It's not actually the government asshatry that concerns me. I mean it's not cool but it isn't going away... ever. But a government needs a healthy fear of it's citizens and a government that isn't afraid of the rabble is a terrible and frightening thing indeed. So yes, I for one do welcome a return to the government hiding in shadows doing illicit things when opposed to one that feels its citizens are powerless and it can openly do illicit things.
It's people who don't understand that government must fear the common man who support measures to disarm the people.
P.S. The whole hoarding bitcoins thing is a myth. Deflationary economies work the same way inflationary economies work the pressure is just in another place. Deflation is a built in wage increase for workers. Everyone's money being worth more is more temptation to spend it because prices get lower and lower. But while prices get lower and lower companies have to continue to pay workers the same amount.
This is partially offset by their cost for materials going down but bottom line is that companies will need to increase sales to keep up. Luckily for companies, everyone makes more than before because their salary of 1 BTC/week is worth more so they can afford more, so consumption goes up.
The confusion comes from people who have bought into the idea that the economy is driven by investors. Never believe this, it's nonsense used to justify people who do nothing but add interest, increase prices, and/or reduce the quality (aka cost of production) of goods and services to "realize value" and thus make money without contributing to the economy but rather by detracting to it. Often these try to take credit for and/or mask their efforts by blending in with actual technology improvements.
The economy is driven by workers (Production) and consumers (Consumption). All value in the economy comes from workers, technology improvements for instance are the work output of engineers and researchers. Consumers purchase goods and services, goods remain part of the economy and have innate value and service availability has an innate value and the output of the service may have a value as well. Consumers generally spend pretty much everything they make.
If you must obsess over middle men (investors, lenders, salesmen, etc) then you should realize that these people want other people's money. Banks don't lend to beat inflation, banks lend to charge an interest rate that is their profit+inflation. With a deflationary system lenders can simply exclude the inflation number since the payback will be in deflated dollars and the interest deflates too. How much interest can they charge? Dunno, but it will be as much as the market will allow and so it should amount to at least the same amount of increased buying power as loans now.
No, actually it's not. They screen every donation in the US as well, that's why they have a questionnaire to eliminate high risk groups. I imagine in Canada the people doing those tests are on state salaries and would be sitting around getting paid regardless. In the US the non-profit donation driven organizations collecting blood have to pay third party labs on a per test basis. Generally those organizations run out of money to collect and screen donations before they run out of willing blood donors. It makes absolutely no sense for them to take blood from high risk groups, have more collected donations fail, and therefore have a higher cost per usable pint of blood.
All investment carries risk. High risk carries high reward but you should moderate how much you put into a high risk store like Bitcoin. Of course, bitcoin will stabilize dramatically as volume increases.
There is another bot created by a group of Isreali's awhile back that was grown to about 6 (if I remember correctly) and read children's books. It was able to convince a child psychologist it was a 6yr old child.
I haven't heard any updates on that particular project.
1. I still highly doubt that. For one I think you underestimate the size of the homosexual population. For another, I think you are forgetting frequency. It is a common myth that women can't derive pleasure from anal sex (yes, it's a myth, there are two branches of the clitoris that drop to the anal passage and appropriate stimulation can actually put women in a continuous orgasm state that can last for... well I've always gotten tired or switched to something else without finding out if there is a limit to how long it could be stimulated but 3 hours+). Women are afraid of anal sex and their fear is generally confirmed by people who don't know how to do it right. Thus they tolerate this painful experience infrequently.
2. Yes.
"I'm sorry but "these people have higher risk factors" is not acceptable when you can just screen the damned blood."
They screen all donated blood. Pre-screening dramatically cuts the cost of doing this and results in an INCREASED supply. Funding for collection and testing is a bigger factor in supply shortages than lack of donors.
Watson's relational reasoning is extremely impressive. Moreover, forming layer upon layer upon layer of relational pattern matching is exactly how the neural networks in our brains form their artificial intelligence. Watson is definitely on the right path.
I'm highly skeptical that you can "code" an AI. I believe we can code the core of it and build it a platform to live on but that we grow an AI much the way we grow our own. Popping out a fully grown human yesterday would not give you someone who could pass a turing test tomorrow. Why should it work for a machine with less powerful hardware?
I also suspect the way we grow is an important factor. Grow the brain slowly, increasing capacity and feeding it with input. It's like a potted plant. The ideal scenerio is to start with a small pot, let the roots fill it out, then increase the pot size progressively letting it fill out each one. This causes the root structure to grow as densely as possible. If you put the plant in the largest pot to begin with the root structure will be spread out more, less dense, and less efficient. Cities are the same way. This is where we see varied levels urban sprawl.
