Damnit, this site can remember who I am, it can remember my comment reading settings, why the hell can't it remember whether I normally post in HTML or text?
"If something's not compiling that you think should, you end up wading through the mile-long error messages. If it does compile but doesn't work right, you're going to find yourself in the debugger trying to step through some of that crazy obscure STL C++ code to try to figure out what the heck is going wrong. Neither is much fun."
To solve this I save off compiler error messages and pass them through a filter (in perl) that knocks out all the stuff between pairs to certain levels. And definitely replaces "basic_string" with "string".
Other compilers (not GCC) are worse - they don't provide enough detail. C++ Builder has a habit of just reply "No. Wont." and not explaining why.
I think the difference is that doctors get respected. They might still have budget restrictions, but they don't have someone stood over them dictating how and where they make incisions. We do. We have non-technical managers saying things like "don't use Perl. Perl hasn't be tested by our compliance people because we can't find anyone to support it".
Doctors are encouraged to learn from each other, it's considered part of their career: companies do their utmost to firewall developers off from as much of the net as possible. Can't have them learning stuff from web sites.
Doctors are considered professionals. When they say things like "That procedure is not safe" people stop and listen to them. When we say "That won't work", we get to told to do it anyway, and then blamed when it doesn't work.
Doctors get to do the diagnosis, they can talk to the patient.. They can do exploratory surgery to help. They have tools - CAT scanners, NMR scanners. We have inept low-level managers who go off to client sites, have coffee, sandwiches, lunches... oh ask a couple of questions, write a vague diagnosis of the problem and hand it to us and say "fix that". We can't look at applications which work, we can't talk to the customers, we DEFINITELY can't write test code to explore solutions.
Funnily enough, doctors don't lose 1/3 of their patients on the table. We do.
Recently I've had my knee put back together by a surgeon so I can walk again. That's got to be a good feeling - to go home at the end of the day having fixed people; made them walk again. My other half pointed out that they have bad days when someone dies on them. But that's not every day.
Every day I turn up to work and watch a project die a bit more in front of me. I'm forbidden from writing decent software; everything is a hack job. The cheapest, fastest possible thing that most people can't prove doesn't work. That's the esteem in which our profession is held.
When you find a good manager, you nail him/her to the floor. Because they're about as common as rocking-horse poo.
Most managers have degrees in subjects like Art History and their IT talents extend to using Word and Notes.
Seriously - I've worked on projects where the project plan is pages and pages long and includes in the middle "Step N. Write the code", because the people running the thing know NOTHING about what happens in that stage, don't want to know and in fact, don't care. They're far, far too busy sorting out what model of BMW or Audi will be their next company car to actually pay attention to what's going on.
I honestly believe this is the problem with IT these days: the specs aren't crap because we don't know how to write them, they're crap because the people who go gather them have their minds on company cars, catered lunches, policy statements and an email-merry-go-round rather than what they're doing.
It isn't worth keeping a list of shite managers in the world, but a list of the good ones isn't going to take much paper.
OK, I've read the article. It still doesn't make any sense. When I was at university we practically relied on group efforts to learn the stuff. How can you not have people discuss project work?
I can understand not having people who merely turn in duplicate disks of someone else's work, but sharing ideas and gaining from that sharing is what a university is supposed to be about. We used to share lumps of code all the time: not the important parts of the projects, but report generators and stuff like that, nifty functions for working round a bug in this compiler or that interpreter...
I don't get how having them all able to do the actual thing is not the goal of them learning.
You watch: in a few years time, the places won't have research students that know how to work properly - they'll not be able to come up with anything they've not been taught, because they'll never have got into the habit of having conversations where the end results are more than the sum of the inputs.
Group learning is a VITAL part of educating people. In industry you don't turn up, get told how to create the solution to this problem and then left to implement it: you have to solve the problem. And you don't have someone who already knows those solutions to tell you them. There is no expert in solving that problem: or you're it. Without the experience in group problem solving and co-operation, those students are going to be useless as productive employees.
