I'm sure that most/. folks agree that war itself isn't the problem, it's that the pending war excuse seems manufactured.
Comply or be destroyed, take a look at what we can do. That's fucking terrorism, okay?
Call it what ever you want, imply that Bush is a terrorist if you like (although I said not to). The problem is that Iraq presents a threat to us and the peoples of the region, and we have to do something about it. I asked what we should do and recieved no answer. Are you saying that we should go to war but present a different reason? If so then what reason do you suggest? Because the President has given all the reasons I've already stated.
Now mod this post and the parent down, because they'd fucking off-topic.
The original post clearly mentions the war, and judging by the majority of highly-modded posts in the thread discussing the war directly, I would not consider it off-topic. We're tired of being modded down because no one has an answer to our challenge to the mainstream/. thought. If it continues then it will just show that most of the moderators are biased, and close-minded, and abusive of power, something that I do not yet believe to be the case. I'd hate to be proven wrong
Alright folks, this is obviously just an excuse to talk about the war, so let's talk about it. I'm announcing a challenge the antiwar contingent on slashdot (clearly the majority). This is not flamebait. I am asking for non-aggressive answers to an honest question. If you accept the challenge then respond: Do not mod me down to censor me.
Everyone seems to be in agreement that Saddam is an evil man. He's killed and tortured many of his own people, launched regional wars of aggression, in both cases using weapons of mass destruction. As many point out, the US in the past has made great mistakes in its foreign policy. But that has nothing to do with the present. The decision to create this monster in the past does not suggest we should allow him to continue now; on the contrary, it suggests we should slay the monster we created and repay our debt of honor to the Iraqi people.
We also have the problem that inspections in the past have failed; they did not find his biological programs (those were revealed by a son-in-law who defected, who Saddam murdered in retaliation for this revelation). Neither did they "contain" Saddam, who kicked out the inspectors in 1998, and we have every reason to believe that his weapons programs will continue and the inspectors will either be fooled or kicked out once again if the US military stands down. Neither will such supposed containment deter Saddam from passing these horrific weapons to terrorists or otherwise supporting them, leaving no fingerprints behind.
If Saddam is allowed to develop a nuclear weapon, we can expect to see a situation worse than North Korea today. Saddam's stated goal is to dominate the region, which will cause turmoil in several ways: 1st, the world economy will be thrown into chaos, as the Middle east is the main source of energy. 2nd, it will start a regional nuclear arms race, as neighboring states attempt to counter Iraq's nuclear force. 3rd, saddam's genoicidal and murderous practices will be expanded to millions more. Finally, we will have no defense against terrorism if Iraq is allowed to develop a significant deterrent.
And yes, Iraq is involved in terrorism. The main plotter behind WTC attack #1 (1993) was Ramzi Yousef, an Iraqi agent. Iraqi agents also tried to assassinate George H W Bush in 1993 along with the emir of Kuwait. There have been high level contacts throughout the 90s between Iraq and al-Qaeda, and although many speculate that the two are too "ideologically different" to cooperate, they seem to like each other enough to call their men to support each other, from the looks of their press releases. Saddam openly pays $25k to the families of Palestinian suicide bombers. We know from surveillance and defectors that Iraq was training airplane hijackers at Salman Pak before September 11th. We also know that Iraq, a police state where no one gets in or out without permission, is harboring al Zarqawi, an al Qaeda associated terrorist who also has connections with the terrorists found with Ricin in Europe.
So here's the challenge: in the face of the the terrorist threat, the regional threat, and the oppression and murder of the Iraqi people, what would you do? Do not respond by making personal attacks on President Bush. Do not respond by pointing out past US mistakes. Just tell us what you would do.
Thus, contrary to what most people would feel the thing that is holding AI up is hardware.
That's not true. The main problems of AI are representation and learning. The representation problem is, if i have a piece of information, how do i store it? In Propositional Logic equations? Neural networks? (what kind?, how?) There is no clear answer to this question. Any system that exists today has some shortcomings. Logic is very brittle, and breaks down when given bad assumptions (Garbage in garbage out). It's also not good for representing fuzzy data or for doing pattern recognition. It's also difficult to support learning when using this system. Neural networks aren't as powerful in reasoning as logic systems.
The learning problem is also very difficult. We need some way to input the data into the system. Some people believe that in order for a robot to learn the same knowledge that a human has, it would have to lead a human like life: grow up with parents, go to school, get beat up by bigger robots, etc. It wouldn't be sufficient (not in any apparent way) that a robot could simply scour the web and gain all of human knowledge. Maybe it could process some text on the subject of, say, basketball, but it won't actually understand what basketball *is* unless it plays basketball. This also applies to learning communication between intelligent agents. There is also the need to learn and encode common sense knowledge that people take for granted.
Similar to today's bot craze, there have been crazes in the past when people thought they were close to building truly intelligent machines ("expert systems" comes to mind.) However, they inevitably came up short because the hardware power wasn't there.
That is not true. Expert systems are just databases combined with propositional logic systems. Expert systems have two weaknesses: The first problem is representation. Logic is very brittle. It can't handle data that aren't represented in its assumptions. Logic doesn't have any "common sense". There isn't any way to know when your logic has shortcomings. The research in expert systems these days involves modal logic (which contains such constructs as "Necessarily X" or "Possibly X", as opposed to just "X is TRUE" or "X is False". Still, these methods have shortcomings). Expert systems only work in very specific domains. They can't learn general domains, or cross-reference domains easily, because of representation issues (and learning issues too)
The Second problem of expert systems is learning. It takes several man-years of expert input to train these systems -- and that is only for specific domains.
Hardware is the least of our problems, and it is certainly not the shortcoming of expert systems.
