Oh, you're just jealous because some people can survive on $400 a year, yogurt, and a loincloth. You're spoiled rotten. When I was a kid, we only had punched cards and we LIKED it.
I skipped lunch for 13 years, saving my lunch money to buy a 5-1/2 diskette drive for my C64. And when I bought it, I was so cool, I got laid almost every night. Hurrah for the C64.
I'm knowledgeable about emotion simulation and understanding in cognitive systems. The LaMuth patent is ringing weirdness alarm bells for me. He describes his technology as dealing with a "multi-part schematic complement of power pyramid definitions". He's claiming understanding of emotions and ethical behavior using a model involving 'power transactions' and a pattern-matching mechanism. The problem with that is it is not powerful enough or cognitively flexible enough to handle understanding the broad range of emotions and values involved in general situations. To do that one has to build detailed models within the cognitive engine (ie, a mind). But parsing natural language statements and building a full contextual model in a computer is a lot more complicated than the mechanism he patented seems to be able to handle. If I were trying to pull a 'Lemelson' patent with overly broad claims, I might do it like this one.
In order to do true speech recognition and understanding, it is necessary to build situation models, basically models of entities, their relationships, their history, and so on to great depth. I do not see any evidence of any such deep understanding built into LaMuth's system. Rather, I see broad claims for 'nested expert systems' and pattern matching. Again, it seems like his mechanism is weak and/or his claims are overly broad.
Also, he seems to be making very broad claims over his diagnostic classifications of emotions and values. The problem for me with what he states is that it appears be an invalid and incorrect model of emotions. He appears to be mixing up character values and emotions, and they are not at all the same or handled the same in a cognitive system.
I find it hard to believe he's actually built a working system and written working code. He may well have created a 'lab' system that works in a microworld on paper, but as AI researchers know, that can break very quickly when you try to scale it up. This whole thing sounds like a fantasy design but not something he's implemented.
Finally, when I read through his claims (the Specs section), I find a lot of areas where his definitions break down and appear to be incorrect. One specific example, his description of the 'treachery' power relationship appears to be invalid. Others are just as bad.
Speaking of neon, I've solved my lost TV remote control problem by putting a fluorescent neon tape tape strip on the edge of the remote. Now it's very visible from anywhere in the room.
Store clerk to manager: "You know, I've been seeing photoflashes every 5 seconds for an hour."
Manager: "Yes, it's that 13 year old with the cellphone and that copy of Playboy."
Well, I live in Silicon Valley and am totally unamazed. They certainly can't get their act together. After 9/11 and the anthrax letters, most magazines I subscribe to began arriving two weeks late if at all, and now 1/3 never arrive, especially the scientific journals. In trying to resolve this I get caught between local PO and the SF PO, with both sides denying responsibility and no one resolving delivery problems. On the other hand, ALL junk mail arrives promptly and undamaged. I look forward to the day when the PO goes away, replaced entirely by electronic means.
1) Lemelson is well known for his submarine patent tricks. I am pretty sure there is an example long ago in literature that counters his claim to invention. Popular Mechanics in the 50s I think had something like this. 2) The use of focused and directed energy to initiate reactions PREDATES lasers well before Lemelson filed back in the 50s. In the past, some researchers used clamshell-shaped mirror enclosures which focused arc light onto small specific areas such as a tube running through the chamber to supply high local energy. When I worked for a company in Minnesota in the early 70s they had a whole division that made focusing enclosures for halogen lamps, for industrial use. I do not know if they were patented, but they predated wide use of lasers for tight energy sources
I would assume most spammers would lie and claim that you requested to be spammed, then force you to prove you never signed up. They could easily fake evidence that you visited a website somewhere and entered your address. You would then be forced to do the impossible, namely, prove that you didn't make the request. They could argue that you are lying in order to collect money from them. Possibly even countersue YOU, for fraud.
In latebreaking news, Microsoft accidently discovered that Passport was just a bad dream. Its entire PR team drank bad Kool-Aid. But nobody will get fired, honest.
Microsoft stole the iLoo idea from a British guy named Andrew Cubitt. When he threatened to sue, Microsoft spun the whole thing as a joke. See proof here:
Looking at the photograph, it seems anyone could just drive over the grass and bushes to get past the van. Oh wait - terrorists respect our driving laws. Never mind, all safe.
On the contrary, a resp mask is important. 25% of a tour group got it on ONE flight from what looks like one source:
One example, in March 26th NY Times article:
"The danger of a further spread of the disease was underlined yesterday when the Hong Kong Health Department disclosed that 9 of the 35 members of a tour group that traveled to Beijing and back last week had become infected, apparently during the flight from Hong Kong to Beijing. At least two members of the group sat on the flight next to a 73-year-old man who had been visiting his infected brother at a Hong Kong hospital and contracted the disease, a department spokesman said."
