Yes, well, once upon a time we considered things real even when they weren't on the web! I know it sounds crazy, but it actually is useful when discussing things that significantly pre-date the web. Seriously, WTF are you on about?
"If there is a personal email about how some bill is progressing, and it's largely personal complaints about whoever is balking, is that government business or not?"
The Governor is sending complaints about how a bill is progressing to someone involved enough to possibly care? How could that not be government business?
I don't know the language of the Alaskan governemnts email retention rules. But, for the reasons you mention, such rules tend to require retention based not on a "clearly pertains to" sort of standard, but a "could possibly be construed as related to". She was sending emails to and about subordinates and other people in the government.
The Turing test is really a thought experiment. Its purpose is/was not actually to test artificial intelligences; actually performing (somewhat dumbed-down versions of) the test is a fun game, but not really the point.
The point Turing was making was that if you communicate with two entities via some mechanism that hides their nature, and cannot tell which one is a machine and which is a human, it is unreasonable for you to then claim the human is intelligent and the machine is not.
So when someone says one of these programs aren't intelligent because "All they are doing is...", then Turing says they have a bad definition of intelligence. You shouldn't need to know anything about how the thing on the other end of the line does what it does to decide if what it does is intelligence.
And while you say "it's much too easy"; the test described is a simplified version with an artificially low threshold, and they aren't very close to passing...
The original ELIZA has been doing this for decades, as anyone involved in this story is certainly aware. The story here is that the current crop of such programs does it quite a lot better than others have in the past.
"she is an ordinary citizen as well as a public office holder"
Yes, and if the emails pertain only to her acting as an "ordinary citizen", she doesn't have to keep them. If the emails pertain to official government business, which some of them clearly do, she is required by law to keep them.
The normal procedure would be to use her state-provided email for all official business, and something else for personal stuff. This keeps everything nicely segregated. The fact she has not done this could mean that she is intentionally evading the law, or that she is an idiot; but one should not jump to conclusions and neglect the possibility of both.
I want to treat my OS like an appliance, and I'm a geek; I'm just not an OS geek. If you enjoy messing about with operating systems internals then obviously Linux is a better choice than Windows; I mean, duh. The interesting question to be addressed in this here eternal flame war is to what degree each is more or less suitable for people who want to do other stuff.
Don't tell me I'm not a geek because I want my operating system to just work and not get in my way while I'm busy optimizing some computational geometry code or designing on board electronics for my bicycle.
My four year old does what I need him to do; in most cases without complaint, and certainly more readily than many of his peers.
In my experience, parents who cannot control their children are the ones who think "because I said so" should be convincing to the child. If you want your kid to go to to bed at a certain time, you have to convince them to do it; you can't physically compel them to calm don and go to sleep. You can get their cooperation on an individual issue in a variety of ways, including fear, bribery, etc.
I find that it usually can be achieved by reasoning with them, and that this is superior. A quick chat about the exciting things planned for tomorrow that will require a good rest will get the kid happily asleep faster than the alternatives.
Besides both of you being happier, you'll get better compliance with your wishes if you establish a reputation in your childs mind as someone who makes reasonable requests for good reasons than as someone who will beat the crap out of them, or give them treats, or whatever.
- They certainly negotiate about all sorts of things. They suggest alternatives; they make counter-offers; they intentionally stake out extreme positions to give themselves compromise room. Just because it's about bedtime rather than a lot of money doesn't mean it isn't negotiation.
- They don't do dishes (if you want them clean).
-"He's the kid. The parents say do it and the kid just does it.". Um, yeah. Good luck with that.
"So i wonder what you think OSS does exist for..."
I don't know about him, but I'd say "Things dont exist for their own self-specific purpose.", because that sums it up nicely.
The questioner had some purpose in creating the code in the first place. The gp suggest the most likely options; that he had fun doing it or was paid. He presumably had some purpose in putting that code under a BSD license, which makes possible both others using his code and others paying him for derivative code they doesn't share.