Right, so Eisenhower I think was a very appeasement-oriented guy. Remember the Aswan Dam, and how he thwarted the Britain-France-Israel coalition taking of the Suez Canal after the Dam was nationalized by Egypt. In retrospect, Eisenhower should have been tougher. Its a good point that the American people were pretty sick of war by 1945.
If we had launched war in 1945 or 1946, would the Russians not have surrendered immediately in the face of the American nuclear option? It is tough to say. Those communists didn't really care much if millions of their people died. Another problem would be a postwar exit strategy. We were new to the concept of nation-building in those days.. our first successes were Germany and Japan, which took several years.
Re:C'mon - Isn't this really about the War
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Open Source Code And War
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· Score: 2, Interesting
Destroying Stalin in 1945 was hardly an option - he was America's ally at that time, and no-one of any political persuasion thought there was any chance at all of fighting Russia just as WWII finally drew to an end.
After the war, no one really considered him our ally. We adopted a policy of containment as early as 1948 and we knew he was trouble in 1945, which is why we were in a rush to beat him to Berlin. It's true that no one considered a preemptive invasion of the USSR at the time, and it probably would have been a diplomatic nightmare, as you point out.
But we would have saved those 20 million from the Soviet police state, millions more from the gulags, tens of millions from poverty under Communism, and hundreds of thousands from the proxy wars in Korea, Vietnam, Afghanistan, we would not have had to prop up all those terrible regimes, and the proliferation problems we face today would be significantly less.
So it's easy for me to say this in hindsight, but nevertheless, it would have been wise to crush Stalin in 1945. The Cold War was in fact the worst case of appeasement in the 20th century, worse than the appeasement of Hitler, just due to the existence of nuclear weapons.
Thanks for replying instead of modding me down. And thanks for keeping an open mind
why not? you guys did a great job of dallying while pakistan and north korea built the bomb.
So let me summarize your logic: "We made terrible mistakes in the past, so let's repeat them." Thank God the President has more sense than you.
that isreal has the bomb and the u.s. continues to do nothing.
Israel is also an open democracy with elections, a free press, and (ironically enough) more rights for palestinians than any other country in the middle east. It also hasn't the history of invading its neighbors for their oil (like Saddam) or of blackmailing the west for aid (like North Korea). Israel is also our ally unlike the others. Israel is also surrounded by enemies who have openly promised to rid the world of Jews in a second if there were no threat of retribution.
[Long List of Mistakes we've made in the past]
Right. So we have a moral responsibility to the people of the middle east to rid them of the monster we created. Let's not leave this problem to fester until Saddam gets a nuclear weapon, at which point we will have utter and total chaos.
the us backed hussein for a decade because it was looking for someone to keep iran in line. no one gave a damn about the "iraqi people" from 1979 until last week. so why, all of a sudden, is it the united state's number one priority?
Because George W. Bush is a man of greater character than his predecessors. Because in the 1980's, we were fighting the greatest evil mankind has ever witnessed -- communism -- which took the lives of over 20 million people. Because we failed to destroy Stalin in 1945 before he got the atomic bomb. Because we engaged in a costly peace only a decade after the similarly idiotic appeasement of Hitler. Because September 11 awoke us to the true suffering of the peoples of the world, to their political powerlessness and economic hopelessness. Because we now understand the evilness and determination of our enemies. Because the President can now fight for the freedom of the Iraqi people with the majority backing of the American public. Because technology is changing the nature of the world and we must adjust to that change. Because democracies don't pick one foreign policy for all of time and stubbornly refuse to improve upon it. Because as a democracy we are constantly self-critical and strive for improvement at every stage. Because it only makes sense that we would be more helpful to others as our understanding of the world grows. Because such is the nature of progressivism, once called "liberalism". (Nowadays liberalism means criticism of the president of the U.S.)
i think the people of france know that when the us ousts a government and puts in a new one, the new puppet has a bad habit of becoming a monster later on.
I think the people of the United States also know that. That's why the US is promoting democracy in Afghanistan. And that's why we will continue to promote democracy in the Middle east -- Starting with Iraq.
I sincerely pray that this parent post was a troll, however, based on my personal experience with people's opinion it probably is not.
cantrip: (kän tRip), n. (Chiefly Scot.)
1. a magical charm or enchantment; 2. an elaborate deception or prank. corpus: (kôr pus), n., pl. -pora,
1. a complete set of writings; 2. a dead body.
You have missed the point entirely that I have just demonstrated a game that can be played on a 3x4 board
We're not talking about your silly examples. We're talking about Chess.
Chess, like many problems we use AI to solve, is TOO COMPLEX to be reduced to a mathematical formula. That is the whole point of doing search, of heuristics, etc. If a solution algorithm exists, we use the algorithm, not search. In chess we must search.
Some problems, despite enormous complexity, CAN be solved because the problem space is small enough that we can dedicate a few computers to searching out the entire problem space. Chess is not one of those problems, because the problem space is too large. As long as your magical algorithm doesn't exist, Chess will continue to be a valuable problem area where we can test our AI techniques.
(Still waiting for your solution for white to win)
The point being that chess is a, theoretically, *solvable* game.
Actually, that is beside the point. The state space of chess has some 10^120 states, larger than the number of particles in the universe. For practical purposes chess is unsolvable.
The precise solution isn't known, although we have a good deal of empirical data regarding possible solutions. (Although white to win has been proven)
Um.. no, white has not been proven to win. If I'm wrong, Why don't you show us the solution?
The chess computers rely on this empirical data, not on thinking. They *compute.* Big deal.