Would the same not be true for a neural network like the brain? Start with a smaller one, let it fill out and utilize that network completely, then progressively add more neurons in a consistent pattern so that it forms the most efficient and dense neural chains possible and utilizes the raw neurons available to the utmost.
If the chat bot is not able to reason and solve novel problems it is not artificially intelligent. It has to be able to derive meaning from and interpret meaning from things being communicated to it in order to be advanced enough. You should able to teach it things beyond chat via chat.
At that point calling it a chat bot doesn't really matter, that's just how it starts it's evolution, at that point it's just an AI.
It does seem as if a legitimate Turing test would involve humans who didn't know they were potentially speaking with a computer. Even better would be if they thought it was a remote working colleague. Also for it to be legitimate, the machine would need to be able to fool them indefinitely (short of some failure to come to physical meetings or physically interact in some way).
An AI working accounts receivable might be a good option.
I don't think a chat bot was what Turing had in mind in any case. A bot that was intelligent enough to be able to LEARN and SPEAK well enough that another human couldn't tell the difference between it and another human is the point.
Everything we see now is trying to win the letter of the turing test and ignoring the spirit. Turing's point was that if we can make it able to reason as well as we can we no longer have the right to deny it as intelligent life. Scripts that skip the reasoning and learning part and just try to con the judges are just attempts to cheat at the test.
It's akin to doing nothing but studying test dumps to pass an IT certification exam or memorizing the question bank to get an Amateur radio license. It being possible to cheat on Turing's test does make it a flawed test but it doesn't mean that Turing was wrong about what it would indicate if a machine passed the test WITHOUT cheating.
"It would be 21", low resolution, not capable of HD, use a ton of electricity, and eventually the phosphors would give out causing it to have wierd colors."
Yeah in 10 years vs the 2 years you can expect a modern TV to last but that is a different issue.
The point being the screen size, lower cost, improved resolution, power savings, etc ARE NOT improvements in the economy. In the 1950's a middle class home could have that $5000 TV. In 2014, someone earning the median $30k/yr income CANNOT afford a $5000 TV.
Given the rampant unemployment I'd contend the system is definitely not pulling everyone up at a phenomenal range.
The cut the 1% get isn't just numbers on a page, it translates into actual labor that is contributed by the middle class. The output of MOST of that labor is going to the 1%. The other 99% could be enjoying far more of the benefits of our collective labor if it weren't being leeched on by 1% of the population.
Actually, I'm not even concerned about the 1%. I'm concerned about the.001%.
Because Verizon has customers paying them for unrestricted access to web content, including Netflix.
But I doubt Verizon does throttling to reduce the quality of Netflix for the sake of redbox instant, it's far more likely to be about boosting their own cable service subscriptions.
"If I could trade 8 hours of my labor for 8 hours of yours on simple barter, than whatever amount of money we make as a proxy to avoid direct barter is irrelevant."
But you can't. I can trade 8hrs of my labor for the output of 3 of your hours. We each give 5 hours worth of every 8 hours we work to a "passive investor" aka someone who is leeching from the system without contributing labor of their own or who is contributing labor but each hour of their labor get traded for 10's, 100's, 1000's, or millions of hours worth of other people's labor.
The proxy system is very relevant because it abstracts this in such a way that people can't see what a lousy trade that is.
That assessment fails to account for purchasing power. Inflation does not accurately reflect purchasing power because of manufacturing and technology improvements (and quality reduction) since the 1950s. It also fails to account that the 2004 values are household vs household. In the 1950's households were generally single income whereas the majority of households are dual income now so having an equal income means getting half as much income per hour of labor worked.
So households now are contributing twice as many units of labor to society and able to purchase fewer total units of labor and natural resources vs the 50's. Where is all that labor going? Mostly to produce the excess valued consumed and stored by the top 1%.
Do you actually own your home? How about your car? You and not the bank likely owned them in the 50's and that is with a single income family.
You don't just have to factor for inflation, you also have to factor out manufacturing efficiency increases. A toaster today does not equate to the same value as a toaster in the 50's. A toaster in the 50's represents more labor and natural resources than a toaster today. A toaster today probably costs $10 but to buy something with an equivalent amount of resources as a 1950's toaster is going to cost at least $100-$200 today.
