTLY increased chances of problems with the travel outside the Earth's influence, landing and living on another rock that we can barely keep a rover running on) and no backup to send spare parts within weeks like we've done with the ISS.
Just think about the first few days - if you don't manage to ship enough stuff and people to build a air-tight shelter against the dust storms, warm enough to keep a human happy, pumped full of oxygen, large enough to hold decent amount of food, people and living space, in one of the most hostile environments that humans would ever have set foot upon, you're dead before you even start. That's assuming those humans even make it there - most of the stuff we've sent to orbit Mars hasn't made it at all or lasted anywhere near it's planned lifetime - the exceptions don't bring up the averages much.
Humans are literally two-three days away from death at any time. Rovers can live for decades and we can send 100 of them for the cost of one man (just in a single mission, if we so wanted). It was estimated recently that Apollo cost $170bn (adjusted for today) for a handful of people to walk on the moon for a day. The Mars rovers cost US$820 million originally, nearly $1bn with all the extensions. Curiosity costs about $3bn. That entire program cost less than 1-2% of the cost of putting a couple of men on the Moon for only a day.
Humans aren't built for travel. Wherever we go we have to take Earth with us. And that, quite literally, costs the Earth each time.
Because, despite all your hyperbole, AI just isn't good enough to do any of that yet.
It can't do natural language processing, it can't reason algebra for itself, it certainly can't read someone else's algebra and spot the mistake, let alone guess why they made that mistake ("little Johnny has a problem with minus-sign blindness"), and don't even think they can suggest how to fix anything except just giving the correct answer.
It can't do grading, it can't do any of that shit. *COMPUTERS* can, and do every day, but AI cannot - computers STILL only work when you tell them exactly what to do and how to do it. What you see in any kind of automated grading system is nothing more than very specifically tuned heuristic systems based on an extremely limited input (i.e. multiple-choice). Just because a research paper says they've made a system where the mystical AI grades English-language papers doesn't mean it's true - half the time, the researchers themselves don't even know what it's actually measuring, it could just be assigning a score based on word-length, or complexity, or the number of times it sees a diagram. Even the "essay-copying" software is nothing more than a statistical analysis. That is NOT AI.
Maple and MathCAD can work all sorts of wonders with mathematics, algebra, calculus. Not one bit of their code is AI or been touched by AI or works via AI or can we get a single AI to even come close to a particular result. Same for Wolfram Alpha. Same for anything you see Google do (even Labs, Translate, Voice, etc.) - Google works on huge statistics, not AI.
If you think AI is doing any of this today you are sadly disillusioned. We have a handful of huge research projects that can do some extremely basic things only after decades of training on a very tiny area, with very limited input and where we require only a very limited output. Why? Because computer AI just doesn't exist in the way the movies would like you to think.
To say that "Today's AI could easily be" doing that shit shows that you just don't understand what those computers are doing and what those research papers are actually claiming.
AI doesn't exist yet in any practical form or application. Get over it. What you see are convincingly-tuned, single-purpose heuristics, which isn't even close to being the same thing, or providing the results you think. Whether it's natural-language processing, computer translation, computer "players" in games, or some huge analysis of student's papers, it's not AI. If you don't understand what they are *currently* doing, you will never understand why all that stuff you just requested does not (and won't, for several decades/centuries/millenia) exist.
With all of the largest supercomputers in the world combined we could JUST about simulate a very idealised (and misunderstood) version of the neural connections of an ant's brain, extremely slowly. That's assuming we had anything to plug into it to seed it (several hundred million years of evolution to create initial pathways would be a good start), the time enough to train it to give any sort of sensible response, or anything worth asking it that an average ant would be able to answer, even "in its head".
AI isn't what you think. Really. Which is why none of that shit exists.
Even better than that - they used, in part, an Apache open source project that had already done that (basically reimplemented Java) and reimplemented the Java VM themselves with compatible interfaces so you *can* run Java code on it without (too many) modifications.
But because they wouldn't go through the Java certification process and/or pay off Sun, Oracle waited until they owned Sun (who didn't really care for years) and then tried to sue only Google. Basically, they say that if you're not certified, you don't have a right to the software patents they have (and hence why the lawsuit only really concerns patents and everything else is a "throw-it-in, see-if-it-sticks" tactics from Oracle), and that Google infringe the patents (despite the VAST, VAST majority of them having been put under review, or completely made void by Google prior-art searches and the Patent Office).
It's gone from "you copied us" to "the code you use, which millions are happily using in a variety of projects and the entirety of which is clean-room implementations, might possibly infringe one of the several hundred quite stupid and obvious software patents we asserted at the start - but we won't say which one until you void all of the rest - and although we offered you a licence for $100m for EVERYTHING, we're going to seek billions from you for that one tiny patent that we're not even sure will stand up."
