I don't know whether or not that would work, but when the seller of the car tried to convert the coins to their real value (rather than their face value) you can be sure they'd be expected to pay taxes on the increase.
Unless, of course, he deposited them in his IRA account at face value and then sold them from the IRA account. Come to think of it, if they are legal tender isn't this a way to get around the $16000 a year IRA contribution limit? Contribute the entire amount in gold eagles at face value? And then (once they've been deposited) sell them at whatever the market will bare?
The ability for idiots who shouldn't be programming in the first place to use something *easier* at the cost of society at large.
The ability of arrogant jerks who don't realize that trivial nonsense is not a neat trick (but it does trespass on others' attention span) to complicate trivial tasks, to ignore solutions to problems which have been around for 20+ years, to take pride in their ignorance a la 1990... meh... why do I bother is the question. You deserve you.
It's not about laziness. It's about dealing with unpredictability. Most modern C++ programs have to deal asynchronous entry into destructors. Mostly due to uncaught exceptions being thrown from multiple threads. If you don't use some automated mechanism for dealing with it, half your code would be dedicated to it. Not taking care of things which can be done machines is a sign of a good programmer. Oh, and programmers who aren't lazy are bad. In fact, very bad.
The particular issue described on that page might be. But, in general, American Eagle issues are "surplus" issues on "uncirculated" coins. It is also possible that the page put up by the mint is plain wrong (from the legal stand point). I don't know about your employer, but if they were true legal tender, you'd be able to buy a car with a dozen of them and only owe a sales tax on the face-value of the coins.
No, you don't want to melt them. Since they are legal tender, they can be declared at their face value for tax purposes. The moment you melt them, you'd "gain" the difference in price of the metal and the nominal value of the coin and owe taxes on it. This is different from US issuing golden eagle and such. The golden eagle is "circulated". So it cannot be used as legal tender.
Which begs the question "why not simply go by the odometer reading?" I am not sure about Holland, but in the US cars have to be inspected every year or two (depending on the state) and odometer reading can be recorded at such time. Why not use it as a measure of how much the car was used?
I don't think so. I think they are preparing for a long-term separation from Java. And Eclipse is, of course, written in Java. Actually, I am mostly hoping that they are. I am just thinking that a company which managed accurate identification of web-wide unstructured text should have no problems producing a tool which would be superb at assisting in production of structured text like C++ code.
No, I didn't misunderstand. I know it's not a tool. I just expect that once Google adapts a language on its platform, it will put some effort into producing some good tools.
Netbeans is 2nd best. VS is still #1. But that is not to say that Netbeans is bad. It's really good. It's just not Intellisense. It has it small problems and long-term problems. The small one is that it is too Java-centric. It attempts to use an AST for C++. Which is all fine and good except it doesn't know how to handle "friend". So it ends up not being aware of the methods which are visible in the friended scope. It's long-term problem is that it's in Java. And given how poorly Oracle has handled Java as a platform, it's future is becoming questionable. I certainly would not commit any large project to Java at this point -- not as my first choice. One rarely succeeds on the web by burning bridges as fast as Oracle has been doing it with Java. There is a lot of inertia built into it because the programmer base is so large, but if you look at any of their latest development, it's down-right depressing. They are slashing modules and language support from Netbeans (7.0 doesn't have Python support anymore). They are just an overall mess that brings more headaches than it solves.
Intellisense is also automated syntax checking. There is no other environment which is able to do a full parse of C++ without compilation and determine the errors. There are environment which PARTIALLY accomplish the task, but none do it fully.
Intellisense is by far the best C++ dev environment. As much as I hate having to work in Windows, homo technicus beats homo sapien any day. And I find that I write faster and better when I have the right tools than when I have a big ego. If Chrome can produce a better environment AND be the first to support all C++11 features, I'll be happy to watch MS slide into history. Until then, I expect MS programmer base to grow.
How nice of you to ignore the part of my post (majority of it) which makes your comment irrelevant. So I explained how initial conditions don't actually matter when you reach the point in time where the oscillations of the events which occurred before this administration can be considered to have long reached a steady state. And your response is to mention that I should brush up on diff eq's? Ditto to you, sir. I don't watch sports. I catch people on their stupidity for sport though. Oh, and since we now had enough time to watch the oscillations of the events put in motion by this administration to play out, I'll go ahead and mention again, that it is this and only this administration which is responsible for its abysmal performance. 10% of national resources wasted to produce.5% increase in meaningful results is a classic failure. You cannot blame it on a housing bubble anymore. Classic! It will be studied for years and year to come as a classic example of how incompetence can propel itself to power. This won't be over when Obama loses in 2012. This will be the lesson for the next 100 years. It will the defining moment of this century in American politics. We've had bubbles before. The only way a bubble's trough continues is when the current policies of price fixing are allowed to take hold. And price fixing (in various forms) is precisely what the 10% of the national resources are still wasted on for the 3rd year in a row.
The delineation is probably that any task which can be accomplished with a look-up table of under a a billion entries is not "sophisticated". Spelling certainly yields itself to such a lookup solution.
