The difference is in what questions can be processed. In the Chinese Room, only questions that have been specifically answered in the "stored data" can be answered successfuly. With true understanding, one can take the rule set behind the individual answers, and apply it to any of a wide variety of possible inputs. The theory can further be taken and linked with other disciplines, related to history, to philosophy (where appropriate). It's the understanding of the underlying principles that makes the difference. And again, without knowing what the kid told them, it's entirely possible he doesn't really have more than a cursory understanding of what he's talking about.
It may not even be pure regurgitation. Remembering back to when I was that age, I understood a hell of a lot, but as I grew up I realized that there was a lot of nuance and finer detail that I was lacking. And like I said, the kid's comment about flying cars and anti-gravity shows that level of thought process. Yes, he's a very verbal kid (assuming the translation came across correctly), and that's a very pretty definition of anti-gravity. But it's also the statement of a child who just thinks anti-grav is soooooo cool, and hasn't really integrated the whole thing into a more wholistic understanding of the world around him.
Hah, touche. I keep forgetting that I'd be considered odd by a lot of people for maintaining a conversant level of knowledge on a wide variety of subjects.
Damn American school systems, beating the joy of learning out of everybody:-(
Potential for human intelligence, huh? I suppose if you want everybody to be hyper-specialized and not have any broad understanding of things like art, philosophy, history, or any other fields outside their focus, then this is a godsend.
I call bullshit on the kid finishing high school in 9 months. Even if he can read something just once and remember it (and integrate it perfectly with everything else), to cover all the material done in high school and middle school in 9 months would give him time to sit at a desk reading, and sleep, and that's about it. The sheer volume of information that you're exposed to would require him to be a speed reader, as well as leaving no time for reflection. I bet the kid knows next to nothing about history -- even the history of physics is probably shaky for him. And that's not worthless information, by any means.
I don't think that's necessarily true. I was homeschooled until 7th grade, and although I wasn't totally isolated, I didn't have nearly the "normal" socialization experience up until that point. Yes, it was a bit harder than for other kids who'd had the regular experience the whole way through, but my personality changed a lot since then, and I became a lot more social in the second year of high school or so. It is possible to change your social patterns, conciously even, later in life.
Since nobody's taken the time to question the kid for days on end, how does the Chinese Room apply here? The kid's supposed to be a genius in physics, so his parents stuffed him full of random physics facts. It's not that far-fetched. And the fact that he wants to join CERN "to learn how to apply superstring theory to flying cars" sorta proves that he really has no idea what it actually means to study physics. Yes, he gave a nice prettied up version of the definition of anti-gravity, but all the kid really said was, "I want to make cars float, even though gravity is pulling on them".
Windows (many variants), Mac OSX, Linux (many many variants), Solaris, *BSD, up-and-comers like SkyOS...
Seems like we already have at least 5 solid OSs competing in the market, and that's if you count all Linux variants as one. Just because the ones you like don't have greater market share doesn't mean the ecosystem is broken. You CAN successfully run only Linux, and get just as much done as on Windows. You CAN run only Mac OSX or only FreeBSD.
Exactly. Operating systems are difficult as hell. Google is, if anything, making applications that will run on the existing "OS" of HTML, Javascript, and xml. It's as useful on any machine, no matter what "true OS" you use, and it doesn't cost them a dime... all their efforts can be devoted to the applications on top of it, which is where the money comes from.
I see your point, I really do. It's underhanded, and it's dishonest. And if it works, it's also the smartest thing they can do. To really beat the PS3, they need mass adoption, so if the 2 million people that do get it come out of their rooms a week later, blinking in the sudden glare of natural light, and proclaim that it's the best thing ever, more people will buy it to see for themselves than would have if they just saturated the market up front.
It sucks, though, cuz I want one early, but I'm not gonna go do this rat race bullshit to get it.:-(
Our best economic growth and even a revolution, an indisutrial revolution, which transformed the US and the world came about becasue of the very libertarian and lassie-faire attitude the government held of the free market. Unfortunately the working conditions were not very good and tended to cause a populist uprising. Fortunately they formed unions and didn't overthrow the government - or vote red.
