No, these things are nanotech, and operate at the quantum level. If the disk is scratched, your data will quantum probability cloud. Solving Schrodinger's equation for the disc will reveal a 50% probability that your data is still there, and a 50% probability that your data is now a dead cat.
Correlation does not imply causation, but in a well-design study does suggest some sort of causal relationship.
In this case, the obvious explanation is that having children of a certain gender and carreer choice share a common cause. For example, although my knowledge of both fields is very shallow, it wouldn't surprise me if testosterone levels in women plays a causal role in both career choice and the gender of children.
well -- i don't know if that would really be "artificial," then, since that is how many islands are formed
Hmm, many islands are formed by Dr Evil detonating nuclear bombs at the bottom of deep holes? Maybe I should have taken a geology course - it sounds more interesting than I expected!
Any pay-per download service selling to Canada is counting on Canadians to pay more attention to the US news than to Canadian, which is probably a pretty safe bet.
If there is an inside to the house, there is always a way to get in there.
Not if the person who built the house was too drunk and/or stupid to remember to add a door.
My parents hired someone to build a cottage on some land they bought. It seemed smaller inside than it did outside. Then we realized that there was a room with no windows or door.
None of our parties would have the guts to even propose it.
Even if a party did propose it, it would not make it through a vote in parliament.
Even if it did pass into law, the party who pushed it through would likely be voted out at the next election, and the new party would repeal it.
Even if nobody repealed it, it would probably be found unconstitutional by the courts.
Even if it were not found to be unconstitutional by the courts, enough people would challenge individual tickets in court on the grounds that they did what they did to avoid an accident that it would be found to be uneconomical, and the program would be shut down.
I believe the correct word for the number may be frooglepoopilion.
The research has already been done...
on
Inkblot Passwords
·
· Score: 1
The article mentions that the reason for using Rorschach Inkblots is that there has been a great deal of research done on them.
These particular inkblots are created in a manner that makes them symmetric along the vertical axis. If MS wanted to research to be applicable, they had to use the same types of inkblots.
Sure, common sense says that random inkblots would work better. But I'll gladly take the empirical results of research over common sense, and there's lots of research on the Rorschach Inkblot test.
If you read both the bill and the section of the United States Code it references, it is quite clear that placing a copyrighted file on a P2P network counts as giving out 10 copies of something worth more than $2,500.
This is being inserted to get around the clause in the United States Code stating that "evidence of reproduction or distribution of a copyrighted work, by itself, shall not be sufficient to establish willful infringement."
Take a look at the wording of the bill and the Code for yourself. First the bill:
Section 506(a) of title 17, United States Code, is amended... by adding at the end the following: "For purposes of section 2319(b) of title 18, the placing of a copyrighted work, without the authorization of the copyright owner, on a computer network accessible to members of the public who are able to copy the work through such access shall be considered to be the distribution, during a 180-day period, of at least 10 copies of that work with a retail value of more than $2,500.''.
Any person who infringes a copyright willfully either -
(1) for purposes of commercial advantage or private financial gain, or
(2) by the reproduction or distribution, including by electronic means, during any 180-day period, of 1 or more copies or phonorecords of 1 or more copyrighted works, which have a total retail value of more than $1,000,
shall be punished as provided under section 2319 of title 18, United States Code. For purposes of this subsection, evidence of reproduction or distribution of a copyrighted work, by itself, shall not be sufficient to establish willful infringement.
So, the net result is that posting a file on a P2P network counts as distributing 10 copies worth $2,500 or more, which is a criminal (rather than civil) offense.
Download the new "Paranoia" collection of ringtones that not only repel common sense, they actually kill it!!! That's right, for only $9.95, you can lose any common sense you may have whenever your cell phone rings.
With such ringtones as "Turn Your Cell Phone ON During the Movie", "Have Loud Conversations on a Crowded Bus", "Talk Over Your Cell During a Party", and "Sorry to Interrupt Our Meeting, but I Need to Take This Call", "Keep Bears at Bay With Your Phone", and "Send Text Messages to People In The Same Room", our selection can't be beat.