He needs to weigh his original purposes and the degree to which they are compromised by this against the size of the money pile in question. But it's all up to him. The code doesn't want anything have any inherent purpose.
It is of course, a stupid Ask Slashdot, only he can answer the question.
Maybe you could skip the condecension ust tell us WTF is Sophie?
I followed your link. (which goes, aparently, to the new version, not the OpenSophie fork of the old the other poster asked about) It didn't reveal to me what Sophie is. I downloaded the pdf user manual from that page, noted the lack of any introduction, skimmed a couple of sections describing how to use various features... Still no idea what the app does. I followed every link in the Summary, none of which actually go to articles, so your RTFA advice is bollocks. The closest any of these came to telling me what sophie is was the single sentence "Sophie is software for writing and reading rich media documents in a networked environment." Which is more than I had previously, but not really all that much... is it a web browser? No. Some kind of wiki-like system? Doesn't seem like it. I think maybe I don't care what it is. Nor why someone thinks funding some Bulgarians to do something similar has some sort of magical negative effect on the original project.
I tried Picassa once, quite a while ago, so apologies if this is out of date, but my impressions were:
1. It wants to own the whole way I organize and interact with my photos. I hate that.
2. More generally, if there was a familiar way to handle some interface element that fit in with how other apps and OS components did it, Picassa tried to make it more intuitive by doing something totally different. Maybe it's just a pet peeve, but any windows app that doesn't have a pull-down menu named "File" with options named "Open" and "Save"... was written by wankers who think too much of themselves, and not enough of my time.
3. But besides all that, it's not really what I want in any case. I want some simple drawing tools. I want to do what Picassa does as an editor (but not an organizer), but I also want to do what Paint does as an editor; or what it would do if it were really designed for photographs and not icons. I want to be able to pull up a snapshot, correct the slight over-exposure, crop it, and draw a dorky mustache on my brother. In one app, without more learning time than the task is worth.
"I just threw out MSPaint as an example of something really low end"
I thought this made it obvious I wasn't recommending MSPaint. If it helps you understand my argument, substitute KolourPaint (I've heard it's great). But it's irrelevant to my point which is:
Defending GIMP by saying the differences with Photoshop only matter to high-end users is silly, because GIMP (and Photoshop) are unsuitable for low to middle range users.
Re:It really didn't have this?
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GIMP 2.6 Released
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· Score: 2, Insightful
I just threw out MSPaint as an example of something really low end - it does very little, but that very little is easy to do, and handles some fraction of my image manipulation needs. I too want to occasionally do stuff that it can't, primarily the sorts of things you mention.
I know both Photoshop and the GIMP are capable of everything I need, and much more. But I've tried to do the things I need in both, and in both I have pretty much utterly failed - or at the least taken an hour to figure out a 2 minute job. Either may be great for someone who uses them more than once a week, but the learning curve is just too steep for someone who wants to use it for five minutes a month.
For my image manipulation needs beyond paint, I turn to the (really fairly craptastic) program that came free with my low-end digital camera.
GIMPs learning curve means most people will never use it to "tweak levels and do color adjustments, resize pictures well, scale, crop, rotate, reduce red-eye, and so on." . It's only going to get used by people going well beyond cleaning up snapshots, so it's going to get compared to Photoshop on CMYK separation, etc.
"For what 99% of people do with graphics, The GIMP DOES compete with Photoshop."
I entirely agree: for what 99% of people do with graphics, both are horrible. They're completely unusable for people who only want to go beyond MSPaint for 5 minutes every few months.
I'm not one of the 1% of people (actually that seems high) who do things with graphics for which Photoshop is the right tool, so I can't speak from personal experience. The handful of people I know in that group (profesional graphic artists), don't think the GIMP measures up. I can't tell you if they have a point or just like what they know. But arguing the GIMP is just as good for all but the obscure corner cases is silly: if you don't need those obscure corners, you don't need Photoshop anyway.