Oracle will be lucky to come out of it with just a settlement that stops Google from suing their arse off in retaliation.
Oh, thank you, thank you, thank you. That's made my day, that has.
Some web programmer was pissed at them - he gave them exactly what they wanted in a way that completely defeated the original object of the exercise. Fabulous.
In fact, all Google did was reimplement an already clean-room reimplementation of Java. The case is about software patents, which Oracle claims Google infringed by doing so, not copyrights. The only mention of copyrights was Oracle trying to say "Google made an interface that was compatible with Java" because Google took a public header file (which are non-copyrightable through reason of insufficient expression - because they are *fact*-based files, nothing else) and used it to create a compatible API.
The lawsuit is basically trying to say "no-one, anywhere, can make anything even vaguely similar to Java because we hold the patent on it", not "Google stole our Java code".
Er, sorry, but the clue is in your answer: "rep"... they are Oracle representatives.
And how would you expect to deal with them? Afresh and without-history on every phone call from a different rep? Nope. They are a company, an entity within itself, and they are representatives. You are speaking to the company - if you say that their sales offer is "stupid", you are talking about the company's offer, not that individual person.
Also, if you are a rep for a company, you MUST expect this distinction, otherwise you'll take everything too personally. Personal / Professional - too different things. The PERSON who called was acting in a PROFESSIONAL role, thus any comment to them is about their PROFESSIONAL life (which would include their professionalism if they were rude).
To be honest, how else would a company even know that they did wrong if you couldn't tell the rep that because it might offend? Get off your supposed politically-correct high-horse and tell companies what you think of them. If the rep bursts into tears, that's a problem with the person taking their professional life too seriously (I have dealt with things like that - it's nothing to do with the person that their company is making them do stupid things, and I make that clear if there is confusion).
A supplier of library software called the school I work for and asked us why we weren't upgrading to the latest version (which is a Silverlight monstrosity that basically connects to a VNC instance at their server which actually runs the program so we have to keep paying subscription fees).
When we told them that a) we don't have, use or condone the use of Silverlight (for a start, half our machines are Linux), b) we're not going to rent software that we currently own, c) we're not going to rely on our Internet connection for our library to operate and d) we would need Data Protection assurances for where the server is hosted, not to mention e) none of their competitors do this shit, they got very confused.
They sent us out brochures and leaflets and instruction manuals because they assured us they had an "offline" version we could host in school. It never materialised and none of the things they sent were relevant (it just described how to have a server in school be the main proxy for the clients, not how to avoid Silverlight, dependence on the company, and dependence on the Internet connection being needed at every client). They were basically told where to go, in no uncertain terms, because their company was forcing them to push us to something completely unsuitable and weren't listening to what we wanted. In the end, we asked them not to call again. We were never allowed to speak to anyone other than a frontline rep.
Your reps being spoken to by your customers are 99.9% of your customer feedback. If your customers are angry, or constantly demand a feature, rollback, bugfix, price reduction, etc. then you better listen to them. They aren't going to be calling the CEO, they are going to call a front-line rep who - if they aren't doing their job - will never pass that info on. And you *can* lose tens or hundreds of pounds of business by losing one customer just because one rep wasn't professional enough to deal with customer concerns.
Cases in point: The library software above, the guy from WStore who replied to our order for £10,000 of networking gear with an accidental CC: of an internal email to us where he referred to my boss as an "idiot" (order cancelled, contract lost), V-Networks - the ISP who cut both our business lines off permanently because we went over a little traffic for a single month after 5 years of being a customer (where my boss literally used the phrase "how much do I need to pay you to turn it back on for the month" and was greeted with an answer that it was absolutely impossible - new ISP within a week, phone calls galore trying to apologise, threats of lawsuits for us backing out of our contract - nothing materialised - and never had a problem since).
Slashdot Mirror
"only 19"
Which means he's old enough to have sex (by three years in the UK), have children, marry, have a house, a mortgage, a credit card, a car, drink alcohol (18 in the UK), enter pubs, represent himself in court, sign legally-binding contracts (18), get loans, gamble, smoke and (most importantly) understand the standard police caution which states he's doesn't have to say anything and is entitled to access to a lawyer (even a free one appointed by the government if necessary).
This *MAN* isn't a kid. He's legally responsible and has been for quite a while. And I doubt the police would go to such public and extraordinary lengths if they couldn't pin a convictable offence on him already - especially when it involves the co-operation of many different police sections across country borders and legal systems (England/Scotland have different legal systems - the Shetlands are in Scotland).
My guess would be that he was caught either encouraging others to DDoS or as a major part of the DDoS itself and now they have charges they can squeeze him for names /identities of others involved (I would guess they have reasonable expectation that he knows or organised others, thus he was more of a "ringleader" than his mother would like to make out). Also, they probably want to seize his computer because he's more likely to have information about his own sources and contacts which could lead to others in the group (a private message / email from someone else discussing the attacks could be evidence enough to convict them upon, for instance).