As for foreign worker hygiene, I base my opinion on being a contractor who has worked at over 50 companies in Silicon Valley in the last decade. That's a lot of data gathering and I wish I were only being a pompous idiot in making the hygiene statement, but sadly, it is valid.
I've seen an entire engineering department come down with flu from one guy coughing and sneezing with uncovered mouth in a cubicle. It is no safer to be stuck on a plane recirculating air with a disease vector around.
The fatality rate is actually a bit higher, and that's with many of the sick being treated in hospitals. If it gets out into the general population the numbers will be higher, obviously.
Even so, 3% of 200,000,000 is 6 million potential dead. That's of the scale of horror of a smallpox epi. And when 5,000 died in NYC in tbe bombing, that was enough to concern the whole country. You saying that 3% is insignificant? I'm glad there are other people who are less smug about not having to do anything.
Here's a quote from AP wire story:
There is no government-approved treatment for the common cold or SARS, but CDC head Dr. Julie Gerberding said the Defense Department is testing the virus against all known antiviral drugs. There has been progress with antivirals against other respiratory viruses and some of those drugs have been effective in studies against some coronaviruses, she said.
However, WHO virologist Dr. Klaus Stohr, who is working with the agency's network of
11 global labs, said researchers in some labs continue to find signs of another germ
family, the paramyxovirus.
``We are a bit puzzled because we are not only dealing apparently with one pathogen
but with two. The reason why we believe that both pathogens should be given equal
attention is that there is consistent finding of both pathogens in individual patients or
of either of the pathogens in other patients,'' he said.
``What we are seeing actually are three hypotheses.''
SARS might be caused by one of those two viruses or ``these two pathogens have to
come together to cause this very severe outbreak.''
The latter theory is that the coronavirus -- which Stohr said lives in immune cells that
fight off disease -- destroys or weakens the immunity in the patient so the second
virus ``has practically an open door to go in and to sicken the patient beyond what this
virus would be able to do normally.
Well, I am sorry you live in Hongkong and are at risk. I only get my Singapore news from your own local newspaper, so I must be way off base with sensationalist overseas reports, huh?
The Straits Times itself is reporting how many parents are clamoring to close the schools for a while to lessen the spread. All those parents must be completely ignorant of local concerns, yes?
As for the epidemiology, you should examine what you say carefully. SARS is highly contagious in close proximity, as is smallpox. Look at what WHO reports.
SARS is likely to be as bad as a smallpox epidemic. The Chinese are stonewalling, that's bad, and the Hongkong authorities are trying to play it down so it won't hurt tourism. These idiocies will get us all in trouble. I predict that this virus will hit Silicon Valley hard; I've seen a lot of techies, especially foreign 'guests', just not practicing simple hygiene like washing hands coming out of the restrooms, sneezing widely into the air, etc. Also, the disease hit China, and so much manufacturing is now there, so there are plenty of chances for it to be contracted and brought back to the US. I think we have a real problem coming. Don't fly unless you wear a respiratory mask, either. I suspect SARS is a two-component disease; first you are hit with the new mutant virus, which sets up your immune system to fail to handle certain things, then the second virus characterizing this disease attacks you unhampered. We do not have any effective way to combat that.
The fly is just part of an evil plot to spam us in new and exciting ways. From the fly, in my email now: "Earn extra money from home with little effort. Sell drugs."
I can confirm this. There was some infamous demo at a conference where someone showed that the resonant frequency of the average anal sphincter muscle was around 37 Hertz. At a high enough acoustic output level, you could cause involuntary resonance of that muscle. So, when I worked for Leslie Speakers in the late 60's, we had a lab room with excellent bass speakers that could put out serious acoustic energy in the 20 to 50 Hertz range. I set up an HP audio oscillator driving something like a 250 watt RMS power amp driving a massive bass speaker in an enclosure, then parked my butt in front of the speaker and with the amp turned up, swept through frequencies. I could feel various internal organs, though very acoustically damped by their internal surroundings, kind of resonantly responding in certain ranges. My guts felt really strange at some frequencies and I could feel unpleasant sensations in my kidneys, and definitely the small intestine. But getting to the point, I found you can get the sphincter to resonate as claimed.
I did not carry things too far, as I was afraid of damaging myself internally. By the way, you will NOT get this kind of acoustic wattage out of a home stereo and home speakers. Oh, and you'll never see McGuyver doing this..
