It seems to me that introducing multiple currencies would add complexity to the economy but would not actually change things that much. Sure, GoblinBucks may devalue if Ub3rGu1ld goes to camp the Goblin Shiznit or whatever, but then they can just go somewhere less camped, like Trollville, and farm Trollbucks and feed those into the economy instead (saving their GoblinBucks for when the economy swings the other way).
Sounds sophisticatd, but all it means is that the farmers would move from place to place like locusts instead of staying in one or two spots. I am not sure what problem that solves. The game economy is still a mess, albeit a tougher one for the devs to try and balance/fix.
Sorry, but no. She was not actually doing a good job of speaking to an MBA crowd either. She was trying to sell us an old idea with a new buzzword. The idea that the business should drive projects, and that there may an IT component to a business project, is as old as computing. Sensible companies have always realized this and operated their IT departments accordingly. Trying to repackage ROI and systems integration as "adaptive computing" is just sound and fury, signifying nothing. Any MBAs she is "communicating" with should be given something more important to do, like creating a new cover sheet for the TPS report.
A better and more honest approach would be to announce that HP will now begin competing with IBM Global Services. That seems to be the upshot of all this, and IBM could sure use some competition, as their offerings stink on ice.
Give me a break. You were lumping this in with the Civil War, and now you are saying Texans should not be proud of their heritage (while maintaining that you should be proud of yours)? Hypocrite.
Also, Texans are appropriately proud of their history and culture (all of it, not just the white male parts), and do not need to pass silly laws trying to ensure that our rich history is not forgotten. I am sorry that you do, and I wish your kids were intereseted enough in your culture that you did not have to do that, but don't try to force an analogy that does not exist.
On the other hand, there is one recent product of Texas that I would happily send to Motreal if you would agree to keep him. Fancy GWB?
The Alamo had nothing to do with the Civil War, you fucking retard. It was a battle in Texas' fight for independence from Mexico. What exactly is objectionable about remembering that?
My guess is translated packaging was not being provided because the market share available in Quebec was not worth it. I suppose we shall see what happens now that the translation law is being enforced. Sometimes laws like that backfire, driving businesses away from the market.
This is not always the case. For many gamers, it is the act of playing the game, the pure gameplay itself, that is what it is all about; this can be more adrenaline-infused, or less. Open-ended games with no clear winning objective may get boring after a while, sure. Some folks, like you perhaps, want concrete goals and a defined endgame, simething like, say, The Sims would probably be boring. On the other hand, the 100000th Baldur's Gate clone can be boring to others. I think the mistake is in trying to tell people what kind of game type they will enjoy. The lesson here is to realize that there is a (large/ small?) segment of the gaming population that enjoys more open-ended games.
I worked for a company like that - a real kool-aid-drinking place called Trilogy Software. The sales team and the sales engineers were crappy at estimation and the corporate culture encouraged long hours in pursuit of unrealistic goals. The end result was always a more-orless timely delivery, crappy quality and poor post-deployment customer support. As a project manager I let myself and my team get burned by these unrealistic commitments over and over again. I was a fool.
I realized after leaving Trilogy that much of the fault was mine as a project manager. 8 hours per day is PLENTY of time to get your job done - if your team cannot generally execute a project on time while working 8-hour days, you have done a poor job planning, estimating or setting expectations. If you are doing frequent replans (monthly at least) and are adjusting client expectations as you go, and if you have a contract that supports you from a legal standpoint, you should be able to manage a project where 8 hour days are the norm, and longer days or weekends are a rare occurrence that should raise questions within the team about how they could have been avoided. Sure, some crunches are unavoidable, but most of them can be mitigated with better planning and communication.
I have been managing my teams this way for a few years now, and I really like the results - happy clients who are successful thanks to my team's work, a happy team, and a feeling that I am always dealing with everyone with a high degree of personal intergrity and honesty. You cannot buy that feeling.