Order yours today, and become the envy of all your friends.
You're missing the click-through agreement you have to accept in order to play. It says you won't use any bots. If you get caught, they would simply confiscate all your money (winnings AND buy-in). That's also in the click-through agreement.
You're also missing a way to get a bot to interface with the online poker room. But this could be built.
Other than those two minor points, you have a good scam. It's simple enough that somebody has probably already done it. They just wouldn't want to share it, since it's quietly earning a living for them.
As a winning poker player in casinos and online, I can tell you that poker is very much a card game, as well as a people game.
Read Caro's Book of Tells for a good introduction to how to read people. You'll notice that some of the most powerfull tells give you information about how that player plays the game (tight, loose, passive, aggressive, etc.). A computer could get this information by keeping tabs on what its opponents do, and crunching the numbers. The only information it would lack is the tells people give off to inform you of what they are holding right now.
The edge you get from being able to read these "what do I hold right now" tells moderately well is a very slim one. It is an edge, and it will let you win money in games where you would otherwise lose. But knowing the odds, and reading what your opponents have based on the way they bet, and based on what hands you have seen them play in the past, are the fundamentals of the game. A good AI could master these fundamentals, and could probably challenge some of the better poker players in the world.
Note that I said the edge is slim if you can read these tells moderately well. Some of the people I see playing in the WSOP seem to be brilliant at it. I'm not qualified to talk about what kind of an edge it gives them, so I won't.
You post a story about it on Slashdot, and kill it's server.
Re:How to stay employed
on
Ageism in IT?
·
· Score: 2, Interesting
I think you're right on.
For design/architecture of large programs or databases, and for getting specifications together, I'll always go for someone with experience.
For hammering out the 200,000 lines of code that will flesh out that design, cheap and fast is the way to go.
You can always test the code to make sure it fits the specs. You can't test the specs to make sure the system will still work 5 years from now. I see it as pretty similar to the construction industry. You may have a crew of 20 year olds to put up the building, but you'll want some 40 year old engineers who have done this 10 times before to design one that won't fall down.
So, if you want to stay employed (and employable), you need to change the character of your work as you mature. Do the things that only experienced people can do, and you're set.
It would be interesting to see how this case would play out if the "peers" selected for the jury were other MMORPG players.
That would give some insight as to whether the players think it is "just a game", or something that they have invested a lot of their emotional well-being in.
The question seems to be, is this act akin to knocking over a chess board in the middle of somebody's game (it's just a game, after all), or is it more like breaking into their house and burning the furniture they have built as a hobby (the players invested time to create their characters, after all).
Yes, interoperability is HARD to do. As are flexibility, usability, and stability. Here's a situation I ran into about 5 years ago.
As a summer intern, I was asked to turn about 1200 Word documents into web pages, with a hyperlinked menu, etc. I used Word's "save as html", separately saved and tweaked all the images, and then wrote a script that cleaned up the resulting documents, and prepared the menu. The whole project took about 2 weeks, and my boss was impressed. The last person had only finished about 500 all summer using cut-and-paste.
He decided he wanted my program to be used by the department in the future, since they get about 100 new documents to post every month. It had to be a "one-button" sort of thing, just pick the files and hit "go", since, way back then, most summer interns didn't know much about computers.
So, I had to build a Windows GUI, trap and handle all the errors, run MS Word and an image editing program through OLE, and have the program talk to another older program on the web server used for actually posting the completed web pages. This took the remaining 3.5 months of the summer, and it still wasn't very easy to use. 2 weeks to make it work, then 14 weeks to make it usable for somebody else.
Since then, I've developed a rule of thumb for how long it will take to build a program. I estimate how long it would take me to code the actual tasks. If I'm going to need to do similar tasks with it frequently, I double it (flexibility). Then, if anyone other than me needs to use it, I triple that number (useability). If people need to use it without me around (no support), then I triple it again (useability). Then I double that for every other program or standard that I have to interoperate with (note that if only 1 module needs to interoperate, I only double the time for that module). This formula works remarkably well.
The point is, algorithms are easy. It's the rest of it that's hard.