There is a form of hidden inflation where the reduced purchasing power of citizens in the western world is hidden by improving manufacturing efficiencies and reducing the quality of goods and services.
So while you might have two cars in the garage with your dual income and both mostly owned by the bank, your 1950's single income family counterpart's purchasing power would have them owning at least 4 or 5 modern cars.
It's not so much whether or not the median has risen as the huge gap between the mean and the median that tells you about the middle class. The median is a better indicator of what people do make, the median is an indicator of what they should make.
"To accept the theory that "Christus/Jesus" was merely a myth, we'd have to assume these theoretical monks were trying to "plant" erroneous information because someday people might question whether Jesus was a real person, so they wanted to make it look like it wasn't fake by including some details that looked like they were written by non-Christians."
Hardly because the Monks/Priests of the church did not believe it was a myth. They believed it was fact. And in their eyes the gospels represent absolute truth and Josephus' account was not contradictory evidence but merely an erroneous history that they corrected with information from a more authoritative source. Integrating it into the text in a way that seamlessly fit with the original, including tone, was simply "best practice" in the day.
None of this requires a conspiracy or ill will just some Monks/Priests trying to correct a history book they believe made a serious factual omission.
Actually the only piece of actual evidence of the existence of Christ as a real person is an entry in the histories written by the Jewish historian Josephus. Those histories are not originals of course, in fact they are all copies made by the Catholics. There are no shortage of changes made by those copiers including additions and changes from the original text that have been detected by comparing various copies that were altered in different ways. The only thing that makes people who know what they are talking about say Jesus probably lived vs probably did not live is the subjective opinion of a few scholars (mostly theist scholars) who studied the passages in question and subjectively think they seem like the style of Josephus.
Given the thinking of the day it would be the most natural thing in the world for a Monk to "correct" a "mistake" in a history that failed to record the trial and death of Jesus and to patch it up with the details from their bible.
Slashdot Mirror
It's not actually the government asshatry that concerns me. I mean it's not cool but it isn't going away... ever. But a government needs a healthy fear of it's citizens and a government that isn't afraid of the rabble is a terrible and frightening thing indeed. So yes, I for one do welcome a return to the government hiding in shadows doing illicit things when opposed to one that feels its citizens are powerless and it can openly do illicit things.
It's people who don't understand that government must fear the common man who support measures to disarm the people.
P.S. The whole hoarding bitcoins thing is a myth. Deflationary economies work the same way inflationary economies work the pressure is just in another place. Deflation is a built in wage increase for workers. Everyone's money being worth more is more temptation to spend it because prices get lower and lower. But while prices get lower and lower companies have to continue to pay workers the same amount.
This is partially offset by their cost for materials going down but bottom line is that companies will need to increase sales to keep up. Luckily for companies, everyone makes more than before because their salary of 1 BTC/week is worth more so they can afford more, so consumption goes up.
The confusion comes from people who have bought into the idea that the economy is driven by investors. Never believe this, it's nonsense used to justify people who do nothing but add interest, increase prices, and/or reduce the quality (aka cost of production) of goods and services to "realize value" and thus make money without contributing to the economy but rather by detracting to it. Often these try to take credit for and/or mask their efforts by blending in with actual technology improvements.
The economy is driven by workers (Production) and consumers (Consumption). All value in the economy comes from workers, technology improvements for instance are the work output of engineers and researchers. Consumers purchase goods and services, goods remain part of the economy and have innate value and service availability has an innate value and the output of the service may have a value as well. Consumers generally spend pretty much everything they make.
If you must obsess over middle men (investors, lenders, salesmen, etc) then you should realize that these people want other people's money. Banks don't lend to beat inflation, banks lend to charge an interest rate that is their profit+inflation. With a deflationary system lenders can simply exclude the inflation number since the payback will be in deflated dollars and the interest deflates too. How much interest can they charge? Dunno, but it will be as much as the market will allow and so it should amount to at least the same amount of increased buying power as loans now.
"Sure it is."
No, actually it's not. They screen every donation in the US as well, that's why they have a questionnaire to eliminate high risk groups. I imagine in Canada the people doing those tests are on state salaries and would be sitting around getting paid regardless. In the US the non-profit donation driven organizations collecting blood have to pay third party labs on a per test basis. Generally those organizations run out of money to collect and screen donations before they run out of willing blood donors. It makes absolutely no sense for them to take blood from high risk groups, have more collected donations fail, and therefore have a higher cost per usable pint of blood.