OK, those are two different things. If they relied on empirical data, that means that they would simply be looking up moves in a table. They're not (until the very endgame). They're looking ahead and then measuring positional and material differences. Quite a difference. And for that matter, the human brain, by the strong AI theory, is just a computer. So Kasparov is "just" computing when he plays a move. He just happens to have a massively parallel computer with billions and billions of neurons making computations simultaneously. "Big deal" indeed
Go is the Holy Grail, and they ain't even close. To date no one has made a Go playing program that can reasonably hold it's own against even a relative novice.
Once computers win Go, people will complain that they are "just" doing pattern matching, and so forth. The truth is that critics like you will never be satisfied with the state of AI because once a problem is solved, it will also be demystified. The fact that programs would approach a problem differently from humans is to be expected. These are chess programs. Not brain emulators.
I don't really care how far down into a tree a modern processor has time to search. It doesn't indicate any sort of "intelligence" in the holy grail sense of AI. Chess is a very limited, structured problem.
There's no reason it must be that way. Nothing is stopping you from writing a logic engine to play chess moves. John McCarthy suggested that this would be extremely useful for reviving AI (I personally think logic is not a good foundation). Similarly nothing is preventing you from designing a neural network to output chess moves, or using any other system not heavily based on this structure of search.
Whatever system you do come up with WILL require lots of computation. The human brain does a lot of computation, in a massively parallel fashion.
I don't know what this holy-grail-type intelligence is that you speak of, but this is a common problem in AI: once something is solved, it's no longer considered AI! But just because some solution isn't "magic" doesn't mean its useless
It's also important to note that search is neither solved nor unimportant. Every field of AI employs search at some level, in one form or another. (Searching the web, planning etc..) Chess was integral in pushing along some of those fields and may produce some useful results yet.
Changing SMTP means switching over every SMTP server and relay.. that's a lot of work and there's a lot of financial resistance to that.
On the other hand this micropayment system can be implemented on TOP Of SMTP... using a server that issues digitally signed tickets, which can simply be appended as an attachment to the emails.
Certainly this system will meet some resistance as well, but much much less. It will only require the clients to change what they are using, not the servers. However in the long term we could probably consider a replacement for SMTP... for example we could roll out the client code together with the client code for this Penny Black system. Then, if this system gets wide spread then people can deploy replacement-for-SMTP servers confident that clients will be able to use them
Only Mr. J. Random Public need be overly concerned. You are a *specific* individual, which changes the rules, and the odds, entirely.
Unless I have some way to measure those odds, I can only use the average given to me. I fly an "average" amount. And assuming a standard (Gaussian) distribution, most people would be around that average.
The article does not mention how microsoft could roll this out. Admittedly the ticket system would be better than changing the SMTP protocol, since it could be added on top of SMTP. But we would still need an incentive for people to start buying the tickets before people can block ticketless senders. In addition there is the problem of legitimate automated emails. Will whitelisting be effective enough to allow these through? What about bounce notices? etc..
So don't bother spending the rest of your life looking over your shoulder for asteroids. *You* are far more likely to die by having a plane fall on you.
Um... the chance that one or more people will be killed by plane today is much higher than the chance that one or more people will be killed by asteroid. However, if their statistic is correct, then *I* am just as likely to die by plane crash as I am by asteroid. So I should be equally as worried.
Who is to say that with the combined ability of every nation on earth that there wouldnt be a way to put enough explosion on target to move such an object?
Just don't let France in on it. They'd probably call for us to "double, triple" the number of telescopes
According to PBS,
"George W. Bush would have widened his 537-vote victory to a 1,665-vote margin if the recount ordered by the Florida Supreme Court would have been allowed to continue, using standards that would have allowed even faintly dimpled "undervotes" to be counted."
And if the popular vote is what would have counted, maybe Bush's election strategy would have been different -- and perhaps he would have won that one too.
One thing I am glad of is that Gore is not president today. The man has no political identity or ideas of his own besides opposing George W. Bush -- nor does most of the American Left, sans the New Republic and Thomas Friedman and very few other exceptions.
I think computer vs human Go matches would be much more interesting now,
Computer Go isn't advanced enough to make the matches interesting. Not too long ago a professional 1-dan (9-dan being the highest rank) played against a computer program giving it a 25 stone advantage. The human still won. (For those of you who haven't played go, 25 stones is HUGE. That would be like giving up a queen, two rooks, and both bishops)
chess is nice, but most progresses in chess have been due to speed increases in hardware and optimizations, hence allowing the computer to overpower the human with depth of search.
Because search is exponential, speed increases in hardware won't have much effect on search depth. For example, it might take a 1000-fold increase in speed to increase search depth by 2. The real improvements have been in better search algorithms, heuristics, and tuned evaluation functions. Chess is easier than go for two reasons: 1) the branching factor is a lot smaller, so less to search; 2) evaluation is MUCH easier.
Agreed. That's not my question. My question is: So what? Why is this a reason to start a war?
Some claim that if an "appropriate authority" have made a "solid legal demand" for information and action, and that demand is ignored or rebuffed, then it is an appropriate excuse to "immediately remove by force" the person who failed to obey orders (with "UN", "Disarm Iraq" and "War" being the three example fillers). I happen to believe that there should be some more levels of negotiation in between failure to comply and ALL OUT WAR.
The problem is that there have already been several levels of "negotiation", all of which consist of Saddam rejecting everything until we threaten war. This has been going on for 10 years now, in the meantime which Clinton allowed him to develop his WMD. In addition, he poses a unique new threat now that terrorists provide a delivery vehicle for his WMD capabilities. And now we are learning that in fact Saddam is harboring and supporting terrorists connected to the ricin terrorists in Europe. Let's face it, the previous Administrations, Clinton and Bush I, really dropped the ball on this. In addition, Saddam continues to maintain his grip on power throw the torture, rape, killing, and imprisonment of his political enemies. He lets his people suffer through sanctions by showing the world that he cannot be trusted with money, as he will simply use it to construct WMD. No peace-loving freedom-loving person could support such a tyrant.