Slashdot Mirror
As soon as I heard that, I reached for my can of UBIK. Now the fresh-roast quantum mechanical aroma of the newly undead now fills my room. Phil lives!
I skipped lunch for 13 years, saving my lunch money to buy a 5-1/2 diskette drive for my C64. And when I bought it, I was so cool, I got laid almost every night. Hurrah for the C64.
In order to do true speech recognition and understanding, it is necessary to build situation models, basically models of entities, their relationships, their history, and so on to great depth. I do not see any evidence of any such deep understanding built into LaMuth's system. Rather, I see broad claims for 'nested expert systems' and pattern matching. Again, it seems like his mechanism is weak and/or his claims are overly broad.
Also, he seems to be making very broad claims over his diagnostic classifications of emotions and values. The problem for me with what he states is that it appears be an invalid and incorrect model of emotions. He appears to be mixing up character values and emotions, and they are not at all the same or handled the same in a cognitive system.
I find it hard to believe he's actually built a working system and written working code. He may well have created a 'lab' system that works in a microworld on paper, but as AI researchers know, that can break very quickly when you try to scale it up. This whole thing sounds like a fantasy design but not something he's implemented.
Finally, when I read through his claims (the Specs section), I find a lot of areas where his definitions break down and appear to be incorrect. One specific example, his description of the 'treachery' power relationship appears to be invalid. Others are just as bad.
I believe that in Area 51 they have alien pogo crows. These are an offshoot of alien MST3K technology.
Speaking of neon, I've solved my lost TV remote control problem by putting a fluorescent neon tape tape strip on the edge of the remote. Now it's very visible from anywhere in the room.
But someone is already selling small flattened rolls of duct tape. I bought one at Big Lots (a retail chainstore) 4 or 5 months ago.
Store clerk to manager: "You know, I've been seeing photoflashes every 5 seconds for an hour." Manager: "Yes, it's that 13 year old with the cellphone and that copy of Playboy."
Well, I live in Silicon Valley and am totally unamazed. They certainly can't get their act together. After 9/11 and the anthrax letters, most magazines I subscribe to began arriving two weeks late if at all, and now 1/3 never arrive, especially the scientific journals. In trying to resolve this I get caught between local PO and the SF PO, with both sides denying responsibility and no one resolving delivery problems. On the other hand, ALL junk mail arrives promptly and undamaged. I look forward to the day when the PO goes away, replaced entirely by electronic means.
Partially-defatted beef tissue is an integral part of our national defense efforts.
1) Lemelson is well known for his submarine patent tricks. I am pretty sure there is an example long ago in literature that counters his claim to invention. Popular Mechanics in the 50s I think had something like this.
2) The use of focused and directed energy to initiate reactions PREDATES lasers well before Lemelson filed back in the 50s. In the past, some researchers used clamshell-shaped mirror enclosures which focused arc light onto small specific areas such as a tube running through the chamber to supply high local energy. When I worked for a company in Minnesota in the early 70s they had a whole division that made focusing enclosures for halogen lamps, for industrial use. I do not know if they were patented, but they predated wide use of lasers for tight energy sources
Age of the skulls was confirmed when a punchcard deck with a COBOL program was found nearby.
I would assume most spammers would lie and claim that you requested to be spammed, then force you to prove you never signed up. They could easily fake evidence that you visited a website somewhere and entered your address. You would then be forced to do the impossible, namely, prove that you didn't make the request. They could argue that you are lying in order to collect money from them. Possibly even countersue YOU, for fraud.
In latebreaking news, Microsoft accidently discovered that Passport was just a bad dream. Its entire PR team drank bad Kool-Aid. But nobody will get fired, honest.
Microsoft stole the iLoo idea from a British guy named Andrew Cubitt. When he threatened to sue, Microsoft spun the whole thing as a joke. See proof here:
http://www.theinquirer.net/?article=9442
and
http://www.theinquirer.net/?article=9461
MS lies, as usual.
Just wait. Five years. Sony AIBO Sexbot. You laugh now, monkeyboy? We'll see.
Looking at the photograph, it seems anyone could just drive over the grass and bushes to get past the van. Oh wait - terrorists respect our driving laws. Never mind, all safe.