And those two things couldn't have had ANY causal relationship, could they? It's just coincidence that the exploitation of millions of laborers through poor working conditions happened to lead to an economic boom for the wealthy few, right?
Damn those dirty lazy hippie bums working 20 hours a day in the coal mines. They almost voted communist!
Uptime key because people in business have this little personality tic where they don't like turning away customers for two days while the sysadmin reboots to try out different kernel configurations...
This makes no sense. Your credit card slip at point of sale requires you to sign, because it says "I the cardholder agree to the purchase amount" or whatever. So you sign that. But the credit card company is never going to know whether the back of your card has the signature on it or not. By signing the slip, you agree that you are entitled to charge money to the card, and agree to pay it, so why do they care what you put on the back of the card? It's not like you can go use it, and then try to reverse the charges because "I hadn't signed the card at the time, so it doesn't count." Nobody's going to give a shit, because you already formed a legally binding contract by signing the receipt.
I'm not saying it may not legally be true, but it's retarded as hell.
Do you think it's possible that the current state of this site is not ALL that it's going to be, in the long run?
Jesus, everyone on here is assuming that it's taken MS two years to catch up to this, and all the resources of the company have gone into making this one rather light-featured website.
Windows live lets you program your own gadgets that anybody can then add to their page... does google home let you do anything other than collect RSS feeds as far as custom content?
How about, say, the continuum of monkeys and apes, from the chimpanzee up to the great ape, and then humans? The larger and more human-like animals are populations that diverged at one point or another and "advanced" (for lack of a better term) towards homo sapiens. You can see this not only in their physical characteristics, but in their mental makeup as well. Several of the more highly evolved primates use tools in the wild.
And don't pull out that bullshit, "if they turned into humans, there wouldn't be any apes left" thing. Divergence occurs, in many cases, when a smallish population is cut off from interbreeding with the rest of the species at large and subjected to unusual pressures by natural selection. The rest of the species can continue just fine in the habitat in which they evolved, while the offshoot diverges enough to become a seperate species.
So how about it? You have living examples of many branches along the primate evolutionary tree, and a clear path of evolution based on physical characteristics and fossil evidence. You also have some more intermediate steps that didn't survive as distinct groups, such as the Lucy skeleton.
Absolutely brilliant. That's totally correct. Some artists are good, and work WITH the limitations of their medium to produce something truly amazing -- I challenge anyone to tell me with a straight face that Annie Hall would look better digitally remastered onto DVD than as a worn out old VHS. Some don't understand the limitations, get screwed over by them, and then try to erase their mistakes when something better comes along, like Lucas.
I hadn't tried that yet, I was just talking about the panels sections. Anyway, it's not perfect, but it's a vast improvement over what they used to have.
Woah. I tried start.com a month ago, and it was crap. The default preview page came up with about 20 meaningless panels, most of which had giant images plastered all over the place. It was cluttered and crap compared to google's personal homepage.
The way it looks now is, granted, a blatant rip off of google. But it captures all the good aspects: clean, no random images, just the information I want to see, at my fingertips, easily reconfigurable by dragging (the old one made you delete an entry from one column, then go through an extremely painful process to add it to another). The change between the old and new versions is pretty strong proof that the designers know why people like Google.
I agree with this completely. So many Windows users decided long ago that command lines are useless for anything, but this is just because the Windows Command Shell sucks. KDE/Gnome have the same functionality in their graphical shells as windows, if not moreso (KDE got spring-loaded folders, hell yeah!), yet I rarely find myself opening them. It's much easier to just do whatever you need in the command line, provided you're used to it.