It is.
It always makes me wonder what kind of organised crime *isn't* serious.
I crossed a road today without looking and didn't get run over. Hey, it's obviously perfectly safe to do! Hey, kids, lets all cross the road without looking!
Dick.
Even if the MAJORITY of cases it works out fine, the risk attached is still real and present and vastly outweighs the benefits. Renting your house to unchecked strangers that you're not verifying will ALWAYS, ultimately end up in a loss for you. Trashing your apartment and stealing your credentials (as the article says) without insurance that covers it (and I'm pretty certain that no insurance will) will cost you vastly more than you would EVER make from renting your place over your entire life.
Hence my complaint that a) she's probably not insured or isn't covered for those events, b) she should never have left personal documents in the house anyway, c) she shouldn't have let it out to someone she had never met or couldn't verify the identity of. Sure, my mother-in-law got away with it. But if she hadn't the consequences would have been on a par (or worse) than this article states - and would make it so that you could NEVER recoup your losses from continuing that activity and hoping it never happens again.
What I can't believe is not that someone would trash an apartment "just because", but that someone else wouldn't think it was possible. Have they seriously been living in cloud-cuckoo-land?
My ex-mother-in-law rented out her house to complete strangers for six months while she was on the other side of the planet. We all said she was incredibly stupid to do such a thing - not least because in that amount of time you could do ANYTHING, i.e. discover house deeds and sell the house to someone else, sublet it out to complete strangers (it was in the middle of a tourist area and used as a guest house when they were home) and there was no-one to check on what happened (she lived hundreds of miles away from where we did).
Although everything went fine, why on earth would you consider doing such a thing, especially in somewhere that's still housing your clothes, a safe with your personal documents, personal possessions, etc.? You've got to be really stupid or incredibly naive.
I bet your normal house insurance doesn't cover such events. I bet airbnb's insurance doesn't cover such events. I bet its difficult to even find rental insurance that covers you when you have no knowledge of who's renting from you.
It's a horrible thing to happen, and it *shouldn't* happen, but equally if I leave my car out in the road with a "Borrow my car for only £10 an hour" scheme where I never see who borrows my car, it's OBVIOUS that the chances are I will never see my car again or, if I do see it, I won't want to. And a car is a replaceable thing. It's not a house. It doesn't contain safes with all my identification documents (what a stupid idea to leave those, even in a safe, in a house you're renting out).
Seriously, it's a horrendous thing to have happen to you but, more seriously, you *DIDN'T* see it coming?
4) BT gives him an estimated bill, and impact on customer bills, for creating an infrastructure that reads every byte of every customer's traffic and blocks anything to/from a given central blacklist of websites (because this surely wouldn't be the only one), anything to any IP listed on their DNS A records, and anything that looks like a reasonable way to get around the traffic.
Because they want to follow the court order to the letter and make sure their users can't just change their DNS etc. and get around the filtering, obviously.
The judge sees that it will cost more than the ISP is worth, and finds them "guilty" with a £10 fine, or not responsible at all.
So what your saying is that DRM is a complete waste of money anyway - because DRM or not, it will get pirated. And with DRM, the chances of someone pirating it are higher because they want to avoid this sort of crap even if they are a legitimate customer. So why bother with it at all?
I've yet to see an effective DRM scheme. In fact, I can't even name a title that got cracked/pirated AFTER it was out in stores - the only news stories I've ever seen were "Unreleased game X on pirate sites already".
How do you expect a 3rd party without your TLS private key to proxy AND compress (i.e. modifying the content) your HTTPS connections?
But I do boycott overbearing DRM schemes. Seriously, this serves nobody's interest at all. It's now more difficult for me to even *look* at buying your games because I have to check if it has junk like this attached to it. So when it comes to purchasing decisions, if I see "Ubisoft" I have to expend more effort to check the product first before I buy it. That means that unless it's something fabulous, the chances are I just won't bother, and the name Ubisoft will put me off everything (it's already starting to now!).
And this time next year Ubisoft will be saying that sales of game X slumped because of completely unverifiable piracy when in fact it was just people annoyed with either previous or new purchases that have shite like that and either pirate or stop buying that and other, completely unrelated, products from Ubisoft.
Not everyone has a perfectly stable Internet connection, not everyone has a perfectly stable wireless connection, not everybody wants their PC constantly communicating online and taking up bandwidth for no good reason (how small the bandwidth is is irrelevant - it's more than it should be and adds up if every game were to go this route, you play a lot, and you have low bandwidth caps in the nation you're in). Just someone uploading photos as you try to do something can kill the average ADSL connection, now it means the game pause/saves/quits.