Find me a spam filter that can learn, without being explicitly *told* it made an error, and I'll start believing it's exhibiting intelligence.
Again, that's too tall an order. Find me a human being who can figure out each one of his spelling errors without external references. What if I insist that the human being correcting a spam filter's errors is acting like a teacher watching over a child who is trying to learn? Certainly you wouldn't expect the child not never make a mistake, would you? And certain mistakes would not be noticeable to a child without being first told that they are mistakes.
would argue that that's *part* of the brain, but not all of it. That's sort of lizard brain type of activity, that happens without conscious thought. Now, I suppose you could favorably compare a spam filter to a reptile (having had a snake before, those things act pretty much like robots - no real emotion or higher intelligence at all, just a wad of instincts and bayesian filters).
Why? The frontal cortex acts the same way. And, in fact, the ability to extrapolate knowledge from observed phenomena is not something one generally attributes to a lizard. A lizard wouldn't expect a sun to come up just because he's seen it many times. Such an expectation is unique to intelligence. This adaptation of expectations (or to put it in other way, moderation of instincts based on observed phenomena) is indicative of higher functions. And it is very much a Bayesian filter activity. The only missing part is "creativity". But one could argue that it's part of the extrapolation mechanism. And it is identical to a sophisticated hypothesis-forming mechanism. Since spam filters do have hypothesis-forming ability and they do adapt their behavior based on the observed data and the oversight correction, I am still not seeing how you can equate them to just a lizard.
I think your criteria probably needs some further filtering, though. For example, my spell checker starts off with a dictionary of words. When it makes a mistake, I tell it that it made a mistake, and it learns a new allowed word or spelling. I'll assert that this fits your definition of "learns on its own", even though you have to tell it that it made a mistake (just like you tell a spam filter to add something to a white list or black list). I'm not sure if you'd count a spell checker as "intelligent".
Well, no. If your spell checker realized that "necessity" is spelled with 1 "c" after being told that "necessary" is spelled with 1 "c", then it would be exhibiting a sign of intelligence. However, in general spelling is too primitive an activity (compared to reading, for example) to be used for measuring intelligence. This is as true in computers as it is in humans.
You might refine it to the following criteria - "if it learns on its own, by recognizing its own mistakes without being *told* it made a mistake, it is intelligent." This would exclude the spell checker, and probably to a great degree the spam filter.
That's too narrow. Human beings learn from feedback from their senses. Which, often enough, means they need to be "told" that they are incorrect. Let's go with the following scenario: a basketball player. He first learns how his hands respond by throwing the ball and associating the effort his hand made with the trajectory of the ball he is able to observe. This "feedback" that he gets on the initial throws allows him to make very drastic adjustments in his motions at first. This is the equivalent of the initial training of a spam filter. As the player gets better, he doesn't need to observe the ball for the full trajectory. Just it's final phase. He is making micro adjustments. Just as the spam filter makes less and less mistakes and only messes on the more subtle differences. Playing basketball may not be an act of intelligence. But it is learning. And learning from introspection, when combined with forming and testing hypothesis, becomes intelligence. Since spam filters are learning and they do form hypothesis (in the form of new testable criteria), they are intelligent.
Brain is a very sophisticated Bayesian filter. You don't "know" anything. You estimate probabilities. As the old saying goes, "when you see the sun come up everyday, you come to expect it." That is, when you observe a certain outcome to result from the same inputs, you estimate with high probability that it will continue to result from the same inputs.
A calculator is not intelligent. If its programming doesn't allow to perform a certain operation correctly, it will never perform it correctly. A word-processor is not intelligent. If it can't understand that a certain language pattern is my choice of writing style, it will never learn to understand that. It is within a word-processor's task domain, however to analyze writing styles and evaluate them. If it doesn't improve in its primary function from experience, then it's not intelligent. Spam filter do improve. They form new associations and they evaluate how useful these associations are in differentiating a spam from a non-spam. Some of these associations are fed into them. But not all. Since they are able to improve over time at its primary task, it's learning. For example, let's say it didn't know that email A was a spam a year ago (even though it was). But because of what it learned over the year, it now knows that A is a spam. It didn't necessarily learn that A's sender was a spammer. Nor did it learn that this exact subject matter is spam. It is better able to analyze the "content" of the email. For example, I mark 1 email about "wow gold" as spam. And then all emails from wow gold sellers go to the spam folder on their own. Meanwhile the emails with financials news about gold metal do not. There are many WoW gold sellers. And they use many different methods to try to fool spam filters (intentional misspellings and such). And sometimes, they distort what they say enough to actually fool such a filter. But when that happens, more often than not, I have problems following their sentence structure myself. So the kind of distortion in communication that is necessary to fool the filter is actually enough to fool a human being.
Main point: if it learns on its own, it's intelligent. If it doesn't learn from its own mistakes, it's not. This goes for both programs and people, btw. Oh, and in my view, human brain is a just a very sophisticated Bayesian filter. So as far as I am concerned, brains and spam filters work on a similar principle: learning through re-enforcement.