Re:He's either a fruit that's a little nutty...
on
Time Travel
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· Score: 1
On the other hand, he does seem rather more qualified than the average/.er
He received a Franklin Institute award for his work on cosmology the same year Minsky got one for his work on cognition.
I don't think he's your average tin-foil-hat wearer.
Re:Just because you _can_ doesn't mean you _wanna_
on
Managing Einsteins
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· Score: 1
"a risk analysis that does include technical issues"
Doesn't.
[Why can't we edit our own comments again?]
Re:Just because you _can_ doesn't mean you _wanna_
on
Managing Einsteins
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· Score: 1
"dont think you'll find many construction workers that like to build useless buildings "
"Actually, builders seem to have absolutely no problem with that. They get a contract, they do the work, they get paid, they move on, without obsessing over whether the project is interesting or challenging or sexy like programmers do."
I don't have a problem with building what I'm told. What I have an issue with is the schizophrenia companies have about whether I'm the infantry or the general. If I'm the infantry, then fine, point which way you want me to march and I'll march.
The trouble is that people do that and then when it turns out to be the wrong way, it's my fault somehow.
If I point out we're marching the wrong way, everyone gets an attitude. They're/MANAGEMENT/ - don't I understand? They wouldn't be management if they weren't better than me, so I'll march where I'm told. And then it's still my fault when it fails... And on the rare occaision I get asked, they ignore my opinion. And then it's my fault when it fails..
Personally, I'd like management that either understood what's going on, or understood that they don't understand and would respect the opinion of someone who would.
My current project manager understands/NOTHING/ about what happens in the magical months between "start developing!" and "is the software done yet?"
The result; A project "plan" which lists people to be invited to meetings, who's working on the project, what their "stake" in the project is, a risk analysis that does include technical issues and a work plan which says "not done yet". According to the project tracking system, this is a completed document, and now the "managing" is done, she's gone off to find other projects to get involved with.. because she has no idea what the development actually entails, but won't admit that. It's like the goal of the project is to write documents, and if we happen to produce working software along the way that's a happy accident.
It's actually an environment at this place - the management are management because... they need to be managers to get company cars and they've been here too long to not have a company car. There's an endemic misunderstanding that you don't need to know anything at all about IT to be able to manage IT projects and make decisions. These are people that get to make decisions on which languages get used in development, when they have never written a program in anything, for example.
So there's something to ask for in management: Either a technically knowledgable, decision making person, or a technically illiterate decision respecting person. Not, as seems the norm in large companies, technically illiterate decision makers.
I have to say, although I can just about hear humming sounds from here (I think it's the colour printer behind me), FAR more noise comes from the phones.
The unattended mobiles are annoying, the monotonous, almost continuous ringing of external calls arriving to whole ring groups is annoying, but far, far and away is the noise made by a phone on ringback. It's this shrill ring-ring-ring-ring-ring sound that makes it really clear that whatever needed ringing back is MUCH more important than the work of the nearest dozen people.
I kind of wish it was quiet enough to hear the machines humming... then I could think straight.
Unfortunately, high technical employee turn-over doesn't worry most companies - after all, all software engineers are exactly the same, they're all just interchangeable bodies-at-desks anyway...
It bothers the software engineers there. It bothers the managers who have to cope with teams that are constantly shifting under them. It doesn't bother the people who instigate the dumbness and it doesn't bother the IT director in his/her ivory tower.
The latter of those three things is usually the thing that stops me: they want payment in dollars, in return for access to a 1-800 number I can't call. Or they take Visa, as long as I can call their 1-800 number...
This was the point I stopped using shareware at all, because I felt guilty about using the stuff without paying, and paying for it is too hard work, and by the time one has paid for a cheque in dollars from a UK bank, it starts looking like commercial price software with less than commercial production.
Being basically honest at heart, I just stopped using the odd few bits I ever did properly try out.