How do you people think the power markets work? States do not sue power providers because they think they are entitled to power at the same prices as the state in which the power was produced. They sue power providers when they engage in price-fixing.
Moving power across state lines, or from area to area within states or coutries, is known as "wheeling", and is a very common occurrence. Prices for wheeling power into or out of a market are more or less a free market. There is regulation to prevent artificial inflation of prices - this is what Enron, El Paso Energy, Dynegy and others were nailed for doing in California a few years ago - colluding between each other to artifically force prices higher than they would otherwise have been, even given the unexpected peak demands. However, having said that, there is nothing built in to these regulatory controls that will prevent a short-sighted state or municipality from having to pay through the nose if they do a crap job of forecasting peak demand and do not act accordingly. These prices, even without artificial inflation, can spike quite high - in the spot (balance of the day/week/month) market, you can see prices as high as $500/MWh where it is normally one tenth or one twentieth that mcuh. These are extreme cases, but not particularly rare ones.
That said, Californians need to send their legislators a message that they do not want to ever again be opened up to the risks of the spot market. Even without the illegal price fixing, the cost that California had to bear for the legally-priced stuff was astronomical and unnecessary in a state where there are pelnty of ways to get power generated and distributed.
Have you looked into A Tale in the Desert? It is a very cool MMOG that has absolutely no combat in it whatsoever - it is a game of collective social and cultural advancement, and is quite amazingly fun.
It may not allow the app to break out of the VM space directly, but it certainly breaks sandboxing in another respect: it breaks your ability to restrict access to specific methods or variables. In, say, an class that handles authentication or authorization, this will be important.
Re:Duh. Its called reflection
on
Hijacking .NET
·
· Score: 1
The issue is not that the private members of a class can be seen, it is that they can be directly accessed. While you can do this in, say, C++, C or Perl, none of those languages advertise a JVM-style secure-sandbox environment, which is how MS pitches the CLR. The big worry is of course that you can think you have hidden code from unauthorized access.
The query cache provides query result caching. If two exact same requests are to be executed, only one is executed and the second one waits until the completion of the first one (this is the default pendingTimeout value which is 0). To prevent the second request to wait forever, a pendingTimeout value in seconds can be defined for the waiting request. If the timeout expires the request is executed in parallel of the first one.
A request cache element is described as follows:
The request cache granularity defines how entries are removed from the cache. noInvalidation provides a non-coherent cache and should only be used for testing purposes. table and column provide table-based and column-based invalidations, respectively. columnUnique can optimize requests that select a unique primary key (useful with EJB entity beans).
Can someone who understands C-JDBC better than I do explain what this might mean? Sounds to me like they are replacing a feature of CMP by doing this, which is not necessarily something that would be "useful with EJB entity beans" if I understand it right (unless maybe they are referring to folks using EJB 1.0?). That is, the container already handles cache-invalidation at a fine-grained level. Perhaps there is a scenario I am not imagining where it would be useful to have this at the database level also... thoughts?
Re:I don't agree with the article
on
A Better Finder?
·
· Score: 1
Well, it really depends on what you want from your OS and your system. Personally, I have no trouble with digital music management on my Linux box, I don't do editing, I find that Linux has plenty of software fo the sort I need, and so on. Plus it is free, and the system I can run it on does not require that I take out a loan to do so. So, from my perspective, I could indeed get two equivalent (for me) systems for the price of a single Mac. Which is why I don't use a Mac. YMMV, and I am sure that it does.
That is the best encapsulation of the two major branches of Creationism I have ever seen.
It also goes yards towards pointing out that "Intelligent Design" Creationism, if it is taught in any classrooms at all, should be taught in sociology or history classes, not in science classes.It simply has nothing to say about science, nor science about it.