More importantly, you will have access to those manuals in 14 years without having to chase down out-of-print hardcopys or worrying about defunct publishers that can't even make a new copy if they wanted to. You would be suprised how often people need old documentation, whether it is for some old files found on a tape in a cabinet somewhere or that computer in the backroom that cannot be upgraded from Windows 95 for whatever reason.
The same problem comes up with old software. I work for a small (and tight-budgeted) engineering company that uses some legacy hardware that will only work under 16-bit DOS. Since MS won't sell us old copies of DOS, and have scared everyone else away from selling them, there is no way for us to legally expand our operations.
We keep our original DOS disks in a bank vault, for fear of losing them!
I have a Kinesis keyboard, and the layout is beautiful. I was getting tendonitis from a "MS Natural Keyboard", and a month with the Kinesis had me all fine and dandy.
It's especially nice for coders. My poor right pinky finger was being used for far too many keys, such as [{}]:/'=+-, Enter, Backspace, Shift, Ctrl, PgUp, PgDown, and the list goes on. Kinesis moves a lot of these to the much stronger and underworked thumbs.
So after a month with my Kinesis, my wrists were happy. Then my Kinesis stopped working, so it was gone for a month while it was repaired. I got another month with it, and it died again. Eventually I just got sick of sending it in.
English Literature Professors fail because no real person knows how to spell those words.
Engineers often fail because, well, most of them seem more like a computer than a simple chatterbot does.
As much as this seems like a joke post, I was actually told this by an AI professor who had some simple chatterbots pass the Turing Test in his lab, and realized that there was a problem with using Electrical Engineering graduate students as the "Real People".
While "People think" is a perfectly good Axiom, it isn't appropriate in this case. Given that nobody is going to derive a definition of Intelligence from the Axioms of Number Theory, or any other existing formal system, we will have to apply Inductive Logic (rather than Deductive) to come up with one.
The core of every system of Inductive Logic is always some variation of the rule: (IF A THEN B) ENTAILS (IF B THEN A). The entailment may be to some degree of probability or fuzzy-truth, depending on the system, but that rule is always there. It is the formalization of the idea "If it happens that way some of the time, maybe it always happens that way."
Your Axiom "People think" could be expressed as: IF (X is a Person) THEN (X thinks). Using the rule of inductive logic, we would could then conclude that IF (X thinks) THEN (X is a person), which means that only people can think. Obviously not something you want as an Axiom.
Even if you want to say "but I don't intend to use inductive logic", you're still going to confuse people, because it is the way most people think. If I tell someone that both of these statements are true: "If it is raining, then I am wet", and "I am wet", and then as them if this means it is raining, most people will say "yes, of course!".
Turing recognized this problem, which is why he postulated a new Axiom for thinking:
IF (X passes the Turing Test) THEN (X thinks), or, more simply "Things that pass the Turing Test think."
Whether you agree with the Axiom or not, he has the right approach. Several alternate Axioms have been proposed, and each have a following in the world of AI:
Anything which acts like a human thinks.
Anything which acts rationally thinks.
Anything which can autonomously generate models of its environment like a human does thinks.
Anything which can autonomously generate accurate models of its environment thinks.
I'm sure there are more that I don't know about.
Obviously, all of these are very vague Axioms, and different projects in AI investigate different aspects of them. The most common variation on the research is changing the domain of thinking. It could be argued that we have already made computers that can think about chess, checkers, network optimization, and many microdomains. What we haven't made is a computer that can think about the politics, the world, or the Turing Test.
Arguably most important, we have not made a computer that can think about its own thoughts. The ability to self-reflect is what some consider the core of intelligence. If you believe the computer is a wet machine, then you likely accept that consciousness is the ability of that machine to represent nearly any aspect of its own operation.
At the moment, my internal model of myself says that I am hungry, so I'm going to go eat.