The people who don't have that stuff will be buying single-player games or games with lots of single-player content and still you force a completely ridiculous requirement on them.
A reliance on a constantly-available Internet connection to a third-party server in order to play a game is ridiculous. Hell, I might as well VNC into a damn computer on the other side of the world and play that way, there's little difference in practical terms between that and this DRM. Connection lost? Bye-bye game, or at best constant pauses and saves because it thinks it's gone.
In work, I have literally told companies to get lost after they tell me that the new iteration of their software is an online-only, access over the Internet, lose your session if it dies, affair. It's not that it won't work most of the time, but the point is that we lose control over when it does work. If local software dies, I can restore an image, or rebuild a machine, or do something to get it back and working. If remote software dies, we just have to twiddle our thumbs until their support line frees up.
It's a ridiculous thing and solves no problem that exists. Pirates will crack round it in days. Consumers don't have any problems without it but have massive ones with it. And console versions OF THE SAME GAME don't have that stupid requirement, despite consoles being online nowadays.
I loved the original Driver. The series got a bit lost after that but I was actually eyeing this up on Steam with the intent to buy it. Saw a thread on the steam forums pointing to those same articles, read them, saw the Twitter comment from Ubisoft itself and instantly removed it from my wishlist. My life is too short for that shit, my gaming time is gaming time, not tech support time. Ubisoft has forgotten that they are providing entertainment - that means "get everything out of my way because I want to have fun". Strangely, I don't want to be diagnosing my wireless/Internet in the middle of a game session, and will just choose a game that doesn't require that.
P.S. The game also doesn't support steering wheel controllers. A driving game. Seriously.
He's a politician, what did you expect?
We have the same over here in the UK. Guess what? The opposition will support the opposite, and then in 5 years their opposition will support the opposite again. Hell, the biggest change in the last hundred years of UK politics happened lately when we elected the LibDem's into partial power. Guess what? Nothing changed, and they've gone back on their words, and their opponents are still the same people and still decrying the same (as they perceive them) problems.
In fact, there was a TV comedy series called "Yes, Minister" following a politician character (later "Yes, Prime Minister" as the character was elected to lead the UK). It has jokes in it about the exact same topics that are in the news, now, today. Do we renew Trident? We're still asking the EXACT same questions that that character did to mock the politicians of the day. When was it produced? 1980. You can actually watch it today as someone up on current affairs and believe it's a new program aimed at today's politicians (if it wasn't for the aged-film look to it).
They're politicians. They will say anything that gets public support and gets them into power. Once there, all bets are off (How's Guantanamo Bay? Still in operation? Still holding people against their will, without charge and withour fair trial, on foreign soil against most humanitarian conventions?).
But yet, people still vote for parties that have a history of this ping-pong opinion-changing as if it's their moral duty to vote in a liar who they've never met to lead their entire country.
If you're shocked by such U-turns, you haven't watched many politicians over the years and compared what they say to what they do. If you're not shocked, I would guess that you hardly, if ever, vote.
It's raspberry!
Only one man would dare raspberry me...
I'd be interested to see the declaration documents for at least one of those wars, and what nations they were against.
You can't declare war on a concept, nor on an individual. Only a nation can declare war on another nation.
Funny, I checked out with Paypal on this yesterday.
It would take a manned mission over 200 days just to get to Mars. This is my point. You would need 400 days of food, water, oxygen and a lot of luck and boredom just to get them there for that day.
And they would need to bring samples back for analysis, they wouldn't be able to do what the rovers do and analyse on-site (sending their results back to Earth within hours) - if you sent them with equipment that could analyse on-site, well... they could have just sent the rover with the same equipment instead, because it's not like the humans added anything.
Distance covered isn't that much of a factor if you're not actually looking at what you're rolling over. How much of that 7.2 manned miles was filmed, recorded, analysed, sampled? Next to nothing. Just because you cover a greater area in less detail doesn't mean it's more useful for science. And the fact is that the rovers have collected consistent data over 12 years - several winters on Mars - whereas Apollo only sampled a handful of days. How do you know those conditions weren't just a one-off, especially if you're going to plan your lunar base around such measurements?
With rovers you can have a one-way mission (saving 50% of the cost) and analysis on-site. With manned missions, you end up bringing everything back again at huge expense (as we saw - hundreds to thousands of times more than a rover) and all you gain is literally a handful of days of human dexterity. The rovers could have done 200mph if anyone had needed them to. The fact is that it's worthless if you want to be safe, stay working, and actually collect useful data.