Possible solution: group in each country set up to collect the money in local currency, convert it to other things en mass (which will make the conversions cheaper) and forward it on to whoever, after taking a small percentage cut to pay for all that to happen. It would take some organising, but would it work?
Warwick uni used to have a sort of policy of splitting machine names by department. Computer Science had mineral, Computing Services had vegetable and Maths had the animals.
So CS had "quartz", "flint", "granite" and a main server named "stone". CServices had things like "poppy" and "lily", and Maths had "rabbit" and "fox" and things.
Scheme kind of fell apart and we ended up with all sorts of bizarre things: a lab referred to occaisionally as the morgue, where machines were called "foot", "finger", "liver". A room called the meat locker where they were called "spam", "ham", "mutton", "beef"...
Body parts is a good one, there's a lot of them, especially once you start including internal organs, although it's a bit gross and people fight to get "spleen" as their workstation. Herbs as well; although spelling them is quite hard sometimes.
Finding 4000 consistent names is going to be hard though. You might be better just having "www00189" type ones, boring though it is.
The creator of Eliza once wrote that he nearly quit the IT world after someone suggested installing terminals connected to it all over the city so people could get therapy as and when needed...
"Laser body scanning unites in clothes shops" - actually this is happening in various places in the UK - the cuts of clothing are apparently being revised because the "standard" sizes/shapes don't fit anyone these days...
I bet I still end up needing different size tops & trousers tho...
Re:The American system is socialized, just less.
on
Movie Review: John Q
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· Score: 1
Personally, I think that the problem with the socialised medical system is not so much discouraging people to use it, but that there's no incentive to/actually/ reduce costs. The NHS has become very cost focussed. To the point where there are now more management staff doing the cost-watching than there are medical staff doing the work... and it's ended up spending more.
Most large organisations are in fact like this. They'll spend any amount of money to save a small amount of money. Most large companies employe hordes of people who's job it is to chase people up over 5p inaccuracies in their expense claims.
The NHS is the same only more so, because at the end of the day if it doesn't make money.. erm... the government just gives it more.
Personally I like the idea of privatising out the health system. Make it free-at-the-point-of-delivery, but let hospitals actually work like businesses and sell their services to the health authority. The counter argument here is that the NHS has bulk-buying power to force down prices, but no-one ever seems to account for the fact that the "bulk buying ability" seems to need a massive beaurocracy to run it.
My private health plan actually costs LESS than my national insurance contributions, but I get to see specialists two days later instead of two years later.
The parts could be made accurately enough at the time - there are issues with the accuracy, in that all the components needed hand tweaking to get them to work properly together (And would even with today's manufacturing tolerances - because the errors cascade) which means the machine's parts aren't interchangeable (which was one of Babbage's goals) and that the thing needs debugging - you need to run some stuff though it knowing the right answer and tweak it until the answer it gives matches.
The reasons Babbage never developed a prototype are different from different sources. He spent a LOT of the money he was given for the analytical engine designing the (more general purpose) difference engine.
Eventually the government got fed up of giving him money - he'd burned through a/frightening/ amount. ISTR it was of the order of 15,000 pounds, at a time when building a steam locomotive and delivering it to the US was all of 700. [Mentioned in the science museum display].
In addition he fell out with his leading craftsman who he accused of padding the contract, and spent quite a lot building workshops and so on at his house in order to develop things on-site.
The analytical engine was definitely acheivable at the time. The difference engine more doubtably so. But while the technology was willing, the project management was missing. Something the IT industry still hasn't learned...
OK, I'm in two minds about this - firstly I did have actual real reasons to worry about misuse of video-taped stuff like that being made (which were unfounded at the time and probably still are now), but on the other hand, I feel a lot safer in areas with cameras. I figure that even the fairly dumb criminals by now have seen CCTV footage being used to catch muggers and stuff and have done a risk/reward trade off.
Every camera that gets installed extends the areas I feel safe in - the areas I'm not concerned about going to.