Is that a sufficient reason to "immediately remove by force" Mr. [Cheney]? Apparently not. Hypocracy is so ugly.
The goal of American Foreign Policy is not "consistency" with how we treat US citizens. It is to protect the American people. And unfortunately, WMD/terrorism are quite different from anything Cheney has been even accused of. For you to equate the two morally says quite a bit about your powers of moral judgment
Bush talks like Iraq is ready to jump out and take over the world unless we stop him. Go look at what really happened. Iraq attacked in 1990. UN responded. Iraq Defeated. Iraq withdraws. Iraq hasn't peeped outside their borders since 1991.
Let's see. Saddam openly supports terrorism against Israel by paying $25k to the families of suicide bombers. Iraqi agents were known to be involved in the WTC bombing in 1993. Tried to assisinate George Bush Sr. the same year. He's been negotiating with Al Qaeda ever since, no one denies that. In fact this Zarqawi character has been holed up in Baghdad for months, and guess what, you don't just walk into a police state by accident. They know that you are there, and the Iraqis are actively supporting him and his thugs in launching chemical attacks abroad. We also know that terrorist camps around Baghdad were practicing hijacking mock airplanes before Sept 11, based on satellite photos. It doesn't take a rocket scientest to figure out what is going on. This isn't a pre-emptive strike: the first attacks were already launched: by Iraq. No one predicted Sept 11. For us to fail to predict a future attack or to allow states to sponsor future attacks would be a huge failure of policy, and would require a great poverty of imagination on the part of our planners. Thankfully our leaders don't sure yours.
CIA rates Iraq as non-threat unless attacked first.
CIA is slowly coming around. First they were saying there was no connection to Al Qaeda. Now they are admitting that. Soon they will be seeing that Saddam is a great threat- wait till the war is over, I predict that the information pouring out of Iraq that was previously locked down by their security services will be something like the outpouring from the KGB after the fall of the USSR. There will be many great threats that we simply aren't aware of. Then there is that little problem of the fact that based on intelligence reports, based on imports of aluminum tubes for example, that Saddam is still actively pursuing a nuclear weapon. Sure, he might not be that big a threat now. Just wait a year until he has the bomb and tell me that
Sure, Iraq wasn't disarming, but they weren't trying to start a war either.
You're right, they weren't declaring official wars. They were launching attacks in the form of terrorism, and building up their WMD arsenal, pursuing nuclear weapons, so that some day they WOULD be in the position to declare war or otherwise blackmail the west (see N. Korea).
He wants weapons to maintain power inside Iraq, not outside.
And this is OK? He has used chemical weapons against the Kurds. He routinely kills and imprisons dissidents. He ENJOYS watching tapes of his security police torturing his opponents. He keeps his people poor and politically powerless. He supports Anti-American and Anti-semetic propoganda. You wonder why there are people crashing planes into skyscrapers and denonating bombs: it's because they have no freedom and little economic hope, and tyrants like this develop propoganda of hatred against their nemies to deflect blame from themselves. They blame Israel for their poverty, but they should be blaming their leaders. The first step is to take our their leaders and establish an oasis of democracy in the gulag desert that is the Middle East. Then maybe we can have a slow conversion to democracy and peace and a solution to Israel/Palestine.
North Korea, a REAL international threat, breathing down our necks. What is "our hero" George doing about them? NOTHING!
Um, HELLO. WHY does he do nothing? He CAN'T. They've got an atomic bomb, and delivery systems conveniently pointed at Seoul and Tokyo. WHY do they have the bomb? Clinton decided to "negotiate" with them. Let's not make the same mistake twice
WAR KILLS PEOPLE.
In this case, war liberates people. War will prevent future terrorism. You're not a peace activist. You're a supporter of one of the worst tyrants and oppressors that exists in the world today. "Peaceful" actions are why we are here in the first place. Sept 11 would never have happened if we had actually used our power to maintain control, instead of appeasing our enemies and making deals with the devil.
Forking Stupid Arrogant Idiot.
Not arrogant; just less myopic than you. If I weren't a regular slashdot reader I might think that your post was a troll. Unfortunately your uninformed opinion is a little too common.
Wal-Mart, Marshall Fields, Target, Toys R Us and Mervyn's have all 'independently' announced plans to collect taxes nation-wide.
Of course these brick-and-mortar retailers wouldn't mind a nation-wide sales tax. It's an easy way to drive their internet-only competition out of business.
Many people have been talking about MD5 checksums and integrity ratings. Unfortunately the client provides these, so they could easily just supply mp3s with checksums that match popular versions of files. Here's where it gets really effective: Kazaa downloads files from multiples sources. So e.g. Kazaa might download the first third of the file from source A, the second third from source B, the final third from source C. It might even try 5 or 7 users. If Any one of those sources ends up being a bad file, guess what... you just got bad mp3. In this way Overpeer could render a large portion of the files on these networks useless.
This would work especially well for larger files, like movies. It is almost impossible to download an entire movie from a small number of sources. Thus there is a good chance that you will come across a fake source sooner or later.
Seriously, in the U.S. we just recently had a paralytic dockworkers' strike. I don't think they'd be amused by this labor-saving innovation. Not that I think people should be kicked out of jobs by robots.
Back in the 80's, the Japanese started using robots to build cars. Here in the US the Auto Workers Union, afraid the robots would replace American jobs, wouldn't allow the manufacturers to use them. Now the Japanese technology is far ahead of ours and the Japanese have a competitive advantage.