My wife just pointed out that there was in fact an entire episode of the X-Files dedicated to a fanfic writer who had recently passed away. She notes:
The character of Special Agent Leyla Harrison, who appeared in the episode titled "Alone" in the eighth season was named for online X-Files fan and fanfic writer Leyla Harrison, whose life was cut short in February 2001 when she lost her battle with skin cancer. Leyla herself touched many in the online XF community, so much so that the show's writers wrote this episode as a tribute to her memory. The character was not only named after Leyla, but gently parodied the relationship between the show and the fans.
Special Agent Harrison, as depicted, was a huge fan of Mulder and Scully, like the real Leyla. She was full of X-Files trivia and obscure references, knew more about the cases than Mulder and Scully themselves did, and was brimming with questions like "How did Mulder and Scully get back from Antarctica?" (a reference to the end of the X-Files feature film), pointing out plot holes that fans often obsess over.
The character later made another appearance in an episode in the show's final season, entitled "Scary Monsters."
Here's the recap of "Alone" on Television Without Pity (which used to be Mighty Big TV): http://www.televisionwithoutpity.com/story.cgi?sho w=5&story=1619&limit=30&sort=
Sure I have. I get marketing spam from Microsoft all the time telling me about the wonders of.NET and how the complete product line will be along any day now.
And they seem to have trouble figuring out how to remove me from their mailing lists. Sounds like spam from an established company to me.
Wouldn't you have to then worry about piercing the veil of illusion that confronted Neo and friends after they escaped the Matrix? I mean, I thought the whole point was to get through all of the layers of illusion?
While you draw some strong parallels between The Matrix and the early to middle Plato, I feel that the film echoes those writings far less directly than some others, most notably Descrates' Meditations and Hilary Putnam's famous "Brains in a Vat" paper. Both of these, esp. Putnam's paper, describe the scnearios very similar to the situation in which Neo finds himself.
In Putnam's paper, he posits that an evil scientist has removed the brains from our bodies and placed them in a vat of nutrients so that they can survive (the details of the science are a bit weak here, but Putnam is speaking hypothetically). He then hooks up the brain to a complex apparatus that provides it with a sensory experience very like what we see in The Matrix. The hard part then is deciding (a) if such a brain were hooked up in this manner, could it ever realize its true sitation (i.e., being a brain in a vat)? and (b) How can we be sure at this moment that we are not brains in a vat (or victims of some similar scneario)?
Descartes' argument was very similar, but involved an evil demon with magical powers instead of a scientist with a really swank computer. [Oh, and he was trying to beat the argument in order to prove the existence of god. Opinions differ as to whether he suceeded...]
Unfortunately, the film opts out of discussing either of the questions raised above by allowing Neo, Morpheus, et al to somehow "know" that what they were experiencing was not real. Moreover, they are able to somehow warp the rules of the system in which they find themselves simply because they know it is not real. However, this does not necessarily make sense - their realization does not necessarily give them superuser access to the system in which they find themselves, eh?
So, if we are in such a system (and remember, it is bug-free to the extent that millions of us have never noticed a problem with what our senses are telling us), what is it about Neo and co. that allow them to notice the difference? It is hard not to degenerate into mysticism at this point (although perhaps that is not a bad thing).
By the way, although Plato did hold a low opinion of democracy, keep in mind that this was largely affected by the treatment his mentor, Socrates, had received at the hands of the Athenian court system. Also, the reason that what you refer to as a "happy few" were the only ones freed from the cave is that most of the people the philosopher tries to free resist such freedom and condemn the teacher (another reference to Socrates, who was convicted and executed for "corrupting the youth of Athens" by teaching them to question the world around them). [After teaching numerous Intro to Philosophy courses, I have to say that this is still the case - in my experience, most people do not wish to challenge the modes of thought that they have unthinkingly used all their lives. Philosophy is hard, which is why few people do it (and even fewer doit well).] Plato thought, based on what he saw around him in Athens, that the people as a whole simply could not be trusted to run a state, as they could not even be bothered to stir themselves from their complacency to seek truth.