Something that very rarely gets considered in all this is my lack of freedom to feel safe in places. If I'm not going somewhere well lit, with cameras etc, I have to weigh up whether the journey is worth it. That's my freedom being restricted by other members of society's desire to kill me. Yeah, it's only a restriction based on a theoretical risk that I might get knifed for my bag or my car, but everyone here is arguing my ability to feel safe should be definitely restricted in response to a theoretical risk they might be arrested for buying the wrong books...
"I'm sure they could have tried to make VHS tapes... that would play only once."
They did/do.
My mother works in market research {No. Not at a level where I can get her to stop it happening} and hence I get to discover the latest wheezes in that world as they try them out. One of the stunts for testing out new adverts is to give out tapes of shows with the adverts in them. Take them home, watch them, couple of days later researcher calls up and asks which adverts you remember and why.
Of course at this point, PARANOIA kicks in - their really, really valuable intellectual property (the new advert) is walking out the door. My god! These people could/sell/ the advert to the competion! They'd know our advertising strategy literally/weeks/ ahead!
Hence: "play once" videotapes.
Actually, all they did was not attach the end of the tape to the take-off spool. All the tape winds onto the take-up and there's a loose end of tape. Circumvention method: screwdriver to open cassette case & small peice of tape.
Re:Chinese Rooms and Software Guys
on
Arguing A.I.
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· Score: 1
Isn't the chinese room essentially a version of Descartian denial? Pointing at a potential intelligence and suspecting it a mere symbol processor which must prove its intelligence is the start of a slope which ends with questioning all other intelligences and concluding that one can only assume "I think therefore I am. I think, I am, therefore there existing thinking things."
How do you prove something isn't a "mere symbol processor" that's very good at looking intelligent? Is it even possible? And does the distinction matter?
Re:What computers still can't do.
on
Arguing A.I.
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· Score: 1
"His claim that symbolic AI will never work and his reason for this back in the 60s. We now know he's right after repeated failure of that disipine. "
Bad logic.
Failures do not invalidate their goal. I haven't seen anyone prove that symbolic AI is impossible. All we do know is that we don't know how to do it yet.
Mankind repeatedly failed to produce flying machines. And for a lot longer.
Slashdot Mirror
This should be "basic_string" with "string".
Damnit, this site can remember who I am, it can remember my comment reading settings, why the hell can't it remember whether I normally post in HTML or text?
"If something's not compiling that you think should, you end up wading through the mile-long error messages. If it does compile but doesn't work right, you're going to find yourself in the debugger trying to step through some of that crazy obscure STL C++ code to try to figure out what the heck is going wrong. Neither is much fun." To solve this I save off compiler error messages and pass them through a filter (in perl) that knocks out all the stuff between pairs to certain levels. And definitely replaces "basic_string" with "string". Other compilers (not GCC) are worse - they don't provide enough detail. C++ Builder has a habit of just reply "No. Wont." and not explaining why.
I think the difference is that doctors get respected. They might still have budget restrictions, but they don't have someone stood over them dictating how and where they make incisions. We do. We have non-technical managers saying things like "don't use Perl. Perl hasn't be tested by our compliance people because we can't find anyone to support it".
Doctors are encouraged to learn from each other, it's considered part of their career: companies do their utmost to firewall developers off from as much of the net as possible. Can't have them learning stuff from web sites.
Doctors are considered professionals. When they say things like "That procedure is not safe" people stop and listen to them. When we say "That won't work", we get to told to do it anyway, and then blamed when it doesn't work.
Doctors get to do the diagnosis, they can talk to the patient.. They can do exploratory surgery to help. They have tools - CAT scanners, NMR scanners. We have inept low-level managers who go off to client sites, have coffee, sandwiches, lunches... oh ask a couple of questions, write a vague diagnosis of the problem and hand it to us and say "fix that". We can't look at applications which work, we can't talk to the customers, we DEFINITELY can't write test code to explore solutions.
Funnily enough, doctors don't lose 1/3 of their patients on the table. We do.