All investment carries risk. High risk carries high reward but you should moderate how much you put into a high risk store like Bitcoin. Of course, bitcoin will stabilize dramatically as volume increases.
But as the market grows there will be more transactions and therefore more fees generated without actually increasing them.
There is another bot created by a group of Isreali's awhile back that was grown to about 6 (if I remember correctly) and read children's books. It was able to convince a child psychologist it was a 6yr old child.
I haven't heard any updates on that particular project.
1. I still highly doubt that. For one I think you underestimate the size of the homosexual population. For another, I think you are forgetting frequency. It is a common myth that women can't derive pleasure from anal sex (yes, it's a myth, there are two branches of the clitoris that drop to the anal passage and appropriate stimulation can actually put women in a continuous orgasm state that can last for... well I've always gotten tired or switched to something else without finding out if there is a limit to how long it could be stimulated but 3 hours+). Women are afraid of anal sex and their fear is generally confirmed by people who don't know how to do it right. Thus they tolerate this painful experience infrequently.
2. Yes.
"I'm sorry but "these people have higher risk factors" is not acceptable when you can just screen the damned blood."
They screen all donated blood. Pre-screening dramatically cuts the cost of doing this and results in an INCREASED supply. Funding for collection and testing is a bigger factor in supply shortages than lack of donors.
It's statistically founded and if they had the balls they'd reject African American males who have crazy high infection rates.
HIV testing isn't cheap and forcing it on everyone would shrink the donor pool dramatically not increase it.
Seriously, can we just having an equal opportunity to have your blood stolen stay off the agenda for the moment?
http://www.smithsonianmag.com/innovation/a-romanian-scientist-claims-to-have-developed-artificial-blood-180947565/?no-ist
Watson's relational reasoning is extremely impressive. Moreover, forming layer upon layer upon layer of relational pattern matching is exactly how the neural networks in our brains form their artificial intelligence. Watson is definitely on the right path.
I'm highly skeptical that you can "code" an AI. I believe we can code the core of it and build it a platform to live on but that we grow an AI much the way we grow our own. Popping out a fully grown human yesterday would not give you someone who could pass a turing test tomorrow. Why should it work for a machine with less powerful hardware?
I also suspect the way we grow is an important factor. Grow the brain slowly, increasing capacity and feeding it with input. It's like a potted plant. The ideal scenerio is to start with a small pot, let the roots fill it out, then increase the pot size progressively letting it fill out each one. This causes the root structure to grow as densely as possible. If you put the plant in the largest pot to begin with the root structure will be spread out more, less dense, and less efficient. Cities are the same way. This is where we see varied levels urban sprawl.
Would the same not be true for a neural network like the brain? Start with a smaller one, let it fill out and utilize that network completely, then progressively add more neurons in a consistent pattern so that it forms the most efficient and dense neural chains possible and utilizes the raw neurons available to the utmost.
I think you replied to the wrong post. Your point is the same point I was making.
If the chat bot is not able to reason and solve novel problems it is not artificially intelligent. It has to be able to derive meaning from and interpret meaning from things being communicated to it in order to be advanced enough. You should able to teach it things beyond chat via chat.
At that point calling it a chat bot doesn't really matter, that's just how it starts it's evolution, at that point it's just an AI.
It does seem as if a legitimate Turing test would involve humans who didn't know they were potentially speaking with a computer. Even better would be if they thought it was a remote working colleague. Also for it to be legitimate, the machine would need to be able to fool them indefinitely (short of some failure to come to physical meetings or physically interact in some way).
An AI working accounts receivable might be a good option.
I don't think a chat bot was what Turing had in mind in any case. A bot that was intelligent enough to be able to LEARN and SPEAK well enough that another human couldn't tell the difference between it and another human is the point.
Everything we see now is trying to win the letter of the turing test and ignoring the spirit. Turing's point was that if we can make it able to reason as well as we can we no longer have the right to deny it as intelligent life. Scripts that skip the reasoning and learning part and just try to con the judges are just attempts to cheat at the test.
It's akin to doing nothing but studying test dumps to pass an IT certification exam or memorizing the question bank to get an Amateur radio license. It being possible to cheat on Turing's test does make it a flawed test but it doesn't mean that Turing was wrong about what it would indicate if a machine passed the test WITHOUT cheating.
"It would be 21", low resolution, not capable of HD, use a ton of electricity, and eventually the phosphors would give out causing it to have wierd colors."
Yeah in 10 years vs the 2 years you can expect a modern TV to last but that is a different issue.