Slashdot Mirror
I'm sure that most /. folks agree that war itself isn't the problem, it's that the pending war excuse seems manufactured.
Comply or be destroyed, take a look at what we can do. That's fucking terrorism, okay?
Call it what ever you want, imply that Bush is a terrorist if you like (although I said not to). The problem is that Iraq presents a threat to us and the peoples of the region, and we have to do something about it. I asked what we should do and recieved no answer. Are you saying that we should go to war but present a different reason? If so then what reason do you suggest? Because the President has given all the reasons I've already stated.
Now mod this post and the parent down, because they'd fucking off-topic.
The original post clearly mentions the war, and judging by the majority of highly-modded posts in the thread discussing the war directly, I would not consider it off-topic. We're tired of being modded down because no one has an answer to our challenge to the mainstream /. thought. If it continues then it will just show that most of the moderators are biased, and close-minded, and abusive of power, something that I do not yet believe to be the case. I'd hate to be proven wrong
Alright folks, this is obviously just an excuse to talk about the war, so let's talk about it. I'm announcing a challenge the antiwar contingent on slashdot (clearly the majority). This is not flamebait. I am asking for non-aggressive answers to an honest question. If you accept the challenge then respond: Do not mod me down to censor me.
Everyone seems to be in agreement that Saddam is an evil man. He's killed and tortured many of his own people, launched regional wars of aggression, in both cases using weapons of mass destruction. As many point out, the US in the past has made great mistakes in its foreign policy. But that has nothing to do with the present. The decision to create this monster in the past does not suggest we should allow him to continue now; on the contrary, it suggests we should slay the monster we created and repay our debt of honor to the Iraqi people.
We also have the problem that inspections in the past have failed; they did not find his biological programs (those were revealed by a son-in-law who defected, who Saddam murdered in retaliation for this revelation). Neither did they "contain" Saddam, who kicked out the inspectors in 1998, and we have every reason to believe that his weapons programs will continue and the inspectors will either be fooled or kicked out once again if the US military stands down. Neither will such supposed containment deter Saddam from passing these horrific weapons to terrorists or otherwise supporting them, leaving no fingerprints behind.
If Saddam is allowed to develop a nuclear weapon, we can expect to see a situation worse than North Korea today. Saddam's stated goal is to dominate the region, which will cause turmoil in several ways: 1st, the world economy will be thrown into chaos, as the Middle east is the main source of energy. 2nd, it will start a regional nuclear arms race, as neighboring states attempt to counter Iraq's nuclear force. 3rd, saddam's genoicidal and murderous practices will be expanded to millions more. Finally, we will have no defense against terrorism if Iraq is allowed to develop a significant deterrent.
And yes, Iraq is involved in terrorism. The main plotter behind WTC attack #1 (1993) was Ramzi Yousef, an Iraqi agent. Iraqi agents also tried to assassinate George H W Bush in 1993 along with the emir of Kuwait. There have been high level contacts throughout the 90s between Iraq and al-Qaeda, and although many speculate that the two are too "ideologically different" to cooperate, they seem to like each other enough to call their men to support each other, from the looks of their press releases. Saddam openly pays $25k to the families of Palestinian suicide bombers. We know from surveillance and defectors that Iraq was training airplane hijackers at Salman Pak before September 11th. We also know that Iraq, a police state where no one gets in or out without permission, is harboring al Zarqawi, an al Qaeda associated terrorist who also has connections with the terrorists found with Ricin in Europe.
So here's the challenge: in the face of the the terrorist threat, the regional threat, and the oppression and murder of the Iraqi people, what would you do? Do not respond by making personal attacks on President Bush. Do not respond by pointing out past US mistakes. Just tell us what you would do.
Thus, contrary to what most people would feel the thing that is holding AI up is hardware.
That's not true. The main problems of AI are representation and learning. The representation problem is, if i have a piece of information, how do i store it? In Propositional Logic equations? Neural networks? (what kind?, how?) There is no clear answer to this question. Any system that exists today has some shortcomings. Logic is very brittle, and breaks down when given bad assumptions (Garbage in garbage out). It's also not good for representing fuzzy data or for doing pattern recognition. It's also difficult to support learning when using this system. Neural networks aren't as powerful in reasoning as logic systems.
The learning problem is also very difficult. We need some way to input the data into the system. Some people believe that in order for a robot to learn the same knowledge that a human has, it would have to lead a human like life: grow up with parents, go to school, get beat up by bigger robots, etc. It wouldn't be sufficient (not in any apparent way) that a robot could simply scour the web and gain all of human knowledge. Maybe it could process some text on the subject of, say, basketball, but it won't actually understand what basketball *is* unless it plays basketball. This also applies to learning communication between intelligent agents. There is also the need to learn and encode common sense knowledge that people take for granted.
Similar to today's bot craze, there have been crazes in the past when people thought they were close to building truly intelligent machines ("expert systems" comes to mind.) However, they inevitably came up short because the hardware power wasn't there.
That is not true. Expert systems are just databases combined with propositional logic systems. Expert systems have two weaknesses: The first problem is representation. Logic is very brittle. It can't handle data that aren't represented in its assumptions. Logic doesn't have any "common sense". There isn't any way to know when your logic has shortcomings. The research in expert systems these days involves modal logic (which contains such constructs as "Necessarily X" or "Possibly X", as opposed to just "X is TRUE" or "X is False". Still, these methods have shortcomings). Expert systems only work in very specific domains. They can't learn general domains, or cross-reference domains easily, because of representation issues (and learning issues too)
The Second problem of expert systems is learning. It takes several man-years of expert input to train these systems -- and that is only for specific domains.
Hardware is the least of our problems, and it is certainly not the shortcoming of expert systems.