(3) would only blow up some small piece of the LHC in any case, so let's let the guys at CERN worry about whether it is possible in the first place. (Which they have, and it isn't.)
A for why this is news, it is because someone assumed that a physicist wouldn't use "nova" to describe a low-energy event just so he could go for a lame "bosenova" pun. Clearly this person, in addition to not knowing physics, didn't know any physicists.
Back in the DOS days, I once used a hex editor to find the string "Bad Command or Filename" and replace it with "Reply Hazy, Ask Again". That was fun, but when my coworker got that machine in a reshuffle, she was confused. I explained what I had done, but she couldn't get her brain around the idea that that error was just a string of characters on the disk; that it didn't mean anything different. So she kept asking me about it until she got a new machine along with her promotion to head of tech support. Wow, that job sucked.
"Just remember that the next time someone says that robots are just as capable as humans."
Humans teams who send robots are more capable than human teams who send humans.
For example, one of those types of teams has carried out all exploration of the martian surface to date. The other type of team managed to fix their toilet in LEO, but it cost them a lot more money than all martian exploration to date.
"A human crew could ride that far in a day, given an appropriate Mars buggy."
Well, a robot could go that far in 30 seconds, given an appropriate robot; better acceleration tolerance. Sure, imaginary humans are more capable than real robots. I do in fact advocate sending humans any time you want to imagine exploring Mars; it makes much better fiction. If you want to do it for real though, sending humans is stupid.
"A human would take no more than a few hours to get there, on foot, much less with some vehicle. And would be able to do much more and diverse probings and experiments"
Tell them to get on with it then. They've got massively more funding than robotic exploration, and they are trying to keep their toilet working in LEO.
"So while human exploration of Mars may be expensive, it is probably much cheaper when comparing results."
Direct human exploration of Mars doesn't have any results. Human exploration of mars by sending robots does. Makes it hard to compare the cost when only one side has anything at all to show for it.
"I know the/. crowd has a strong, somewhat irrational animosity towards manned exploration."
Is it rational to compare your fantasy of what a human "would have" done to what robots are actually doing? "Would have" done if what? If sending humans weren't horrendously less efficient a way to get things done?
Humans are quite clever, I entirely agree. Some are so clever that they are exploring Mars right now! I'm less clear why using the best tools available, and actually getting the job done, somehow makes them less clever.
"The design of the cable with electrical conductors on either side reaching all the way up to geostationary orbit is, of course, left as an exercise to the reader."
The weight of the electrical conductors is asked as a refutation of the instructor. It is theorized, that maybe, possibly, carbon nanotubes could be made with a strength-to-weight ratio sufficient to support themselves over the length of the elevator. I know of no suggestion by anyone who has actually done the physics that includes the possibility of any other substance running the length to the elevator.
Transmitting power to the car by laser beam has been suggested. (not that I buy that either, but it's not so obviously bad as running an extension cord up the cable)
"Seriously, emails through Freedom of Information Act? "
Um, yes, quite seriously. Are we supposed to demand transparency in government, but not if they use email?
"What are the laws on government email retention?"
You'll have to look up the details, (particularly for the state of Alaska) yourself, but on the federal level "you must retain everything for a very long time" would be a simple summary.
If all that was found are family photos, she's not trying to get around any laws, and the attackers/publishers are out of line. If she is doing any government business via her private yahoo account, that's probably illegal, or would be if she were in the federal government. It certainly was when Bush administration officials were using RNC accounts.
"if your ideals about the market are that free trade is good, controls are bad, and that manipulating and putting controls on the market will be harmful, what's the point in becoming an economist in the first place?"
If you've already decided what you believe, no point in studying it; Hooray for blind faith!
Slashdot Mirror
As an atheist, I assure you I am not going to say that my religion is a major one.
Thanks for asking.