"Worse off"? Nowhere near it. It's still a nonsense to send men (and always was nothing more than political oneupmanship) and will be until putting them in orbit is essentially an every-day operation with every-day costs. When you have those Virgin spacecraft and everything touching a vacuum on a daily basis, even if only for rich businessmen, then you can start looking at pushing humans elsewhere. Until then, it's prohibitively expensive and dangerous (from a mission point of view) to send a squelchy air-dependent bag of water somewhere just so they can turn a drill.
Better yet - one that can't organise refuse collections in Naples because the resident Mafia are the incumbent refuse collectors, and they just dump it around the country wherever they like (including commercial/toxic waste).
Naples has been up to its neck in household rubbish for a few years now, to the point where the residents are marching in front of government buildings demanding a cleanup.
Er... no quantum entanglement ever observed/created has ever resulted in faster-than-light data transmission.
Of course you can do that - if you WRITE a SPECIFIC program to do just that. That's not intelligence inside that program. The intelligence in that case is sitting in front the keyboard deciding what to write, not plugged into it.
Your spam filter is literally just a Bayesian filter. That's it. Nothing fancy, just a statistic. If "penis" is found in enough things that you mark spam, anything with "penis" in it will be marked as spam. That's not intelligence, the intelligence that does that is the one writing the program (and deciding to use Bayesian as opposed to anything else) or clicking the Spam/Not Spam button because it spots something that shouldn't be in that category.
What you describe is an heuristic (most of which are statistical). Clippy is heuristic. Spam blockers are heuristic. Your "exam graders" are heuristic. That's why they, on the whole, suck in terms of accuracy, have to have extremely limited options (try starting a letter Dear with Clippy enabled, then try starting one with My dearest...) and have to be spoon-fed for their whole lives.
An heuristic like that is *ONE* measure of *ONE* element that an "AI" can take into account - no intelligence involved, just a number and a threshold. What you're describing is an input - a function of certain facts. An intelligence (broadly speaking) is something that can proscribe those functions, see non-logical knock-on effects of those facts, and describe how to collate them in the first place.
I work in education. Trust me, everything that you hear about that is heuristically-based is being fought against tooth-and-nail by people who want children to learn - but because of budgets, skills shortages and just plain government-enforced stupidity, the ticksheet-grading is taking the place of kids actually KNOWING what they are being taught. Nothing in the world can make your kids learn better than a human - they are DESIGNED to copy other humans, adapt their techniques and learn from them - they are intelligent in themselves, and outpace any computer in the first 10 years of their lives.
Private schools shy away from IT and have less computers than state schools, even though they have orders of magnitude more funds and freedom available. There's a reason for that.
The same could be said for quite a lot of things, for instance World of Warcraft characters. But some of those have sold for hundreds of thousands of dollars.
Not everything has to be tangible to have a value (the entire concept of copyright, for instance, credit cards, pyramid schemes). And not everything that is tangible has value (Zimbabwean currency, for instance).
To the right buyer, a bit of paint slapped on a canvas in a vague square is worth millions. It's just a question of finding a buyer. Considering BitCoin has started to be featured in the Money/City sections of newspapers now (e.g. Metro.co.uk this morning), it doesn't need to have anything tangible or concrete behind it. Value does not always mean cash, either.
That said, I bet you could find *someone* who wanted to part with money in exchange for a certain amount of Bitcoins. Thus it has value. Everything else is just negotiation.
You'd also have to be stupid to believe that:
This makes it right.
The problem is not that others are doing this (that's a matter for THOSE cases), it's a problem that this one was known to be doing this for years, even up to the top levels of the police force, and nothing was done about it by the judiciary or politicians until everyone started to say "Now, hold on, that's not right".
They believed they could get away with it and, well, now it turns out that they can't. The fact that every other major newspaper is probably shitting themselves and shredding evidence of similar stuff right now (which would also be illegal, by the way) is neither here nor there. They shouldn't have been doing it in the first place, and they were allowed to get away with it, and allowed to pay off certain settlements, and allowed to continue as if it was a mere nuisance having to pay off the settlements rather than a punishment for a big illegal operation. It's like big companies that deliver goods in Central London - they all get park where they like and get parking fines and just pay them as part of operational life (even adding it to the cost of delivery) - the parking doesn't benefit any, and nobody really suffers except some poor sod who lives/works in the wrong place.
The "freedom of the press" is one of the things that's ALWAYS bugged the shit out of me. Yes, you need to be able to report in case we get a corrupt government, but equally you should have no more access to information than I do. If I can't access something, there should be a DAMN GOOD reason behind that, and that reason should apply to the press too. I am *NOT* allowed to flash my camera through the windows of vans that are in motion, get photographs of people I haven't asked permission of, and publish those front-page nationwide with whatever kind of assertions I like without bothering to check facts just by adding "allegedly". I'd be in jail before I got past the first step.