Right, so Eisenhower I think was a very appeasement-oriented guy. Remember the Aswan Dam, and how he thwarted the Britain-France-Israel coalition taking of the Suez Canal after the Dam was nationalized by Egypt. In retrospect, Eisenhower should have been tougher. Its a good point that the American people were pretty sick of war by 1945.
If we had launched war in 1945 or 1946, would the Russians not have surrendered immediately in the face of the American nuclear option? It is tough to say. Those communists didn't really care much if millions of their people died. Another problem would be a postwar exit strategy. We were new to the concept of nation-building in those days.. our first successes were Germany and Japan, which took several years.
Destroying Stalin in 1945 was hardly an option - he was America's ally at that time, and no-one of any political persuasion thought there was any chance at all of fighting Russia just as WWII finally drew to an end.
After the war, no one really considered him our ally. We adopted a policy of containment as early as 1948 and we knew he was trouble in 1945, which is why we were in a rush to beat him to Berlin. It's true that no one considered a preemptive invasion of the USSR at the time, and it probably would have been a diplomatic nightmare, as you point out.
But we would have saved those 20 million from the Soviet police state, millions more from the gulags, tens of millions from poverty under Communism, and hundreds of thousands from the proxy wars in Korea, Vietnam, Afghanistan, we would not have had to prop up all those terrible regimes, and the proliferation problems we face today would be significantly less.
So it's easy for me to say this in hindsight, but nevertheless, it would have been wise to crush Stalin in 1945. The Cold War was in fact the worst case of appeasement in the 20th century, worse than the appeasement of Hitler, just due to the existence of nuclear weapons.
Thanks for replying instead of modding me down. And thanks for keeping an open mind
You are correct. There are 2^120 states. Thank you.
why not? you guys did a great job of dallying while pakistan and north korea built the bomb.
So let me summarize your logic: "We made terrible mistakes in the past, so let's repeat them." Thank God the President has more sense than you.
that isreal has the bomb and the u.s. continues to do nothing.
Israel is also an open democracy with elections, a free press, and (ironically enough) more rights for palestinians than any other country in the middle east. It also hasn't the history of invading its neighbors for their oil (like Saddam) or of blackmailing the west for aid (like North Korea). Israel is also our ally unlike the others. Israel is also surrounded by enemies who have openly promised to rid the world of Jews in a second if there were no threat of retribution.
[Long List of Mistakes we've made in the past]
Right. So we have a moral responsibility to the people of the middle east to rid them of the monster we created. Let's not leave this problem to fester until Saddam gets a nuclear weapon, at which point we will have utter and total chaos.
the us backed hussein for a decade because it was looking for someone to keep iran in line. no one gave a damn about the "iraqi people" from 1979 until last week. so why, all of a sudden, is it the united state's number one priority?
Because George W. Bush is a man of greater character than his predecessors. Because in the 1980's, we were fighting the greatest evil mankind has ever witnessed -- communism -- which took the lives of over 20 million people. Because we failed to destroy Stalin in 1945 before he got the atomic bomb. Because we engaged in a costly peace only a decade after the similarly idiotic appeasement of Hitler. Because September 11 awoke us to the true suffering of the peoples of the world, to their political powerlessness and economic hopelessness. Because we now understand the evilness and determination of our enemies. Because the President can now fight for the freedom of the Iraqi people with the majority backing of the American public. Because technology is changing the nature of the world and we must adjust to that change. Because democracies don't pick one foreign policy for all of time and stubbornly refuse to improve upon it. Because as a democracy we are constantly self-critical and strive for improvement at every stage. Because it only makes sense that we would be more helpful to others as our understanding of the world grows. Because such is the nature of progressivism, once called "liberalism". (Nowadays liberalism means criticism of the president of the U.S.)
i think the people of france know that when the us ousts a government and puts in a new one, the new puppet has a bad habit of becoming a monster later on.
I think the people of the United States also know that. That's why the US is promoting democracy in Afghanistan. And that's why we will continue to promote democracy in the Middle east -- Starting with Iraq.
I sincerely pray that this parent post was a troll, however, based on my personal experience with people's opinion it probably is not.
For anyone interested in the actual issues surrounding the war on Iraq, see my webpage: http://www.tpengster.com/bad.html
Thank you for keeping an open mind and contributing your thoughts.
From the front page of the site (www.cantrip.com)
cantrip: (kän tRip), n. (Chiefly Scot.)
1. a magical charm or enchantment; 2. an
elaborate deception or prank.
corpus: (kôr pus), n., pl. -pora,
1. a complete set of writings; 2. a dead body.
Congratulations, Slashdot. YHBT
You have missed the point entirely that I have just demonstrated a game that can be played on a 3x4 board
We're not talking about your silly examples. We're talking about Chess.
Chess, like many problems we use AI to solve, is TOO COMPLEX to be reduced to a mathematical formula. That is the whole point of doing search, of heuristics, etc. If a solution algorithm exists, we use the algorithm, not search. In chess we must search.
Some problems, despite enormous complexity, CAN be solved because the problem space is small enough that we can dedicate a few computers to searching out the entire problem space. Chess is not one of those problems, because the problem space is too large. As long as your magical algorithm doesn't exist, Chess will continue to be a valuable problem area where we can test our AI techniques.
(Still waiting for your solution for white to win)
The question isn't how many states, the question is the complexity of the mathmatical algorithm required to solve it.
The point being that chess is a, theoretically, *solvable* game.
The precise solution isn't known, although we have a good deal of empirical data regarding possible solutions. (Although white to win has been proven)
The chess computers rely on this empirical data, not on thinking. They *compute.* Big deal.
Go is the Holy Grail, and they ain't even close. To date no one has made a Go playing program that can reasonably hold it's own against even a relative novice.