I am, by the way, not defending Plato's position, merely clarifying it. But the interestig thing is that, while Morpheus claims his goal is to free everyone (eventually), he is ostensibly a tyrant in the Platonic sense found in the Republic. He is the keeper of the truth (at least, until Neo comes into his own at the end of the film), and the others do his biddig as a result. Recall, this was one of Cipher's major causes for dissatisfaction.
Right, like you said, not that important, but good fun.
Millimetering towards a turing test is more like it. I mean, we are missing several key elements to the Turing test here. The biggest two are:
Interactivity: Turing's test specifies that the sessions be interactive. Emulating human output in the sense of writing a scfi book is (as Thomas Miconi pointed out) a mathematical game. In terms of compelxity of the AI problem, it barely scratches the surface. Until a human is able to interact with two test subjects (one human and one AI candidate) and find herself/himself unable to distinguish between the two, we are nowhere near AI. In fact, I would submit that, as these things go, Deep Blue is possibly further along the track towards a real Turing test: it plays the same kind of mathematical game but for a different problem (chess vs. grammatical construction), and it has been agreed that it does so as well as an ackknowledged human master, whereas the samples from Brutus.l that I have so far seen are pretty craptacular.
Totally free range of topics: Until we are able to query the writers and have them change subjects during one of these competitions (see interactivity, above), we are seeing no real advance here with respect to the Turing test. The difficulty of the TT comes not from being good at one tiny area - that is only a really tiny part of the problem. The real difficulty comes from being able to seem human in a conversation without limitations on the subject matter.
Brutus.l is moving in the durection of the TT. But it is not as much of a breakthrough as we would like it to be...
I read the review of Neuromancer in Dragon(tm) magazine (D&D nerd and computer geek all at the same time - what are the odds?). Went out the same day, bought a copy and read it three times in a row. As books go, it was a "killer app" for me.
I just hope that Chris Cunningham (the director) can stick with his plan to keep the focus on the plot and not the f/x. Far too many movies these days seem to believe that a lot of cool graphics can obviate the need for a good plot or decent acting. Case in point (as many others have said here) is Johnny Mnemonic. If Neuromancer turns out to be a piece of crap like that it will break my heart...
Slashdot Mirror
It seems to me that introducing multiple currencies would add complexity to the economy but would not actually change things that much. Sure, GoblinBucks may devalue if Ub3rGu1ld goes to camp the Goblin Shiznit or whatever, but then they can just go somewhere less camped, like Trollville, and farm Trollbucks and feed those into the economy instead (saving their GoblinBucks for when the economy swings the other way).
Sounds sophisticatd, but all it means is that the farmers would move from place to place like locusts instead of staying in one or two spots. I am not sure what problem that solves. The game economy is still a mess, albeit a tougher one for the devs to try and balance/fix.
Sorry, but no. She was not actually doing a good job of speaking to an MBA crowd either. She was trying to sell us an old idea with a new buzzword. The idea that the business should drive projects, and that there may an IT component to a business project, is as old as computing. Sensible companies have always realized this and operated their IT departments accordingly. Trying to repackage ROI and systems integration as "adaptive computing" is just sound and fury, signifying nothing. Any MBAs she is "communicating" with should be given something more important to do, like creating a new cover sheet for the TPS report.
A better and more honest approach would be to announce that HP will now begin competing with IBM Global Services. That seems to be the upshot of all this, and IBM could sure use some competition, as their offerings stink on ice.
"Ask a Mexican, you dickless bonehead."
Give me a break. You were lumping this in with the Civil War, and now you are saying Texans should not be proud of their heritage (while maintaining that you should be proud of yours)? Hypocrite.
Also, Texans are appropriately proud of their history and culture (all of it, not just the white male parts), and do not need to pass silly laws trying to ensure that our rich history is not forgotten. I am sorry that you do, and I wish your kids were intereseted enough in your culture that you did not have to do that, but don't try to force an analogy that does not exist.