And responding to the grandparent, I learned my first programming in RealBasic (Mac approximation of Real Basic) and on Hypertext before that. RealBasic had command completion, but when I got to college I did my C++ with Pico and the command line, and once you learn a few simple tricks it's just as easy as visual studio. To this day, I'm indifferent about using a "development environment". Give me Kate for multiple open files and syntax highlighting, and I'm just as productive as with Visual Studio. I agree with the article in that doing it without autocomplete can force you to have a better mental grasp of what you're coding. You have to hold more in your head about what your system does and what other systems it calls, so it's more of a direct brain-dump than a "what functions can I call at this point" sort of thing.
I'm actually not big into this... I used to play some fake games with my dad when I was about 8, and did maybe 2 months of a GURPS campaign with a couple friends in early high school.
That said, assuming I'm not misinterpreting what other people get out of it, I think you've missed the point. Having complex, unique, original stories isn't where this gets creative. It's not a narrative form well-suited to telling Tolkien-quality stories. Yes, you can have some neat elements in it, but you're not going to have a bunch of pre-written dialogue and some perfectly scripted ending. The creative part comes from the fact that the setting is just that: a setting. And within that, you and a number of other people _roleplay_. You actually take on the part of a character, and have them interact with other people also playing characters, and an all powerful DM who represents the rest of reality.
It's intensely creative, because you are essentially improvising an entire shared experience, of which the main experience takes place almost completely in your imagination. The rules are just there to keep everybody on the same page, and give them a framework within which they can do this creation. Unlike a computer game, if a character "dies" and the GM decides that they aren't supposed to, they can change it. If someone goes up against a monster they should have no chance of beating and gets a lucky die roll, the GM can say that they die anyway. The die rolls don't _have_ to mean anything. The main part is about the interaction and imagination.
And in fact, it is reasonable to interpret from the fair use provisions in copyright law that I AM entitled to download a digital backup copy of any media I have bought on another format.
Perhaps the real message is that consumers as a whole don't CARE about the latest and greatest storage media, and would rather not pay for it either through taxes OR "voluntarily".
Slashdot Mirror
The difference is in what questions can be processed. In the Chinese Room, only questions that have been specifically answered in the "stored data" can be answered successfuly. With true understanding, one can take the rule set behind the individual answers, and apply it to any of a wide variety of possible inputs. The theory can further be taken and linked with other disciplines, related to history, to philosophy (where appropriate). It's the understanding of the underlying principles that makes the difference. And again, without knowing what the kid told them, it's entirely possible he doesn't really have more than a cursory understanding of what he's talking about.
It may not even be pure regurgitation. Remembering back to when I was that age, I understood a hell of a lot, but as I grew up I realized that there was a lot of nuance and finer detail that I was lacking. And like I said, the kid's comment about flying cars and anti-gravity shows that level of thought process. Yes, he's a very verbal kid (assuming the translation came across correctly), and that's a very pretty definition of anti-gravity. But it's also the statement of a child who just thinks anti-grav is soooooo cool, and hasn't really integrated the whole thing into a more wholistic understanding of the world around him.
Hah, touche. I keep forgetting that I'd be considered odd by a lot of people for maintaining a conversant level of knowledge on a wide variety of subjects.
:-(
Damn American school systems, beating the joy of learning out of everybody
Potential for human intelligence, huh? I suppose if you want everybody to be hyper-specialized and not have any broad understanding of things like art, philosophy, history, or any other fields outside their focus, then this is a godsend.
I call bullshit on the kid finishing high school in 9 months. Even if he can read something just once and remember it (and integrate it perfectly with everything else), to cover all the material done in high school and middle school in 9 months would give him time to sit at a desk reading, and sleep, and that's about it. The sheer volume of information that you're exposed to would require him to be a speed reader, as well as leaving no time for reflection. I bet the kid knows next to nothing about history -- even the history of physics is probably shaky for him. And that's not worthless information, by any means.