I don't really care how far down into a tree a modern processor has time to search. It doesn't indicate any sort of "intelligence" in the holy grail sense of AI. Chess is a very limited, structured problem.
There's no reason it must be that way. Nothing is stopping you from writing a logic engine to play chess moves. John McCarthy suggested that this would be extremely useful for reviving AI (I personally think logic is not a good foundation). Similarly nothing is preventing you from designing a neural network to output chess moves, or using any other system not heavily based on this structure of search.
Whatever system you do come up with WILL require lots of computation. The human brain does a lot of computation, in a massively parallel fashion.
I don't know what this holy-grail-type intelligence is that you speak of, but this is a common problem in AI: once something is solved, it's no longer considered AI! But just because some solution isn't "magic" doesn't mean its useless
It's also important to note that search is neither solved nor unimportant. Every field of AI employs search at some level, in one form or another. (Searching the web, planning etc..) Chess was integral in pushing along some of those fields and may produce some useful results yet.
Changing SMTP means switching over every SMTP server and relay.. that's a lot of work and there's a lot of financial resistance to that.
On the other hand this micropayment system can be implemented on TOP Of SMTP... using a server that issues digitally signed tickets, which can simply be appended as an attachment to the emails.
Certainly this system will meet some resistance as well, but much much less. It will only require the clients to change what they are using, not the servers. However in the long term we could probably consider a replacement for SMTP... for example we could roll out the client code together with the client code for this Penny Black system. Then, if this system gets wide spread then people can deploy replacement-for-SMTP servers confident that clients will be able to use them
Only Mr. J. Random Public need be overly concerned. You are a *specific* individual, which changes the rules, and the odds, entirely.
Unless I have some way to measure those odds, I can only use the average given to me. I fly an "average" amount. And assuming a standard (Gaussian) distribution, most people would be around that average.
The article does not mention how microsoft could roll this out. Admittedly the ticket system would be better than changing the SMTP protocol, since it could be added on top of SMTP. But we would still need an incentive for people to start buying the tickets before people can block ticketless senders. In addition there is the problem of legitimate automated emails. Will whitelisting be effective enough to allow these through? What about bounce notices? etc..
So don't bother spending the rest of your life looking over your shoulder for asteroids. *You* are far more likely to die by having a plane fall on you.
Um... the chance that one or more people will be killed by plane today is much higher than the chance that one or more people will be killed by asteroid. However, if their statistic is correct, then *I* am just as likely to die by plane crash as I am by asteroid. So I should be equally as worried.
Who is to say that with the combined ability of every nation on earth that there wouldnt be a way to put enough explosion on target to move such an object?
Just don't let France in on it. They'd probably call for us to "double, triple" the number of telescopes
According to PBS, "George W. Bush would have widened his 537-vote victory to a 1,665-vote margin if the recount ordered by the Florida Supreme Court would have been allowed to continue, using standards that would have allowed even faintly dimpled "undervotes" to be counted." And if the popular vote is what would have counted, maybe Bush's election strategy would have been different -- and perhaps he would have won that one too. One thing I am glad of is that Gore is not president today. The man has no political identity or ideas of his own besides opposing George W. Bush -- nor does most of the American Left, sans the New Republic and Thomas Friedman and very few other exceptions.
I think computer vs human Go matches would be much more interesting now,
Computer Go isn't advanced enough to make the matches interesting. Not too long ago a professional 1-dan (9-dan being the highest rank) played against a computer program giving it a 25 stone advantage. The human still won. (For those of you who haven't played go, 25 stones is HUGE. That would be like giving up a queen, two rooks, and both bishops)
chess is nice, but most progresses in chess have been due to speed increases in hardware and optimizations, hence allowing the computer to overpower the human with depth of search.
Because search is exponential, speed increases in hardware won't have much effect on search depth. For example, it might take a 1000-fold increase in speed to increase search depth by 2. The real improvements have been in better search algorithms, heuristics, and tuned evaluation functions. Chess is easier than go for two reasons: 1) the branching factor is a lot smaller, so less to search; 2) evaluation is MUCH easier.
Agreed. That's not my question. My question is: So what? Why is this a reason to start a war? Some claim that if an "appropriate authority" have made a "solid legal demand" for information and action, and that demand is ignored or rebuffed, then it is an appropriate excuse to "immediately remove by force" the person who failed to obey orders (with "UN", "Disarm Iraq" and "War" being the three example fillers). I happen to believe that there should be some more levels of negotiation in between failure to comply and ALL OUT WAR.
The problem is that there have already been several levels of "negotiation", all of which consist of Saddam rejecting everything until we threaten war. This has been going on for 10 years now, in the meantime which Clinton allowed him to develop his WMD. In addition, he poses a unique new threat now that terrorists provide a delivery vehicle for his WMD capabilities. And now we are learning that in fact Saddam is harboring and supporting terrorists connected to the ricin terrorists in Europe. Let's face it, the previous Administrations, Clinton and Bush I, really dropped the ball on this. In addition, Saddam continues to maintain his grip on power throw the torture, rape, killing, and imprisonment of his political enemies. He lets his people suffer through sanctions by showing the world that he cannot be trusted with money, as he will simply use it to construct WMD. No peace-loving freedom-loving person could support such a tyrant.
Is that a sufficient reason to "immediately remove by force" Mr. [Cheney]? Apparently not. Hypocracy is so ugly.
The goal of American Foreign Policy is not "consistency" with how we treat US citizens. It is to protect the American people. And unfortunately, WMD/terrorism are quite different from anything Cheney has been even accused of. For you to equate the two morally says quite a bit about your powers of moral judgment
Bush talks like Iraq is ready to jump out and take over the world unless we stop him. Go look at what really happened. Iraq attacked in 1990. UN responded. Iraq Defeated. Iraq withdraws. Iraq hasn't peeped outside their borders since 1991.