And when it came to the UK super-injunctions (where the press were banned from identifying anything or anyone about a particular series of perfectly true events, or even the existence of such an injunction, because footballer X couldn't keep it in his pants) they did the media a disservice - they held the junctions where necessary and kept pointing to their jobs and saying "we need this to provide proper freedom of press", but didn't bother to breach them for months because they would be shouldering the risk and burden of those actions (and creating so much fuss that EVERYONE knows it was Ryan Giggs now, even if they didn't give a shit and wouldn't have cared if it hadn't been the subject of a super-injunction). When it comes to freedom of the press, they didn't care. But when it comes to freedom to obtain juicy gossip illegally, suddenly all the bets are off.
And when it comes to actual *news*, it does not mean you can tap into people's phones, even "accidentally", camp outside their house and harass them, take photos over the garden fence, obstruct their exit from buildings, chase them on public highways in cars through tunnels, or whatever else you "think" is necessary.
Why is it one rule for the press and another for anyone else? The rules should allow ME to do those same actions, otherwise the press becomes this special little clique that are allowed to break laws because they are in favour with the politicians of the moment. And if there's something that the press can't report, I shouldn't be able to report it either and vice versa - and the reasons for not being able to report that should be open enough that a government CAN'T just censor everything in the hopes of not having frauds and expense claims and everything else found out.
The press are worthless, as they currently stand, and are allowed to break laws that we aren't. As such, they grew complacent, and greedy, and believed themselves to be powerful. Now, however, it's got to the point where the public are recognising this and will (with any luck) fight for equality. If a N
The kind of AI that the OP is referring to is essentially an artificial human - reading text perfectly, understanding the concept that the text describes (which suggests a real-world understanding and self-awareness), formulating mathematical models with inaccuracies, identifying the inaccuracies, seeking out potential solution avenues and arriving at a solution, negotiating that solution into a human-understandable context and explaining it back to a human.
Damn, if we get that far, abandon humans entirely. It can do all our maths and physics research for us, write and direct successful books and plays and movies, and plot its own damn space missions to save us from problems we've never seen before. We just tell it "we want more electricity" and it will work out how to do it, using techniques and quantum mechanics we'd never thought of. Why bother trying to get it to teach our kids, who have limited brains and won't understand quantum theory until they're about 16, let alone be able to derive the equations for it?
This is why AI is such a problem area to understand - there is no definition. 50 years ago, computer-chess was "AI". Now it's more a graph theory exercise and a large database. I can write a program in BASIC that will beat you at chess - just give me enough cycles per second and a long-enough time limit. It's the same program I wrote to do the same job back in the 80's. Want me to beat a grandmaster? Just give me more cycles per second or a longer time limit. There's no "intelligence" in the system, it's just following mathematical orders to try every possibility fast enough to find things that our brains can't. The "intelligence" is in the shortcuts and application of graph/game theory to the problem in order to arrive at the code for the "AI" in the first place - all human-performed. When the program itself pops up unannounced and unplanned and says "Hey, I can eliminate this entire class of problems where the pawn is in KKn7 because I've noticed they always end in stalemate", then we have something to shout about - at the moment anything like that is us SPECIFICALLY telling it to look for that pattern explicitly (because we've told it to explicitly look for billions of potential patterns, for example).
We consider humans "intelligent". So does your brain literally track through every possible chess position even 2-3 moves ahead without you forcing it to do so? We believe not. It just has a natural way of determining patterns and using those to its own ends - it "knows" when something is a stupid move without having to try every possible path after it and see if it can force what results in a win for itself - it's an automated, reflexive action of a trained brain. It can also form those paths so that it KNOWS it's stupid to open with P - KR4 even if it's never tried every single possible game past that point. Current computer AI isn't close to that for even the simplest of tasks.
OCR - is that AI? It's considered not, but used to be. It's just looking for splines, analysing position and matching to a statistical database. There's no "intelligence", no "personal choice" being made - just a literal, specified decision.
We also have absolutely nothing that's even close to "understanding" the concept of a real world. Nothing. Not even remotely close at all.
There are elements of "true" AI dotted about in research. We have genetically-evolved chip designs that out-perform their human-designed peers. We have no idea how they do it (or didn't, until it had done it and we analysed the result) but they work faster in a smaller chip size to do the same job. (The classic was an experiment to design a chip to differentiate between two frequencies of AC signal - the "genetically-evolved" chip design actually confused us for years as to how it worked and/or how it was smaller than our best design).
But AI literally means what you what it to. "Artificial Intelligence" to a professional, however, in no way suggests brute-force-of-a-simple-algorithm, nor
The only permanent, extra-terrestrial life-supporting, man-made object is the ISS. That needed 14 years of construction (predicted to last only about 14 more once it's finished), needed the Americans, Soviets, Europeans and Japanese to all abandon their individual projects and concentrate on only that, costs about 100bn Euros, and is 200 miles away.