Construction Worker Joe: I think the non-trivial zeros of the zeta-function are of the form 1/2 +- i*theta_n
Construction Worker Larry: I agree. It's clear when you consider the operators D^{(k,1)} and their respective vectors \psi_s (t)
Construction Worker Joe: Of course, so long as using D^{(k,1)} on \psi_s (t) will produce k*(\psi_s (t))
Construction Worker Larry: Yeah. Joe, you'd better make sure the Eigenvectors of those two boards you're nailing together have a dot product of zero. The last time the boards weren't orthogonal, the boss had a fit!
Construction Worker Joe: Yeah, whatever. Hey, check out that girl's hyperbolic curves!
Slashdot Mirror
No, these things are nanotech, and operate at the quantum level. If the disk is scratched, your data will quantum probability cloud. Solving Schrodinger's equation for the disc will reveal a 50% probability that your data is still there, and a 50% probability that your data is now a dead cat.
Correlation does not imply causation, but in a well-design study does suggest some sort of causal relationship. In this case, the obvious explanation is that having children of a certain gender and carreer choice share a common cause. For example, although my knowledge of both fields is very shallow, it wouldn't surprise me if testosterone levels in women plays a causal role in both career choice and the gender of children.
well -- i don't know if that would really be "artificial," then, since that is how many islands are formed
Hmm, many islands are formed by Dr Evil detonating nuclear bombs at the bottom of deep holes? Maybe I should have taken a geology course - it sounds more interesting than I expected!
The key, then, is to select an encryption system that is legal everywhere.
Maybe the time has finally come for the ROT13 encryption system to be revived!
Any pay-per download service selling to Canada is counting on Canadians to pay more attention to the US news than to Canadian, which is probably a pretty safe bet.
Not if the person who built the house was too drunk and/or stupid to remember to add a door.
My parents hired someone to build a cottage on some land they bought. It seemed smaller inside than it did outside. Then we realized that there was a room with no windows or door.
The world can be a strange place sometimes.
None of our parties would have the guts to even propose it.
Even if a party did propose it, it would not make it through a vote in parliament.
Even if it did pass into law, the party who pushed it through would likely be voted out at the next election, and the new party would repeal it.
Even if nobody repealed it, it would probably be found unconstitutional by the courts.
Even if it were not found to be unconstitutional by the courts, enough people would challenge individual tickets in court on the grounds that they did what they did to avoid an accident that it would be found to be uneconomical, and the program would be shut down.
I feel safe from this law.
Hard liquor is much better for you. In fact, if you drink enough right after a meal, you can actually get negative calories from it...
I believe the correct word for the number may be frooglepoopilion.
These particular inkblots are created in a manner that makes them symmetric along the vertical axis. If MS wanted to research to be applicable, they had to use the same types of inkblots.
Sure, common sense says that random inkblots would work better. But I'll gladly take the empirical results of research over common sense, and there's lots of research on the Rorschach Inkblot test.
This is being inserted to get around the clause in the United States Code stating that "evidence of reproduction or distribution of a copyrighted work, by itself, shall not be sufficient to establish willful infringement."
Take a look at the wording of the bill and the Code for yourself. First the bill:
Section 506(a) of title 17, United States Code, is amended... by adding at the end the following: "For purposes of section 2319(b) of title 18, the placing of a copyrighted work, without the authorization of the copyright owner, on a computer network accessible to members of the public who are able to copy the work through such access shall be considered to be the distribution, during a 180-day period, of at least 10 copies of that work with a retail value of more than $2,500.''.
Let's take a look at the referenced Title of the United States Code that will be modified:
Criminal Infringement. -
Any person who infringes a copyright willfully either -
(1) for purposes of commercial advantage or private financial gain, or
(2) by the reproduction or distribution, including by electronic means, during any 180-day period, of 1 or more copies or phonorecords of 1 or more copyrighted works, which have a total retail value of more than $1,000,
shall be punished as provided under section 2319 of title 18, United States Code. For purposes of this subsection, evidence of reproduction or distribution of a copyrighted work, by itself, shall not be sufficient to establish willful infringement.
So, the net result is that posting a file on a P2P network counts as distributing 10 copies worth $2,500 or more, which is a criminal (rather than civil) offense.