Yes, well, once upon a time we considered things real even when they weren't on the web! I know it sounds crazy, but it actually is useful when discussing things that significantly pre-date the web. Seriously, WTF are you on about?
"If there is a personal email about how some bill is progressing, and it's largely personal complaints about whoever is balking, is that government business or not?"
The Governor is sending complaints about how a bill is progressing to someone involved enough to possibly care? How could that not be government business?
I don't know the language of the Alaskan governemnts email retention rules. But, for the reasons you mention, such rules tend to require retention based not on a "clearly pertains to" sort of standard, but a "could possibly be construed as related to". She was sending emails to and about subordinates and other people in the government.
The Turing test is really a thought experiment. Its purpose is/was not actually to test artificial intelligences; actually performing (somewhat dumbed-down versions of) the test is a fun game, but not really the point.
The point Turing was making was that if you communicate with two entities via some mechanism that hides their nature, and cannot tell which one is a machine and which is a human, it is unreasonable for you to then claim the human is intelligent and the machine is not.
So when someone says one of these programs aren't intelligent because "All they are doing is...", then Turing says they have a bad definition of intelligence. You shouldn't need to know anything about how the thing on the other end of the line does what it does to decide if what it does is intelligence.
And while you say "it's much too easy"; the test described is a simplified version with an artificially low threshold, and they aren't very close to passing...
The original ELIZA has been doing this for decades, as anyone involved in this story is certainly aware. The story here is that the current crop of such programs does it quite a lot better than others have in the past.
"she is an ordinary citizen as well as a public office holder"
Yes, and if the emails pertain only to her acting as an "ordinary citizen", she doesn't have to keep them. If the emails pertain to official government business, which some of them clearly do, she is required by law to keep them.
The normal procedure would be to use her state-provided email for all official business, and something else for personal stuff. This keeps everything nicely segregated. The fact she has not done this could mean that she is intentionally evading the law, or that she is an idiot; but one should not jump to conclusions and neglect the possibility of both.
I want to treat my OS like an appliance, and I'm a geek; I'm just not an OS geek. If you enjoy messing about with operating systems internals then obviously Linux is a better choice than Windows; I mean, duh. The interesting question to be addressed in this here eternal flame war is to what degree each is more or less suitable for people who want to do other stuff.
Don't tell me I'm not a geek because I want my operating system to just work and not get in my way while I'm busy optimizing some computational geometry code or designing on board electronics for my bicycle.
My four year old does what I need him to do; in most cases without complaint, and certainly more readily than many of his peers.
In my experience, parents who cannot control their children are the ones who think "because I said so" should be convincing to the child. If you want your kid to go to to bed at a certain time, you have to convince them to do it; you can't physically compel them to calm don and go to sleep. You can get their cooperation on an individual issue in a variety of ways, including fear, bribery, etc.
I find that it usually can be achieved by reasoning with them, and that this is superior. A quick chat about the exciting things planned for tomorrow that will require a good rest will get the kid happily asleep faster than the alternatives.
Besides both of you being happier, you'll get better compliance with your wishes if you establish a reputation in your childs mind as someone who makes reasonable requests for good reasons than as someone who will beat the crap out of them, or give them treats, or whatever.
I'm guessing you do not have a four year old.
- They certainly negotiate about all sorts of things. They suggest alternatives; they make counter-offers; they intentionally stake out extreme positions to give themselves compromise room. Just because it's about bedtime rather than a lot of money doesn't mean it isn't negotiation.
- They don't do dishes (if you want them clean).
-"He's the kid. The parents say do it and the kid just does it.".
Um, yeah. Good luck with that.
"So i wonder what you think OSS does exist for..."
I don't know about him, but I'd say "Things dont exist for their own self-specific purpose.", because that sums it up nicely.
The questioner had some purpose in creating the code in the first place. The gp suggest the most likely options; that he had fun doing it or was paid. He presumably had some purpose in putting that code under a BSD license, which makes possible both others using his code and others paying him for derivative code they doesn't share.