The Moon is 200,000 miles away. Mars is 150,000,000 miles away.
There will be no short-term supply trips to give people several years worth of food (i.e. the time until we can send a "real" supply) - hell, food would constitute the vast majority of their payload because you won't be growing anything self-sustainable on the Moon/Mars for at least a year even under ideal "Earth-like" conditions simulated inside some kind of greenhouse (it's called farming - plant stuff, wait a year, eat it).
There's a hell of a lot less heat and you're going to be constantly pumping heat into a cold void in order to keep things at room temperature (considering we can just about rustle-up a handful of watts for the Mars rovers, or a couple of hundred for the new ones using radioactive materials, your heating bill is going to be... well... astronomical). We just about managed it for a handful of days in the past, for just spacesuits. The Apollo astronauts barely stayed a day.
There will be a bit more than the ISS's 10 major incidents in that time (not counting the VASTLY increased chances of problems with the travel outside the Earth's influence, landing and living on another rock that we can barely keep a rover running on) and no backup to send spare parts within weeks like we've done with the ISS.
Just think about the first few days - if you don't manage to ship enough stuff and people to build a air-tight shelter against the dust storms, warm enough to keep a human happy, pumped full of oxygen, large enough to hold decent amount of food, people and living space, in one of the most hostile environments that humans would ever have set foot upon, you're dead before you even start. That's assuming those humans even make it there - most of the stuff we've sent to orbit Mars hasn't made it at all or lasted anywhere near it's planned lifetime - the exceptions don't bring up the averages much.
Humans are literally two-three days away from death at any time. Rovers can live for decades and we can send 100 of them for the cost of one man (just in a single mission, if we so wanted). It was estimated recently that Apollo cost $170bn (adjusted for today) for a handful of people to walk on the moon for a day. The Mars rovers cost US$820 million originally, nearly $1bn with all the extensions. Curiosity costs about $3bn. That entire program cost less than 1-2% of the cost of putting a couple of men on the Moon for only a day.
Humans aren't built for travel. Wherever we go we have to take Earth with us. And that, quite literally, costs the Earth each time.
Because, despite all your hyperbole, AI just isn't good enough to do any of that yet.
It can't do natural language processing, it can't reason algebra for itself, it certainly can't read someone else's algebra and spot the mistake, let alone guess why they made that mistake ("little Johnny has a problem with minus-sign blindness"), and don't even think they can suggest how to fix anything except just giving the correct answer.
It can't do grading, it can't do any of that shit. *COMPUTERS* can, and do every day, but AI cannot - computers STILL only work when you tell them exactly what to do and how to do it. What you see in any kind of automated grading system is nothing more than very specifically tuned heuristic systems based on an extremely limited input (i.e. multiple-choice). Just because a research paper says they've made a system where the mystical AI grades English-language papers doesn't mean it's true - half the time, the researchers themselves don't even know what it's actually measuring, it could just be assigning a score based on word-length, or complexity, or the number of times it sees a diagram. Even the "essay-copying" software is nothing more than a statistical analysis. That is NOT AI.
Maple and MathCAD can work all sorts of wonders with mathematics, algebra, calculus. Not one bit of their code is AI or been touched by AI or works via AI or can we get a single AI to even come close to a particular result. Same for Wolfram Alpha. Same for anything you see Google do (even Labs, Translate, Voice, etc.) - Google works on huge statistics, not AI.
If you think AI is doing any of this today you are sadly disillusioned. We have a handful of huge research projects that can do some extremely basic things only after decades of training on a very tiny area, with very limited input and where we require only a very limited output. Why? Because computer AI just doesn't exist in the way the movies would like you to think.
To say that "Today's AI could easily be" doing that shit shows that you just don't understand what those computers are doing and what those research papers are actually claiming.
AI doesn't exist yet in any practical form or application. Get over it. What you see are convincingly-tuned, single-purpose heuristics, which isn't even close to being the same thing, or providing the results you think. Whether it's natural-language processing, computer translation, computer "players" in games, or some huge analysis of student's papers, it's not AI. If you don't understand what they are *currently* doing, you will never understand why all that stuff you just requested does not (and won't, for several decades/centuries/millenia) exist.
With all of the largest supercomputers in the world combined we could JUST about simulate a very idealised (and misunderstood) version of the neural connections of an ant's brain, extremely slowly. That's assuming we had anything to plug into it to seed it (several hundred million years of evolution to create initial pathways would be a good start), the time enough to train it to give any sort of sensible response, or anything worth asking it that an average ant would be able to answer, even "in its head".
AI isn't what you think. Really. Which is why none of that shit exists.
Even better than that - they used, in part, an Apache open source project that had already done that (basically reimplemented Java) and reimplemented the Java VM themselves with compatible interfaces so you *can* run Java code on it without (too many) modifications.