I don't think that's necessarily true. I was homeschooled until 7th grade, and although I wasn't totally isolated, I didn't have nearly the "normal" socialization experience up until that point. Yes, it was a bit harder than for other kids who'd had the regular experience the whole way through, but my personality changed a lot since then, and I became a lot more social in the second year of high school or so. It is possible to change your social patterns, conciously even, later in life.
Since nobody's taken the time to question the kid for days on end, how does the Chinese Room apply here? The kid's supposed to be a genius in physics, so his parents stuffed him full of random physics facts. It's not that far-fetched. And the fact that he wants to join CERN "to learn how to apply superstring theory to flying cars" sorta proves that he really has no idea what it actually means to study physics. Yes, he gave a nice prettied up version of the definition of anti-gravity, but all the kid really said was, "I want to make cars float, even though gravity is pulling on them".
Windows (many variants), Mac OSX, Linux (many many variants), Solaris, *BSD, up-and-comers like SkyOS...
Seems like we already have at least 5 solid OSs competing in the market, and that's if you count all Linux variants as one. Just because the ones you like don't have greater market share doesn't mean the ecosystem is broken. You CAN successfully run only Linux, and get just as much done as on Windows. You CAN run only Mac OSX or only FreeBSD.
Exactly. Operating systems are difficult as hell. Google is, if anything, making applications that will run on the existing "OS" of HTML, Javascript, and xml. It's as useful on any machine, no matter what "true OS" you use, and it doesn't cost them a dime... all their efforts can be devoted to the applications on top of it, which is where the money comes from.
I see your point, I really do. It's underhanded, and it's dishonest. And if it works, it's also the smartest thing they can do. To really beat the PS3, they need mass adoption, so if the 2 million people that do get it come out of their rooms a week later, blinking in the sudden glare of natural light, and proclaim that it's the best thing ever, more people will buy it to see for themselves than would have if they just saturated the market up front.
:-(
It sucks, though, cuz I want one early, but I'm not gonna go do this rat race bullshit to get it.
Damn those dirty lazy hippie bums working 20 hours a day in the coal mines. They almost voted communist!
Uptime key because people in business have this little personality tic where they don't like turning away customers for two days while the sysadmin reboots to try out different kernel configurations...
This makes no sense. Your credit card slip at point of sale requires you to sign, because it says "I the cardholder agree to the purchase amount" or whatever. So you sign that. But the credit card company is never going to know whether the back of your card has the signature on it or not. By signing the slip, you agree that you are entitled to charge money to the card, and agree to pay it, so why do they care what you put on the back of the card? It's not like you can go use it, and then try to reverse the charges because "I hadn't signed the card at the time, so it doesn't count." Nobody's going to give a shit, because you already formed a legally binding contract by signing the receipt.
I'm not saying it may not legally be true, but it's retarded as hell.
Do you think it's possible that the current state of this site is not ALL that it's going to be, in the long run? Jesus, everyone on here is assuming that it's taken MS two years to catch up to this, and all the resources of the company have gone into making this one rather light-featured website.
Windows live lets you program your own gadgets that anybody can then add to their page... does google home let you do anything other than collect RSS feeds as far as custom content?
Despite the fact that they have a "Firefox support coming soon" banner at the top, the page works just fine for me in Firefox...
How about, say, the continuum of monkeys and apes, from the chimpanzee up to the great ape, and then humans? The larger and more human-like animals are populations that diverged at one point or another and "advanced" (for lack of a better term) towards homo sapiens. You can see this not only in their physical characteristics, but in their mental makeup as well. Several of the more highly evolved primates use tools in the wild.
And don't pull out that bullshit, "if they turned into humans, there wouldn't be any apes left" thing. Divergence occurs, in many cases, when a smallish population is cut off from interbreeding with the rest of the species at large and subjected to unusual pressures by natural selection. The rest of the species can continue just fine in the habitat in which they evolved, while the offshoot diverges enough to become a seperate species.
So how about it? You have living examples of many branches along the primate evolutionary tree, and a clear path of evolution based on physical characteristics and fossil evidence. You also have some more intermediate steps that didn't survive as distinct groups, such as the Lucy skeleton.