On the other hand, there is one recent product of Texas that I would happily send to Motreal if you would agree to keep him. Fancy GWB?
"remember the Alamo! Yee-HAW!"
The Alamo had nothing to do with the Civil War, you fucking retard. It was a battle in Texas' fight for independence from Mexico. What exactly is objectionable about remembering that?
My guess is translated packaging was not being provided because the market share available in Quebec was not worth it. I suppose we shall see what happens now that the translation law is being enforced. Sometimes laws like that backfire, driving businesses away from the market.
This is not always the case. For many gamers, it is the act of playing the game, the pure gameplay itself, that is what it is all about; this can be more adrenaline-infused, or less. Open-ended games with no clear winning objective may get boring after a while, sure. Some folks, like you perhaps, want concrete goals and a defined endgame, simething like, say, The Sims would probably be boring. On the other hand, the 100000th Baldur's Gate clone can be boring to others. I think the mistake is in trying to tell people what kind of game type they will enjoy. The lesson here is to realize that there is a (large/ small?) segment of the gaming population that enjoys more open-ended games.
Now THAT is a good game. Paranoia is hands down the most enjoyable game to play (and roleplay), IMO.
None of this pathetic idolizing of undead bottom-feeders (I mean, honestly, looking up to vampires is like looking up to slum landlords).
I think A Tale in the Desert caters to role-players quite well as you have defined them. If you are not playing it, give it a go.
I worked for a company like that - a real kool-aid-drinking place called Trilogy Software. The sales team and the sales engineers were crappy at estimation and the corporate culture encouraged long hours in pursuit of unrealistic goals. The end result was always a more-orless timely delivery, crappy quality and poor post-deployment customer support. As a project manager I let myself and my team get burned by these unrealistic commitments over and over again. I was a fool.
I realized after leaving Trilogy that much of the fault was mine as a project manager. 8 hours per day is PLENTY of time to get your job done - if your team cannot generally execute a project on time while working 8-hour days, you have done a poor job planning, estimating or setting expectations. If you are doing frequent replans (monthly at least) and are adjusting client expectations as you go, and if you have a contract that supports you from a legal standpoint, you should be able to manage a project where 8 hour days are the norm, and longer days or weekends are a rare occurrence that should raise questions within the team about how they could have been avoided. Sure, some crunches are unavoidable, but most of them can be mitigated with better planning and communication.
I have been managing my teams this way for a few years now, and I really like the results - happy clients who are successful thanks to my team's work, a happy team, and a feeling that I am always dealing with everyone with a high degree of personal intergrity and honesty. You cannot buy that feeling.
How do you people think the power markets work? States do not sue power providers because they think they are entitled to power at the same prices as the state in which the power was produced. They sue power providers when they engage in price-fixing.
Moving power across state lines, or from area to area within states or coutries, is known as "wheeling", and is a very common occurrence. Prices for wheeling power into or out of a market are more or less a free market. There is regulation to prevent artificial inflation of prices - this is what Enron, El Paso Energy, Dynegy and others were nailed for doing in California a few years ago - colluding between each other to artifically force prices higher than they would otherwise have been, even given the unexpected peak demands. However, having said that, there is nothing built in to these regulatory controls that will prevent a short-sighted state or municipality from having to pay through the nose if they do a crap job of forecasting peak demand and do not act accordingly. These prices, even without artificial inflation, can spike quite high - in the spot (balance of the day/week/month) market, you can see prices as high as $500/MWh where it is normally one tenth or one twentieth that mcuh. These are extreme cases, but not particularly rare ones.
That said, Californians need to send their legislators a message that they do not want to ever again be opened up to the risks of the spot market. Even without the illegal price fixing, the cost that California had to bear for the legally-priced stuff was astronomical and unnecessary in a state where there are pelnty of ways to get power generated and distributed.