But because they wouldn't go through the Java certification process and/or pay off Sun, Oracle waited until they owned Sun (who didn't really care for years) and then tried to sue only Google. Basically, they say that if you're not certified, you don't have a right to the software patents they have (and hence why the lawsuit only really concerns patents and everything else is a "throw-it-in, see-if-it-sticks" tactics from Oracle), and that Google infringe the patents (despite the VAST, VAST majority of them having been put under review, or completely made void by Google prior-art searches and the Patent Office).
It's gone from "you copied us" to "the code you use, which millions are happily using in a variety of projects and the entirety of which is clean-room implementations, might possibly infringe one of the several hundred quite stupid and obvious software patents we asserted at the start - but we won't say which one until you void all of the rest - and although we offered you a licence for $100m for EVERYTHING, we're going to seek billions from you for that one tiny patent that we're not even sure will stand up."
Oracle will be lucky to come out of it with just a settlement that stops Google from suing their arse off in retaliation.
Oh, thank you, thank you, thank you. That's made my day, that has.
Some web programmer was pissed at them - he gave them exactly what they wanted in a way that completely defeated the original object of the exercise. Fabulous.
'cept that's nothing like what happened.
In fact, all Google did was reimplement an already clean-room reimplementation of Java. The case is about software patents, which Oracle claims Google infringed by doing so, not copyrights. The only mention of copyrights was Oracle trying to say "Google made an interface that was compatible with Java" because Google took a public header file (which are non-copyrightable through reason of insufficient expression - because they are *fact*-based files, nothing else) and used it to create a compatible API.
The lawsuit is basically trying to say "no-one, anywhere, can make anything even vaguely similar to Java because we hold the patent on it", not "Google stole our Java code".
But, please, do carry on trolling.
Er, sorry, but the clue is in your answer: "rep"... they are Oracle representatives.
And how would you expect to deal with them? Afresh and without-history on every phone call from a different rep? Nope. They are a company, an entity within itself, and they are representatives. You are speaking to the company - if you say that their sales offer is "stupid", you are talking about the company's offer, not that individual person.
Also, if you are a rep for a company, you MUST expect this distinction, otherwise you'll take everything too personally. Personal / Professional - too different things. The PERSON who called was acting in a PROFESSIONAL role, thus any comment to them is about their PROFESSIONAL life (which would include their professionalism if they were rude).
To be honest, how else would a company even know that they did wrong if you couldn't tell the rep that because it might offend? Get off your supposed politically-correct high-horse and tell companies what you think of them. If the rep bursts into tears, that's a problem with the person taking their professional life too seriously (I have dealt with things like that - it's nothing to do with the person that their company is making them do stupid things, and I make that clear if there is confusion).
A supplier of library software called the school I work for and asked us why we weren't upgrading to the latest version (which is a Silverlight monstrosity that basically connects to a VNC instance at their server which actually runs the program so we have to keep paying subscription fees).
When we told them that a) we don't have, use or condone the use of Silverlight (for a start, half our machines are Linux), b) we're not going to rent software that we currently own, c) we're not going to rely on our Internet connection for our library to operate and d) we would need Data Protection assurances for where the server is hosted, not to mention e) none of their competitors do this shit, they got very confused.
They sent us out brochures and leaflets and instruction manuals because they assured us they had an "offline" version we could host in school. It never materialised and none of the things they sent were relevant (it just described how to have a server in school be the main proxy for the clients, not how to avoid Silverlight, dependence on the company, and dependence on the Internet connection being needed at every client). They were basically told where to go, in no uncertain terms, because their company was forcing them to push us to something completely unsuitable and weren't listening to what we wanted. In the end, we asked them not to call again. We were never allowed to speak to anyone other than a frontline rep.
Your reps being spoken to by your customers are 99.9% of your customer feedback. If your customers are angry, or constantly demand a feature, rollback, bugfix, price reduction, etc. then you better listen to them. They aren't going to be calling the CEO, they are going to call a front-line rep who - if they aren't doing their job - will never pass that info on. And you *can* lose tens or hundreds of pounds of business by losing one customer just because one rep wasn't professional enough to deal with customer concerns.
Cases in point: The library software above, the guy from WStore who replied to our order for £10,000 of networking gear with an accidental CC: of an internal email to us where he referred to my boss as an "idiot" (order cancelled, contract lost), V-Networks - the ISP who cut both our business lines off permanently because we went over a little traffic for a single month after 5 years of being a customer (where my boss literally used the phrase "how much do I need to pay you to turn it back on for the month" and was greeted with an answer that it was absolutely impossible - new ISP within a week, phone calls galore trying to apologise, threats of lawsuits for us backing out of our contract - nothing materialised - and never had a problem since).
Your r