Download the new "Paranoia" collection of ringtones that not only repel common sense, they actually kill it!!! That's right, for only $9.95, you can lose any common sense you may have whenever your cell phone rings.
With such ringtones as "Turn Your Cell Phone ON During the Movie", "Have Loud Conversations on a Crowded Bus", "Talk Over Your Cell During a Party", and "Sorry to Interrupt Our Meeting, but I Need to Take This Call", "Keep Bears at Bay With Your Phone", and "Send Text Messages to People In The Same Room", our selection can't be beat.
Order yours today, and become the envy of all your friends.
You're also missing a way to get a bot to interface with the online poker room. But this could be built.
Other than those two minor points, you have a good scam. It's simple enough that somebody has probably already done it. They just wouldn't want to share it, since it's quietly earning a living for them.
Read Caro's Book of Tells for a good introduction to how to read people. You'll notice that some of the most powerfull tells give you information about how that player plays the game (tight, loose, passive, aggressive, etc.). A computer could get this information by keeping tabs on what its opponents do, and crunching the numbers. The only information it would lack is the tells people give off to inform you of what they are holding right now.
The edge you get from being able to read these "what do I hold right now" tells moderately well is a very slim one. It is an edge, and it will let you win money in games where you would otherwise lose. But knowing the odds, and reading what your opponents have based on the way they bet, and based on what hands you have seen them play in the past, are the fundamentals of the game. A good AI could master these fundamentals, and could probably challenge some of the better poker players in the world.
Note that I said the edge is slim if you can read these tells moderately well. Some of the people I see playing in the WSOP seem to be brilliant at it. I'm not qualified to talk about what kind of an edge it gives them, so I won't.
You post a story about it on Slashdot, and kill it's server.
For design/architecture of large programs or databases, and for getting specifications together, I'll always go for someone with experience.
For hammering out the 200,000 lines of code that will flesh out that design, cheap and fast is the way to go.
You can always test the code to make sure it fits the specs. You can't test the specs to make sure the system will still work 5 years from now. I see it as pretty similar to the construction industry. You may have a crew of 20 year olds to put up the building, but you'll want some 40 year old engineers who have done this 10 times before to design one that won't fall down.
So, if you want to stay employed (and employable), you need to change the character of your work as you mature. Do the things that only experienced people can do, and you're set.
That would give some insight as to whether the players think it is "just a game", or something that they have invested a lot of their emotional well-being in.
The question seems to be, is this act akin to knocking over a chess board in the middle of somebody's game (it's just a game, after all), or is it more like breaking into their house and burning the furniture they have built as a hobby (the players invested time to create their characters, after all).
As a summer intern, I was asked to turn about 1200 Word documents into web pages, with a hyperlinked menu, etc. I used Word's "save as html", separately saved and tweaked all the images, and then wrote a script that cleaned up the resulting documents, and prepared the menu. The whole project took about 2 weeks, and my boss was impressed. The last person had only finished about 500 all summer using cut-and-paste.
He decided he wanted my program to be used by the department in the future, since they get about 100 new documents to post every month. It had to be a "one-button" sort of thing, just pick the files and hit "go", since, way back then, most summer interns didn't know much about computers.
So, I had to build a Windows GUI, trap and handle all the errors, run MS Word and an image editing program through OLE, and have the program talk to another older program on the web server used for actually posting the completed web pages. This took the remaining 3.5 months of the summer, and it still wasn't very easy to use. 2 weeks to make it work, then 14 weeks to make it usable for somebody else.
Since then, I've developed a rule of thumb for how long it will take to build a program. I estimate how long it would take me to code the actual tasks. If I'm going to need to do similar tasks with it frequently, I double it (flexibility). Then, if anyone other than me needs to use it, I triple that number (useability). If people need to use it without me around (no support), then I triple it again (useability). Then I double that for every other program or standard that I have to interoperate with (note that if only 1 module needs to interoperate, I only double the time for that module). This formula works remarkably well.
The point is, algorithms are easy. It's the rest of it that's hard.
The same problem comes up with old software. I work for a small (and tight-budgeted) engineering company that uses some legacy hardware that will only work under 16-bit DOS. Since MS won't sell us old copies of DOS, and have scared everyone else away from selling them, there is no way for us to legally expand our operations.