Recently I've had my knee put back together by a surgeon so I can walk again. That's got to be a good feeling - to go home at the end of the day having fixed people; made them walk again. My other half pointed out that they have bad days when someone dies on them. But that's not every day.
Every day I turn up to work and watch a project die a bit more in front of me. I'm forbidden from writing decent software; everything is a hack job. The cheapest, fastest possible thing that most people can't prove doesn't work. That's the esteem in which our profession is held.
When you find a good manager, you nail him/her to the floor. Because they're about as common as rocking-horse poo.
Most managers have degrees in subjects like Art History and their IT talents extend to using Word and Notes.
Seriously - I've worked on projects where the project plan is pages and pages long and includes in the middle "Step N. Write the code", because the people running the thing know NOTHING about what happens in that stage, don't want to know and in fact, don't care. They're far, far too busy sorting out what model of BMW or Audi will be their next company car to actually pay attention to what's going on.
I honestly believe this is the problem with IT these days: the specs aren't crap because we don't know how to write them, they're crap because the people who go gather them have their minds on company cars, catered lunches, policy statements and an email-merry-go-round rather than what they're doing.
It isn't worth keeping a list of shite managers in the world, but a list of the good ones isn't going to take much paper.
OK, I've read the article. It still doesn't make any sense. When I was at university we practically relied on group efforts to learn the stuff. How can you not have people discuss project work?
I can understand not having people who merely turn in duplicate disks of someone else's work, but sharing ideas and gaining from that sharing is what a university is supposed to be about. We used to share lumps of code all the time: not the important parts of the projects, but report generators and stuff like that, nifty functions for working round a bug in this compiler or that interpreter...
I don't get how having them all able to do the actual thing is not the goal of them learning.
You watch: in a few years time, the places won't have research students that know how to work properly - they'll not be able to come up with anything they've not been taught, because they'll never have got into the habit of having conversations where the end results are more than the sum of the inputs.
Group learning is a VITAL part of educating people. In industry you don't turn up, get told how to create the solution to this problem and then left to implement it: you have to solve the problem. And you don't have someone who already knows those solutions to tell you them. There is no expert in solving that problem: or you're it. Without the experience in group problem solving and co-operation, those students are going to be useless as productive employees.
On the other hand, he does seem rather more qualified than the average /.er
He received a Franklin Institute award for his work on cosmology the same year Minsky got one for his work on cognition.
I don't think he's your average tin-foil-hat wearer.
"a risk analysis that does include technical issues"
Doesn't.
[Why can't we edit our own comments again?]
"dont think you'll find many construction workers that like to build useless buildings "
/MANAGEMENT/ - don't I understand? They wouldn't be management if they weren't better than me, so I'll march where I'm told. And then it's still my fault when it fails... And on the rare occaision I get asked, they ignore my opinion. And then it's my fault when it fails..
/NOTHING/ about what happens in the magical months between "start developing!" and "is the software done yet?"
"Actually, builders seem to have absolutely no problem with that. They get a contract, they do the work, they get paid, they move on, without obsessing over whether the project is interesting or challenging or sexy like programmers do."
I don't have a problem with building what I'm told. What I have an issue with is the schizophrenia companies have about whether I'm the infantry or the general. If I'm the infantry, then fine, point which way you want me to march and I'll march.
The trouble is that people do that and then when it turns out to be the wrong way, it's my fault somehow.
If I point out we're marching the wrong way, everyone gets an attitude. They're
Personally, I'd like management that either understood what's going on, or understood that they don't understand and would respect the opinion of someone who would.
My current project manager understands
The result; A project "plan" which lists people to be invited to meetings, who's working on the project, what their "stake" in the project is, a risk analysis that does include technical issues and a work plan which says "not done yet". According to the project tracking system, this is a completed document, and now the "managing" is done, she's gone off to find other projects to get involved with.. because she has no idea what the development actually entails, but won't admit that. It's like the goal of the project is to write documents, and if we happen to produce working software along the way that's a happy accident.