Let's see. Saddam openly supports terrorism against Israel by paying $25k to the families of suicide bombers. Iraqi agents were known to be involved in the WTC bombing in 1993. Tried to assisinate George Bush Sr. the same year. He's been negotiating with Al Qaeda ever since, no one denies that. In fact this Zarqawi character has been holed up in Baghdad for months, and guess what, you don't just walk into a police state by accident. They know that you are there, and the Iraqis are actively supporting him and his thugs in launching chemical attacks abroad. We also know that terrorist camps around Baghdad were practicing hijacking mock airplanes before Sept 11, based on satellite photos. It doesn't take a rocket scientest to figure out what is going on. This isn't a pre-emptive strike: the first attacks were already launched: by Iraq. No one predicted Sept 11. For us to fail to predict a future attack or to allow states to sponsor future attacks would be a huge failure of policy, and would require a great poverty of imagination on the part of our planners. Thankfully our leaders don't sure yours.CIA rates Iraq as non-threat unless attacked first.
CIA is slowly coming around. First they were saying there was no connection to Al Qaeda. Now they are admitting that. Soon they will be seeing that Saddam is a great threat- wait till the war is over, I predict that the information pouring out of Iraq that was previously locked down by their security services will be something like the outpouring from the KGB after the fall of the USSR. There will be many great threats that we simply aren't aware of. Then there is that little problem of the fact that based on intelligence reports, based on imports of aluminum tubes for example, that Saddam is still actively pursuing a nuclear weapon. Sure, he might not be that big a threat now. Just wait a year until he has the bomb and tell me that
Sure, Iraq wasn't disarming, but they weren't trying to start a war either.
You're right, they weren't declaring official wars. They were launching attacks in the form of terrorism, and building up their WMD arsenal, pursuing nuclear weapons, so that some day they WOULD be in the position to declare war or otherwise blackmail the west (see N. Korea).
He wants weapons to maintain power inside Iraq, not outside.
And this is OK? He has used chemical weapons against the Kurds. He routinely kills and imprisons dissidents. He ENJOYS watching tapes of his security police torturing his opponents. He keeps his people poor and politically powerless. He supports Anti-American and Anti-semetic propoganda. You wonder why there are people crashing planes into skyscrapers and denonating bombs: it's because they have no freedom and little economic hope, and tyrants like this develop propoganda of hatred against their nemies to deflect blame from themselves. They blame Israel for their poverty, but they should be blaming their leaders. The first step is to take our their leaders and establish an oasis of democracy in the gulag desert that is the Middle East. Then maybe we can have a slow conversion to democracy and peace and a solution to Israel/Palestine.
North Korea, a REAL international threat, breathing down our necks. What is "our hero" George doing about them? NOTHING!
Um, HELLO. WHY does he do nothing? He CAN'T. They've got an atomic bomb, and delivery systems conveniently pointed at Seoul and Tokyo. WHY do they have the bomb? Clinton decided to "negotiate" with them. Let's not make the same mistake twice
WAR KILLS PEOPLE.
In this case, war liberates people. War will prevent future terrorism. You're not a peace activist. You're a supporter of one of the worst tyrants and oppressors that exists in the world today. "Peaceful" actions are why we are here in the first place. Sept 11 would never have happened if we had actually used our power to maintain control, instead of appeasing our enemies and making deals with the devil.
Forking Stupid Arrogant Idiot.
Not arrogant; just less myopic than you. If I weren't a regular slashdot reader I might think that your post was a troll. Unfortunately your uninformed opinion is a little too common.Wal-Mart, Marshall Fields, Target, Toys R Us and Mervyn's have all 'independently' announced plans to collect taxes nation-wide. Of course these brick-and-mortar retailers wouldn't mind a nation-wide sales tax. It's an easy way to drive their internet-only competition out of business.
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A21
http://slate.msn.com/id/2078104/
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A16
http://www.boston.com/dailyglobe2/035/oped/Rebuil
http://www.chron.com/cs/CDA/story.hts/editorial/1
http://www.nypost.com/postopinion/editorial/68231
http://www.timesonline.co.uk/article/0,,482-56453
http://www.nytimes.com/2003/02/03/opinion/03ALDR.
http://www.msnbc.com/news/867640.asp?0cv=KB10
http://www.weeklystandard.com/Content/Public/Arti
http://www.time.com/time/covers/1101030210/sctone
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A13
http://www.philly.com/mld/inquirer/news/editorial
http://www2.bostonherald.com/news/columnists/bev0
Many people have been talking about MD5 checksums and integrity ratings. Unfortunately the client provides these, so they could easily just supply mp3s with checksums that match popular versions of files. Here's where it gets really effective: Kazaa downloads files from multiples sources. So e.g. Kazaa might download the first third of the file from source A, the second third from source B, the final third from source C. It might even try 5 or 7 users. If Any one of those sources ends up being a bad file, guess what... you just got bad mp3. In this way Overpeer could render a large portion of the files on these networks useless.
This would work especially well for larger files, like movies. It is almost impossible to download an entire movie from a small number of sources. Thus there is a good chance that you will come across a fake source sooner or later.
Seriously, in the U.S. we just recently had a paralytic dockworkers' strike. I don't think they'd be amused by this labor-saving innovation. Not that I think people should be kicked out of jobs by robots.
Back in the 80's, the Japanese started using robots to build cars. Here in the US the Auto Workers Union, afraid the robots would replace American jobs, wouldn't allow the manufacturers to use them. Now the Japanese technology is far ahead of ours and the Japanese have a competitive advantage.