He needs to weigh his original purposes and the degree to which they are compromised by this against the size of the money pile in question. But it's all up to him. The code doesn't want anything have any inherent purpose.
It is of course, a stupid Ask Slashdot, only he can answer the question.
Maybe you could skip the condecension ust tell us WTF is Sophie?
I followed your link. (which goes, aparently, to the new version, not the OpenSophie fork of the old the other poster asked about) It didn't reveal to me what Sophie is. I downloaded the pdf user manual from that page, noted the lack of any introduction, skimmed a couple of sections describing how to use various features... Still no idea what the app does. I followed every link in the Summary, none of which actually go to articles, so your RTFA advice is bollocks. The closest any of these came to telling me what sophie is was the single sentence "Sophie is software for writing and reading rich media documents in a networked environment." Which is more than I had previously, but not really all that much... is it a web browser? No. Some kind of wiki-like system? Doesn't seem like it. I think maybe I don't care what it is. Nor why someone thinks funding some Bulgarians to do something similar has some sort of magical negative effect on the original project.
I tried Picassa once, quite a while ago, so apologies if this is out of date, but my impressions were:
1. It wants to own the whole way I organize and interact with my photos. I hate that.
2. More generally, if there was a familiar way to handle some interface element that fit in with how other apps and OS components did it, Picassa tried to make it more intuitive by doing something totally different. Maybe it's just a pet peeve, but any windows app that doesn't have a pull-down menu named "File" with options named "Open" and "Save"... was written by wankers who think too much of themselves, and not enough of my time.
3. But besides all that, it's not really what I want in any case. I want some simple drawing tools. I want to do what Picassa does as an editor (but not an organizer), but I also want to do what Paint does as an editor; or what it would do if it were really designed for photographs and not icons. I want to be able to pull up a snapshot, correct the slight over-exposure, crop it, and draw a dorky mustache on my brother. In one app, without more learning time than the task is worth.
"I just threw out MSPaint as an example of something really low end"
I thought this made it obvious I wasn't recommending MSPaint. If it helps you understand my argument, substitute KolourPaint (I've heard it's great). But it's irrelevant to my point which is:
Defending GIMP by saying the differences with Photoshop only matter to high-end users is silly, because GIMP (and Photoshop) are unsuitable for low to middle range users.
I just threw out MSPaint as an example of something really low end - it does very little, but that very little is easy to do, and handles some fraction of my image manipulation needs. I too want to occasionally do stuff that it can't, primarily the sorts of things you mention.
I know both Photoshop and the GIMP are capable of everything I need, and much more. But I've tried to do the things I need in both, and in both I have pretty much utterly failed - or at the least taken an hour to figure out a 2 minute job. Either may be great for someone who uses them more than once a week, but the learning curve is just too steep for someone who wants to use it for five minutes a month.
For my image manipulation needs beyond paint, I turn to the (really fairly craptastic) program that came free with my low-end digital camera.
GIMPs learning curve means most people will never use it to "tweak levels and do color adjustments, resize pictures well, scale, crop, rotate, reduce red-eye, and so on." . It's only going to get used by people going well beyond cleaning up snapshots, so it's going to get compared to Photoshop on CMYK separation, etc.
"For what 99% of people do with graphics, The GIMP DOES compete with Photoshop."
I entirely agree: for what 99% of people do with graphics, both are horrible. They're completely unusable for people who only want to go beyond MSPaint for 5 minutes every few months.
I'm not one of the 1% of people (actually that seems high) who do things with graphics for which Photoshop is the right tool, so I can't speak from personal experience. The handful of people I know in that group (profesional graphic artists), don't think the GIMP measures up. I can't tell you if they have a point or just like what they know. But arguing the GIMP is just as good for all but the obscure corner cases is silly: if you don't need those obscure corners, you don't need Photoshop anyway.