We keep our original DOS disks in a bank vault, for fear of losing them!
Nope:
11) Venture Capital runs out.
12) Still haven't gotten rid of all the bugs...
13) Mortgate house.
14) Still haven't gotten rid of all the bugs...
15) Bankrupt.
It's especially nice for coders. My poor right pinky finger was being used for far too many keys, such as [{}]:/'=+-, Enter, Backspace, Shift, Ctrl, PgUp, PgDown, and the list goes on. Kinesis moves a lot of these to the much stronger and underworked thumbs.
So after a month with my Kinesis, my wrists were happy. Then my Kinesis stopped working, so it was gone for a month while it was repaired. I got another month with it, and it died again. Eventually I just got sick of sending it in.
It's a great product, if it holds together.
Give us another decade or so, and we'll grow up.
Engineers often fail because, well, most of them seem more like a computer than a simple chatterbot does.
As much as this seems like a joke post, I was actually told this by an AI professor who had some simple chatterbots pass the Turing Test in his lab, and realized that there was a problem with using Electrical Engineering graduate students as the "Real People".
While "People think" is a perfectly good Axiom, it isn't appropriate in this case. Given that nobody is going to derive a definition of Intelligence from the Axioms of Number Theory, or any other existing formal system, we will have to apply Inductive Logic (rather than Deductive) to come up with one.
The core of every system of Inductive Logic is always some variation of the rule: (IF A THEN B) ENTAILS (IF B THEN A). The entailment may be to some degree of probability or fuzzy-truth, depending on the system, but that rule is always there. It is the formalization of the idea "If it happens that way some of the time, maybe it always happens that way."
Your Axiom "People think" could be expressed as: IF (X is a Person) THEN (X thinks). Using the rule of inductive logic, we would could then conclude that IF (X thinks) THEN (X is a person), which means that only people can think. Obviously not something you want as an Axiom.
Even if you want to say "but I don't intend to use inductive logic", you're still going to confuse people, because it is the way most people think. If I tell someone that both of these statements are true: "If it is raining, then I am wet", and "I am wet", and then as them if this means it is raining, most people will say "yes, of course!".
Turing recognized this problem, which is why he postulated a new Axiom for thinking: IF (X passes the Turing Test) THEN (X thinks), or, more simply "Things that pass the Turing Test think."
Whether you agree with the Axiom or not, he has the right approach. Several alternate Axioms have been proposed, and each have a following in the world of AI:
Anything which acts like a human thinks.
Anything which acts rationally thinks.
Anything which can autonomously generate models of its environment like a human does thinks.
Anything which can autonomously generate accurate models of its environment thinks.
I'm sure there are more that I don't know about.
Obviously, all of these are very vague Axioms, and different projects in AI investigate different aspects of them. The most common variation on the research is changing the domain of thinking. It could be argued that we have already made computers that can think about chess, checkers, network optimization, and many microdomains. What we haven't made is a computer that can think about the politics, the world, or the Turing Test.
Arguably most important, we have not made a computer that can think about its own thoughts. The ability to self-reflect is what some consider the core of intelligence. If you believe the computer is a wet machine, then you likely accept that consciousness is the ability of that machine to represent nearly any aspect of its own operation.
At the moment, my internal model of myself says that I am hungry, so I'm going to go eat.
Construction Worker Joe: I think the non-trivial zeros of the zeta-function are of the form 1/2 +- i*theta_n
Construction Worker Larry: I agree. It's clear when you consider the operators D^{(k,1)} and their respective vectors \psi_s (t)
Construction Worker Joe: Of course, so long as using D^{(k,1)} on \psi_s (t) will produce k*(\psi_s (t))
Construction Worker Larry: Yeah. Joe, you'd better make sure the Eigenvectors of those two boards you're nailing together have a dot product of zero. The last time the boards weren't orthogonal, the boss had a fit!
Construction Worker Joe: Yeah, whatever. Hey, check out that girl's hyperbolic curves!