On the contrary, a resp mask is important. 25% of a tour group got it on ONE flight from what looks like one source: One example, in March 26th NY Times article: "The danger of a further spread of the disease was underlined yesterday when the Hong Kong Health Department disclosed that 9 of the 35 members of a tour group that traveled to Beijing and back last week had become infected, apparently during the flight from Hong Kong to Beijing. At least two members of the group sat on the flight next to a 73-year-old man who had been visiting his infected brother at a Hong Kong hospital and contracted the disease, a department spokesman said." As for foreign worker hygiene, I base my opinion on being a contractor who has worked at over 50 companies in Silicon Valley in the last decade. That's a lot of data gathering and I wish I were only being a pompous idiot in making the hygiene statement, but sadly, it is valid. I've seen an entire engineering department come down with flu from one guy coughing and sneezing with uncovered mouth in a cubicle. It is no safer to be stuck on a plane recirculating air with a disease vector around.
The fatality rate is actually a bit higher, and that's with many of the sick being treated in hospitals. If it gets out into the general population the numbers will be higher, obviously. Even so, 3% of 200,000,000 is 6 million potential dead. That's of the scale of horror of a smallpox epi. And when 5,000 died in NYC in tbe bombing, that was enough to concern the whole country. You saying that 3% is insignificant? I'm glad there are other people who are less smug about not having to do anything.
Here's a quote from AP wire story: There is no government-approved treatment for the common cold or SARS, but CDC head Dr. Julie Gerberding said the Defense Department is testing the virus against all known antiviral drugs. There has been progress with antivirals against other respiratory viruses and some of those drugs have been effective in studies against some coronaviruses, she said. However, WHO virologist Dr. Klaus Stohr, who is working with the agency's network of 11 global labs, said researchers in some labs continue to find signs of another germ family, the paramyxovirus. ``We are a bit puzzled because we are not only dealing apparently with one pathogen but with two. The reason why we believe that both pathogens should be given equal attention is that there is consistent finding of both pathogens in individual patients or of either of the pathogens in other patients,'' he said. ``What we are seeing actually are three hypotheses.'' SARS might be caused by one of those two viruses or ``these two pathogens have to come together to cause this very severe outbreak.'' The latter theory is that the coronavirus -- which Stohr said lives in immune cells that fight off disease -- destroys or weakens the immunity in the patient so the second virus ``has practically an open door to go in and to sicken the patient beyond what this virus would be able to do normally.
Well, I am sorry you live in Hongkong and are at risk. I only get my Singapore news from your own local newspaper, so I must be way off base with sensationalist overseas reports, huh?
0 .h tml
The Straits Times itself is reporting how many parents are clamoring to close the schools for a while to lessen the spread. All those parents must be completely ignorant of local concerns, yes?
http://straitstimes.asia1.com.sg/home/0,1869,,0
As for the epidemiology, you should examine what you say carefully. SARS is highly contagious in close proximity, as is smallpox. Look at what WHO reports.
SARS is likely to be as bad as a smallpox epidemic. The Chinese are stonewalling, that's bad, and the Hongkong authorities are trying to play it down so it won't hurt tourism. These idiocies will get us all in trouble. I predict that this virus will hit Silicon Valley hard; I've seen a lot of techies, especially foreign 'guests', just not practicing simple hygiene like washing hands coming out of the restrooms, sneezing widely into the air, etc. Also, the disease hit China, and so much manufacturing is now there, so there are plenty of chances for it to be contracted and brought back to the US. I think we have a real problem coming. Don't fly unless you wear a respiratory mask, either. I suspect SARS is a two-component disease; first you are hit with the new mutant virus, which sets up your immune system to fail to handle certain things, then the second virus characterizing this disease attacks you unhampered. We do not have any effective way to combat that.
The fly is just part of an evil plot to spam us in new and exciting ways. From the fly, in my email now: "Earn extra money from home with little effort. Sell drugs."
I can confirm this. There was some infamous demo at a conference where someone showed that the resonant frequency of the average anal sphincter muscle was around 37 Hertz. At a high enough acoustic output level, you could cause involuntary resonance of that muscle. So, when I worked for Leslie Speakers in the late 60's, we had a lab room with excellent bass speakers that could put out serious acoustic energy in the 20 to 50 Hertz range. I set up an HP audio oscillator driving something like a 250 watt RMS power amp driving a massive bass speaker in an enclosure, then parked my butt in front of the speaker and with the amp turned up, swept through frequencies. I could feel various internal organs, though very acoustically damped by their internal surroundings, kind of resonantly responding in certain ranges. My guts felt really strange at some frequencies and I could feel unpleasant sensations in my kidneys, and definitely the small intestine. But getting to the point, I found you can get the sphincter to resonate as claimed. I did not carry things too far, as I was afraid of damaging myself internally. By the way, you will NOT get this kind of acoustic wattage out of a home stereo and home speakers. Oh, and you'll never see McGuyver doing this..
I have the perfect defense against credit fraud on me. I have bad credit.
It's an Illudium 235 Space Modulator, you stupid Earthmen!