Also:
(3) would only blow up some small piece of the LHC in any case, so let's let the guys at CERN worry about whether it is possible in the first place. (Which they have, and it isn't.)
A for why this is news, it is because someone assumed that a physicist wouldn't use "nova" to describe a low-energy event just so he could go for a lame "bosenova" pun. Clearly this person, in addition to not knowing physics, didn't know any physicists.
3 of the things on that list are Math questions: the ones that start with "Settle the ____ [conjecture/hypothesis]"
The rest are at best areas of study, and only a few of those are areas of study in Mathematics.
I didn't want to give up on the possibility of helping her to understand the nature of software. I was young.
Back in the DOS days, I once used a hex editor to find the string "Bad Command or Filename" and replace it with "Reply Hazy, Ask Again". That was fun, but when my coworker got that machine in a reshuffle, she was confused. I explained what I had done, but she couldn't get her brain around the idea that that error was just a string of characters on the disk; that it didn't mean anything different. So she kept asking me about it until she got a new machine along with her promotion to head of tech support. Wow, that job sucked.
"Just remember that the next time someone says that robots are just as capable as humans."
Humans teams who send robots are more capable than human teams who send humans.
For example, one of those types of teams has carried out all exploration of the martian surface to date. The other type of team managed to fix their toilet in LEO, but it cost them a lot more money than all martian exploration to date.
"A human crew could ride that far in a day, given an appropriate Mars buggy."
Well, a robot could go that far in 30 seconds, given an appropriate robot; better acceleration tolerance. Sure, imaginary humans are more capable than real robots. I do in fact advocate sending humans any time you want to imagine exploring Mars; it makes much better fiction. If you want to do it for real though, sending humans is stupid.
"A human would take no more than a few hours to get there, on foot, much less with some vehicle. And would be able to do much more and diverse probings and experiments"
/. crowd has a strong, somewhat irrational animosity towards manned exploration."
Tell them to get on with it then. They've got massively more funding than robotic exploration, and they are trying to keep their toilet working in LEO.
"So while human exploration of Mars may be expensive, it is probably much cheaper when comparing results."
Direct human exploration of Mars doesn't have any results. Human exploration of mars by sending robots does. Makes it hard to compare the cost when only one side has anything at all to show for it.
"I know the
Is it rational to compare your fantasy of what a human "would have" done to what robots are actually doing? "Would have" done if what? If sending humans weren't horrendously less efficient a way to get things done?
Humans are quite clever, I entirely agree. Some are so clever that they are exploring Mars right now! I'm less clear why using the best tools available, and actually getting the job done, somehow makes them less clever.
"The design of the cable with electrical conductors on either side reaching all the way up to geostationary orbit is, of course, left as an exercise to the reader."
The weight of the electrical conductors is asked as a refutation of the instructor. It is theorized, that maybe, possibly, carbon nanotubes could be made with a strength-to-weight ratio sufficient to support themselves over the length of the elevator. I know of no suggestion by anyone who has actually done the physics that includes the possibility of any other substance running the length to the elevator.
Transmitting power to the car by laser beam has been suggested. (not that I buy that either, but it's not so obviously bad as running an extension cord up the cable)
"Seriously, emails through Freedom of Information Act? "
Um, yes, quite seriously. Are we supposed to demand transparency in government, but not if they use email?
"What are the laws on government email retention?"
You'll have to look up the details, (particularly for the state of Alaska) yourself, but on the federal level "you must retain everything for a very long time" would be a simple summary.
If all that was found are family photos, she's not trying to get around any laws, and the attackers/publishers are out of line. If she is doing any government business via her private yahoo account, that's probably illegal, or would be if she were in the federal government. It certainly was when Bush administration officials were using RNC accounts.
"if your ideals about the market are that free trade is good, controls are bad, and that manipulating and putting controls on the market will be harmful, what's the point in becoming an economist in the first place?"
If you've already decided what you believe, no point in studying it; Hooray for blind faith!