Have you looked into A Tale in the Desert? It is a very cool MMOG that has absolutely no combat in it whatsoever - it is a game of collective social and cultural advancement, and is quite amazingly fun.
OK, that was a poor example. Never mind.
It may not allow the app to break out of the VM space directly, but it certainly breaks sandboxing in another respect: it breaks your ability to restrict access to specific methods or variables. In, say, an class that handles authentication or authorization, this will be important.
The issue is not that the private members of a class can be seen, it is that they can be directly accessed. While you can do this in, say, C++, C or Perl, none of those languages advertise a JVM-style secure-sandbox environment, which is how MS pitches the CLR. The big worry is of course that you can think you have hidden code from unauthorized access.
Can someone who understands C-JDBC better than I do explain what this might mean? Sounds to me like they are replacing a feature of CMP by doing this, which is not necessarily something that would be "useful with EJB entity beans" if I understand it right (unless maybe they are referring to folks using EJB 1.0?). That is, the container already handles cache-invalidation at a fine-grained level. Perhaps there is a scenario I am not imagining where it would be useful to have this at the database level also... thoughts?
Well, it really depends on what you want from your OS and your system. Personally, I have no trouble with digital music management on my Linux box, I don't do editing, I find that Linux has plenty of software fo the sort I need, and so on. Plus it is free, and the system I can run it on does not require that I take out a loan to do so. So, from my perspective, I could indeed get two equivalent (for me) systems for the price of a single Mac. Which is why I don't use a Mac. YMMV, and I am sure that it does.
Yeah! This is the 21st century, after all. I want my air/raft, dammit!
That is the best encapsulation of the two major branches of Creationism I have ever seen.
It also goes yards towards pointing out that "Intelligent Design" Creationism, if it is taught in any classrooms at all, should be taught in sociology or history classes, not in science classes.It simply has nothing to say about science, nor science about it.
My wife just pointed out that there was in fact an entire episode of the X-Files dedicated to a fanfic writer who had recently passed away. She notes:
o w=5&story=1619&limit=30&sort=
The character of Special Agent Leyla Harrison, who appeared in the episode titled "Alone" in the eighth season was named for online X-Files fan and fanfic writer Leyla Harrison, whose life was cut short in February 2001 when she lost her battle with skin cancer. Leyla herself touched many in the online XF community, so much so that the show's writers wrote this episode as a tribute to her memory. The character was not only named after Leyla, but gently parodied the relationship between the show and the fans.
Special Agent Harrison, as depicted, was a huge fan of Mulder and Scully, like the real Leyla. She was full of X-Files trivia and obscure references, knew more about the cases than Mulder and Scully themselves did, and was brimming with questions like "How did Mulder and Scully get back from Antarctica?" (a reference to the end of the X-Files feature film), pointing out plot holes that fans often obsess over.
The character later made another appearance in an episode in the show's final season, entitled "Scary Monsters."
Here's the recap of "Alone" on Television Without Pity (which used to be Mighty Big TV): http://www.televisionwithoutpity.com/story.cgi?sh
> ever received spam from IBM?
.NET and how the complete product line will be along any day now.
Sure I have. I get marketing spam from Microsoft all the time telling me about the wonders of
And they seem to have trouble figuring out how to remove me from their mailing lists. Sounds like spam from an established company to me.
Wouldn't you have to then worry about piercing the veil of illusion that confronted Neo and friends after they escaped the Matrix? I mean, I thought the whole point was to get through all of the layers of illusion?
In Putnam's paper, he posits that an evil scientist has removed the brains from our bodies and placed them in a vat of nutrients so that they can survive (the details of the science are a bit weak here, but Putnam is speaking hypothetically). He then hooks up the brain to a complex apparatus that provides it with a sensory experience very like what we see in The Matrix. The hard part then is deciding (a) if such a brain were hooked up in this manner, could it ever realize its true sitation (i.e., being a brain in a vat)? and (b) How can we be sure at this moment that we are not brains in a vat (or victims of some similar scneario)?