So... what's your answer to that?
Absolutely brilliant. That's totally correct. Some artists are good, and work WITH the limitations of their medium to produce something truly amazing -- I challenge anyone to tell me with a straight face that Annie Hall would look better digitally remastered onto DVD than as a worn out old VHS. Some don't understand the limitations, get screwed over by them, and then try to erase their mistakes when something better comes along, like Lucas.
Not now, since scotty is dead, you heartless bastard.
:-)
ok, so not the search feature itself :-P
I hadn't tried that yet, I was just talking about the panels sections. Anyway, it's not perfect, but it's a vast improvement over what they used to have.
Woah. I tried start.com a month ago, and it was crap. The default preview page came up with about 20 meaningless panels, most of which had giant images plastered all over the place. It was cluttered and crap compared to google's personal homepage.
The way it looks now is, granted, a blatant rip off of google. But it captures all the good aspects: clean, no random images, just the information I want to see, at my fingertips, easily reconfigurable by dragging (the old one made you delete an entry from one column, then go through an extremely painful process to add it to another). The change between the old and new versions is pretty strong proof that the designers know why people like Google.
I agree with this completely. So many Windows users decided long ago that command lines are useless for anything, but this is just because the Windows Command Shell sucks. KDE/Gnome have the same functionality in their graphical shells as windows, if not moreso (KDE got spring-loaded folders, hell yeah!), yet I rarely find myself opening them. It's much easier to just do whatever you need in the command line, provided you're used to it.
And responding to the grandparent, I learned my first programming in RealBasic (Mac approximation of Real Basic) and on Hypertext before that. RealBasic had command completion, but when I got to college I did my C++ with Pico and the command line, and once you learn a few simple tricks it's just as easy as visual studio. To this day, I'm indifferent about using a "development environment". Give me Kate for multiple open files and syntax highlighting, and I'm just as productive as with Visual Studio. I agree with the article in that doing it without autocomplete can force you to have a better mental grasp of what you're coding. You have to hold more in your head about what your system does and what other systems it calls, so it's more of a direct brain-dump than a "what functions can I call at this point" sort of thing.
I'm actually not big into this... I used to play some fake games with my dad when I was about 8, and did maybe 2 months of a GURPS campaign with a couple friends in early high school.
That said, assuming I'm not misinterpreting what other people get out of it, I think you've missed the point. Having complex, unique, original stories isn't where this gets creative. It's not a narrative form well-suited to telling Tolkien-quality stories. Yes, you can have some neat elements in it, but you're not going to have a bunch of pre-written dialogue and some perfectly scripted ending. The creative part comes from the fact that the setting is just that: a setting. And within that, you and a number of other people _roleplay_. You actually take on the part of a character, and have them interact with other people also playing characters, and an all powerful DM who represents the rest of reality.
It's intensely creative, because you are essentially improvising an entire shared experience, of which the main experience takes place almost completely in your imagination. The rules are just there to keep everybody on the same page, and give them a framework within which they can do this creation. Unlike a computer game, if a character "dies" and the GM decides that they aren't supposed to, they can change it. If someone goes up against a monster they should have no chance of beating and gets a lucky die roll, the GM can say that they die anyway. The die rolls don't _have_ to mean anything. The main part is about the interaction and imagination.
And in fact, it is reasonable to interpret from the fair use provisions in copyright law that I AM entitled to download a digital backup copy of any media I have bought on another format.
Perhaps the real message is that consumers as a whole don't CARE about the latest and greatest storage media, and would rather not pay for it either through taxes OR "voluntarily".
> Some catholic missionaries are teaching that condoms cause AIDS
:-)
O_O
links, please? I'd like to kill some brain cells, and I'm out of alcohol.
(hey, look, it's actually readable if you add tags
> Some catholic missionaries are teaching that condoms cause AIDS O_O links, please? I'd like to kill some brain cells, and I'm out of alcohol.