It's actually an environment at this place - the management are management because... they need to be managers to get company cars and they've been here too long to not have a company car. There's an endemic misunderstanding that you don't need to know anything at all about IT to be able to manage IT projects and make decisions. These are people that get to make decisions on which languages get used in development, when they have never written a program in anything, for example.
So there's something to ask for in management: Either a technically knowledgable, decision making person, or a technically illiterate decision respecting person. Not, as seems the norm in large companies, technically illiterate decision makers.
I have to say, although I can just about hear humming sounds from here (I think it's the colour printer behind me), FAR more noise comes from the phones.
The unattended mobiles are annoying, the monotonous, almost continuous ringing of external calls arriving to whole ring groups is annoying, but far, far and away is the noise made by a phone on ringback. It's this shrill ring-ring-ring-ring-ring sound that makes it really clear that whatever needed ringing back is MUCH more important than the work of the nearest dozen people.
I kind of wish it was quiet enough to hear the machines humming... then I could think straight.
BBC had an article on a new approach for treating tinnitus:
1 88 5000/1885492.stm
http://news.bbc.co.uk/hi/english/health/newsid_
Why not?
We get the spam about reducing our federal income taxes sent us...
Unfortunately, high technical employee turn-over doesn't worry most companies - after all, all software engineers are exactly the same, they're all just interchangeable bodies-at-desks anyway...
It bothers the software engineers there. It bothers the managers who have to cope with teams that are constantly shifting under them. It doesn't bother the people who instigate the dumbness and it doesn't bother the IT director in his/her ivory tower.
The latter of those three things is usually the thing that stops me: they want payment in dollars, in return for access to a 1-800 number I can't call. Or they take Visa, as long as I can call their 1-800 number...
This was the point I stopped using shareware at all, because I felt guilty about using the stuff without paying, and paying for it is too hard work, and by the time one has paid for a cheque in dollars from a UK bank, it starts looking like commercial price software with less than commercial production.
Being basically honest at heart, I just stopped using the odd few bits I ever did properly try out.
Possible solution: group in each country set up to collect the money in local currency, convert it to other things en mass (which will make the conversions cheaper) and forward it on to whoever, after taking a small percentage cut to pay for all that to happen. It would take some organising, but would it work?
And also, about half the potential buyers out there will change their surname at some point in time...
Warwick uni used to have a sort of policy of splitting machine names by department. Computer Science had mineral, Computing Services had vegetable and Maths had the animals.
So CS had "quartz", "flint", "granite" and a main server named "stone". CServices had things like "poppy" and "lily", and Maths had "rabbit" and "fox" and things.
Scheme kind of fell apart and we ended up with all sorts of bizarre things: a lab referred to occaisionally as the morgue, where machines were called "foot", "finger", "liver". A room called the meat locker where they were called "spam", "ham", "mutton", "beef"...
Body parts is a good one, there's a lot of them, especially once you start including internal organs, although it's a bit gross and people fight to get "spleen" as their workstation. Herbs as well; although spelling them is quite hard sometimes.
Finding 4000 consistent names is going to be hard though. You might be better just having "www00189" type ones, boring though it is.
The creator of Eliza once wrote that he nearly quit the IT world after someone suggested installing terminals connected to it all over the city so people could get therapy as and when needed...
"Laser body scanning unites in clothes shops" - actually this is happening in various places in the UK - the cuts of clothing are apparently being revised because the "standard" sizes/shapes don't fit anyone these days...
I bet I still end up needing different size tops & trousers tho...
Personally, I think that the problem with the socialised medical system is not so much discouraging people to use it, but that there's no incentive to /actually/ reduce costs. The NHS has become very cost focussed. To the point where there are now more management staff doing the cost-watching than there are medical staff doing the work... and it's ended up spending more.
Most large organisations are in fact like this. They'll spend any amount of money to save a small amount of money. Most large companies employe hordes of people who's job it is to chase people up over 5p inaccuracies in their expense claims.
The NHS is the same only more so, because at the end of the day if it doesn't make money.. erm... the government just gives it more.