The point being the screen size, lower cost, improved resolution, power savings, etc ARE NOT improvements in the economy. In the 1950's a middle class home could have that $5000 TV. In 2014, someone earning the median $30k/yr income CANNOT afford a $5000 TV.
Given the rampant unemployment I'd contend the system is definitely not pulling everyone up at a phenomenal range.
.001%.
The cut the 1% get isn't just numbers on a page, it translates into actual labor that is contributed by the middle class. The output of MOST of that labor is going to the 1%. The other 99% could be enjoying far more of the benefits of our collective labor if it weren't being leeched on by 1% of the population.
Actually, I'm not even concerned about the 1%. I'm concerned about the
I think you'll find that the census incorrectly considers those with mortgages to be homeowners. The bank owns those homes.
Because Verizon has customers paying them for unrestricted access to web content, including Netflix.
But I doubt Verizon does throttling to reduce the quality of Netflix for the sake of redbox instant, it's far more likely to be about boosting their own cable service subscriptions.
"If I could trade 8 hours of my labor for 8 hours of yours on simple barter, than whatever amount of money we make as a proxy to avoid direct barter is irrelevant."
But you can't. I can trade 8hrs of my labor for the output of 3 of your hours. We each give 5 hours worth of every 8 hours we work to a "passive investor" aka someone who is leeching from the system without contributing labor of their own or who is contributing labor but each hour of their labor get traded for 10's, 100's, 1000's, or millions of hours worth of other people's labor.
The proxy system is very relevant because it abstracts this in such a way that people can't see what a lousy trade that is.
That assessment fails to account for purchasing power. Inflation does not accurately reflect purchasing power because of manufacturing and technology improvements (and quality reduction) since the 1950s. It also fails to account that the 2004 values are household vs household. In the 1950's households were generally single income whereas the majority of households are dual income now so having an equal income means getting half as much income per hour of labor worked.
So households now are contributing twice as many units of labor to society and able to purchase fewer total units of labor and natural resources vs the 50's. Where is all that labor going? Mostly to produce the excess valued consumed and stored by the top 1%.
Do you actually own your home? How about your car? You and not the bank likely owned them in the 50's and that is with a single income family.
You don't just have to factor for inflation, you also have to factor out manufacturing efficiency increases. A toaster today does not equate to the same value as a toaster in the 50's. A toaster in the 50's represents more labor and natural resources than a toaster today. A toaster today probably costs $10 but to buy something with an equivalent amount of resources as a 1950's toaster is going to cost at least $100-$200 today.
There is a form of hidden inflation where the reduced purchasing power of citizens in the western world is hidden by improving manufacturing efficiencies and reducing the quality of goods and services.
So while you might have two cars in the garage with your dual income and both mostly owned by the bank, your 1950's single income family counterpart's purchasing power would have them owning at least 4 or 5 modern cars.
It's not so much whether or not the median has risen as the huge gap between the mean and the median that tells you about the middle class. The median is a better indicator of what people do make, the median is an indicator of what they should make.
"To accept the theory that "Christus/Jesus" was merely a myth, we'd have to assume these theoretical monks were trying to "plant" erroneous information because someday people might question whether Jesus was a real person, so they wanted to make it look like it wasn't fake by including some details that looked like they were written by non-Christians."
Hardly because the Monks/Priests of the church did not believe it was a myth. They believed it was fact. And in their eyes the gospels represent absolute truth and Josephus' account was not contradictory evidence but merely an erroneous history that they corrected with information from a more authoritative source. Integrating it into the text in a way that seamlessly fit with the original, including tone, was simply "best practice" in the day.
None of this requires a conspiracy or ill will just some Monks/Priests trying to correct a history book they believe made a serious factual omission.
Leave it to a muggle to fail to understand the power true names have over things!
Actually the only piece of actual evidence of the existence of Christ as a real person is an entry in the histories written by the Jewish historian Josephus. Those histories are not originals of course, in fact they are all copies made by the Catholics. There are no shortage of changes made by those copiers including additions and changes from the original text that have been detected by comparing various copies that were altered in different ways. The only thing that makes people who know what they are talking about say Jesus probably lived vs probably did not live is the subjective opinion of a few scholars (mostly theist scholars) who studied the passages in question and subjectively think they seem like the style of Josephus.
Given the thinking of the day it would be the most natural thing in the world for a Monk to "correct" a "mistake" in a history that failed to record the trial and death of Jesus and to patch it up with the details from their bible.