Descartes' argument was very similar, but involved an evil demon with magical powers instead of a scientist with a really swank computer. [Oh, and he was trying to beat the argument in order to prove the existence of god. Opinions differ as to whether he suceeded...]
Unfortunately, the film opts out of discussing either of the questions raised above by allowing Neo, Morpheus, et al to somehow "know" that what they were experiencing was not real. Moreover, they are able to somehow warp the rules of the system in which they find themselves simply because they know it is not real. However, this does not necessarily make sense - their realization does not necessarily give them superuser access to the system in which they find themselves, eh?
So, if we are in such a system (and remember, it is bug-free to the extent that millions of us have never noticed a problem with what our senses are telling us), what is it about Neo and co. that allow them to notice the difference? It is hard not to degenerate into mysticism at this point (although perhaps that is not a bad thing).
By the way, although Plato did hold a low opinion of democracy, keep in mind that this was largely affected by the treatment his mentor, Socrates, had received at the hands of the Athenian court system. Also, the reason that what you refer to as a "happy few" were the only ones freed from the cave is that most of the people the philosopher tries to free resist such freedom and condemn the teacher (another reference to Socrates, who was convicted and executed for "corrupting the youth of Athens" by teaching them to question the world around them). [After teaching numerous Intro to Philosophy courses, I have to say that this is still the case - in my experience, most people do not wish to challenge the modes of thought that they have unthinkingly used all their lives. Philosophy is hard, which is why few people do it (and even fewer doit well).] Plato thought, based on what he saw around him in Athens, that the people as a whole simply could not be trusted to run a state, as they could not even be bothered to stir themselves from their complacency to seek truth.
I am, by the way, not defending Plato's position, merely clarifying it. But the interestig thing is that, while Morpheus claims his goal is to free everyone (eventually), he is ostensibly a tyrant in the Platonic sense found in the Republic. He is the keeper of the truth (at least, until Neo comes into his own at the end of the film), and the others do his biddig as a result. Recall, this was one of Cipher's major causes for dissatisfaction.
Right, like you said, not that important, but good fun.
- Interactivity: Turing's test specifies that the sessions be interactive. Emulating human output in the sense of writing a scfi book is (as Thomas Miconi pointed out) a mathematical game. In terms of compelxity of the AI problem, it barely scratches the surface. Until a human is able to interact with two test subjects (one human and one AI candidate) and find herself/himself unable to distinguish between the two, we are nowhere near AI. In fact, I would submit that, as these things go, Deep Blue is possibly further along the track towards a real Turing test: it plays the same kind of mathematical game but for a different problem (chess vs. grammatical construction), and it has been agreed that it does so as well as an ackknowledged human master, whereas the samples from Brutus.l that I have so far seen are pretty craptacular.
- Totally free range of topics: Until we are able to query the writers and have them change subjects during one of these competitions (see interactivity, above), we are seeing no real advance here with respect to the Turing test. The difficulty of the TT comes not from being good at one tiny area - that is only a really tiny part of the problem. The real difficulty comes from being able to seem human in a conversation without limitations on the subject matter.
Brutus.l is moving in the durection of the TT. But it is not as much of a breakthrough as we would like it to be...I read the review of Neuromancer in Dragon(tm) magazine (D&D nerd and computer geek all at the same time - what are the odds?). Went out the same day, bought a copy and read it three times in a row. As books go, it was a "killer app" for me.
I just hope that Chris Cunningham (the director) can stick with his plan to keep the focus on the plot and not the f/x. Far too many movies these days seem to believe that a lot of cool graphics can obviate the need for a good plot or decent acting. Case in point (as many others have said here) is Johnny Mnemonic. If Neuromancer turns out to be a piece of crap like that it will break my heart...