Personally I like the idea of privatising out the health system. Make it free-at-the-point-of-delivery, but let hospitals actually work like businesses and sell their services to the health authority. The counter argument here is that the NHS has bulk-buying power to force down prices, but no-one ever seems to account for the fact that the "bulk buying ability" seems to need a massive beaurocracy to run it.
My private health plan actually costs LESS than my national insurance contributions, but I get to see specialists two days later instead of two years later.
The parts could be made accurately enough at the time - there are issues with the accuracy, in that all the components needed hand tweaking to get them to work properly together (And would even with today's manufacturing tolerances - because the errors cascade) which means the machine's parts aren't interchangeable (which was one of Babbage's goals) and that the thing needs debugging - you need to run some stuff though it knowing the right answer and tweak it until the answer it gives matches.
/frightening/ amount. ISTR it was of the order of 15,000 pounds, at a time when building a steam locomotive and delivering it to the US was all of 700. [Mentioned in the science museum display].
The reasons Babbage never developed a prototype are different from different sources. He spent a LOT of the money he was given for the analytical engine designing the (more general purpose) difference engine.
Eventually the government got fed up of giving him money - he'd burned through a
In addition he fell out with his leading craftsman who he accused of padding the contract, and spent quite a lot building workshops and so on at his house in order to develop things on-site.
The analytical engine was definitely acheivable at the time. The difference engine more doubtably so. But while the technology was willing, the project management was missing. Something the IT industry still hasn't learned...
OK, I'm in two minds about this - firstly I did have actual real reasons to worry about misuse of video-taped stuff like that being made (which were unfounded at the time and probably still are now), but on the other hand, I feel a lot safer in areas with cameras. I figure that even the fairly dumb criminals by now have seen CCTV footage being used to catch muggers and stuff and have done a risk/reward trade off.
Every camera that gets installed extends the areas I feel safe in - the areas I'm not concerned about going to.
Something that very rarely gets considered in all this is my lack of freedom to feel safe in places. If I'm not going somewhere well lit, with cameras etc, I have to weigh up whether the journey is worth it. That's my freedom being restricted by other members of society's desire to kill me. Yeah, it's only a restriction based on a theoretical risk that I might get knifed for my bag or my car, but everyone here is arguing my ability to feel safe should be definitely restricted in response to a theoretical risk they might be arrested for buying the wrong books...
"I'm sure they could have tried to make VHS tapes... that would play only once."
/sell/ the advert to the competion! They'd know our advertising strategy literally /weeks/ ahead!
They did/do.
My mother works in market research {No. Not at a level where I can get her to stop it happening} and hence I get to discover the latest wheezes in that world as they try them out. One of the stunts for testing out new adverts is to give out tapes of shows with the adverts in them. Take them home, watch them, couple of days later researcher calls up and asks which adverts you remember and why.
Of course at this point, PARANOIA kicks in - their really, really valuable intellectual property (the new advert) is walking out the door. My god! These people could
Hence: "play once" videotapes.
Actually, all they did was not attach the end of the tape to the take-off spool. All the tape winds onto the take-up and there's a loose end of tape. Circumvention method: screwdriver to open cassette case & small peice of tape.
Isn't the chinese room essentially a version of Descartian denial? Pointing at a potential intelligence and suspecting it a mere symbol processor which must prove its intelligence is the start of a slope which ends with questioning all other intelligences and concluding that one can only assume "I think therefore I am. I think, I am, therefore there existing thinking things."
How do you prove something isn't a "mere symbol processor" that's very good at looking intelligent? Is it even possible? And does the distinction matter?
"His claim that symbolic AI will never work and his reason for this back in the 60s. We now know he's right after repeated failure of that disipine. "
Bad logic.
Failures do not invalidate their goal. I haven't seen anyone prove that symbolic AI is impossible. All we do know is that we don't know how to do it yet.
Mankind repeatedly failed to produce flying machines. And for a lot longer.