I am gonna stop at this point. I think you are might be stuck in a tautology... something along the lines of "it's not intelligent because its programmed and nothing programmed can be intelligent." From what I see I answered the questions that you are posing again. If ever get less emotionally invested in your position, you might enjoy rereading this discussion. If not, I wish you well anyway.
Slashdot Mirror
Correlation does not imply causation.
I don't know whether or not that would work, but when the seller of the car tried to convert the coins to their real value (rather than their face value) you can be sure they'd be expected to pay taxes on the increase.
Unless, of course, he deposited them in his IRA account at face value and then sold them from the IRA account. Come to think of it, if they are legal tender isn't this a way to get around the $16000 a year IRA contribution limit? Contribute the entire amount in gold eagles at face value? And then (once they've been deposited) sell them at whatever the market will bare?
of NYT to confess their own marching orders
blah... inline.... not intern...
Turn off intern'ing during development and only turn it on for releases. This will speed up compilation considerably.
Shouldn't it be:
(+ A (+ (* B C) (* A D)))
or did you mean this:
(+ (+ A (* B C) ) (* A D)))
Filter error: Don't use so many caps. It's like YELLING.
The ability for idiots who shouldn't be programming in the first place to use something *easier* at the cost of society at large.
The ability of arrogant jerks who don't realize that trivial nonsense is not a neat trick (but it does trespass on others' attention span) to complicate trivial tasks, to ignore solutions to problems which have been around for 20+ years, to take pride in their ignorance a la 1990... meh... why do I bother is the question. You deserve you.
It's not about laziness. It's about dealing with unpredictability. Most modern C++ programs have to deal asynchronous entry into destructors. Mostly due to uncaught exceptions being thrown from multiple threads. If you don't use some automated mechanism for dealing with it, half your code would be dedicated to it. Not taking care of things which can be done machines is a sign of a good programmer. Oh, and programmers who aren't lazy are bad. In fact, very bad.
The particular issue described on that page might be. But, in general, American Eagle issues are "surplus" issues on "uncirculated" coins. It is also possible that the page put up by the mint is plain wrong (from the legal stand point). I don't know about your employer, but if they were true legal tender, you'd be able to buy a car with a dozen of them and only owe a sales tax on the face-value of the coins.
Sorry, I meant, of course, that golden eagles are "uncirculated".
No, you don't want to melt them. Since they are legal tender, they can be declared at their face value for tax purposes. The moment you melt them, you'd "gain" the difference in price of the metal and the nominal value of the coin and owe taxes on it. This is different from US issuing golden eagle and such. The golden eagle is "circulated". So it cannot be used as legal tender.
Which begs the question "why not simply go by the odometer reading?" I am not sure about Holland, but in the US cars have to be inspected every year or two (depending on the state) and odometer reading can be recorded at such time. Why not use it as a measure of how much the car was used?
I don't think so. I think they are preparing for a long-term separation from Java. And Eclipse is, of course, written in Java. Actually, I am mostly hoping that they are. I am just thinking that a company which managed accurate identification of web-wide unstructured text should have no problems producing a tool which would be superb at assisting in production of structured text like C++ code.
No, I didn't misunderstand. I know it's not a tool. I just expect that once Google adapts a language on its platform, it will put some effort into producing some good tools.
Xcode is still GCC 4.2. MSVC 10 has most of the nice features of C++11:
http://wiki.apache.org/stdcxx/C++0xCompilerSupport
Netbeans is 2nd best. VS is still #1. But that is not to say that Netbeans is bad. It's really good. It's just not Intellisense. It has it small problems and long-term problems. The small one is that it is too Java-centric. It attempts to use an AST for C++. Which is all fine and good except it doesn't know how to handle "friend". So it ends up not being aware of the methods which are visible in the friended scope. It's long-term problem is that it's in Java. And given how poorly Oracle has handled Java as a platform, it's future is becoming questionable. I certainly would not commit any large project to Java at this point -- not as my first choice. One rarely succeeds on the web by burning bridges as fast as Oracle has been doing it with Java. There is a lot of inertia built into it because the programmer base is so large, but if you look at any of their latest development, it's down-right depressing. They are slashing modules and language support from Netbeans (7.0 doesn't have Python support anymore). They are just an overall mess that brings more headaches than it solves.
I have a better check for C++ programmers who write C-spaghetti code with classes: they don't have a favorite IDE.
Intellisense is also automated syntax checking. There is no other environment which is able to do a full parse of C++ without compilation and determine the errors. There are environment which PARTIALLY accomplish the task, but none do it fully.
Intellisense is by far the best C++ dev environment. As much as I hate having to work in Windows, homo technicus beats homo sapien any day. And I find that I write faster and better when I have the right tools than when I have a big ego. If Chrome can produce a better environment AND be the first to support all C++11 features, I'll be happy to watch MS slide into history. Until then, I expect MS programmer base to grow.
How nice of you to ignore the part of my post (majority of it) which makes your comment irrelevant. So I explained how initial conditions don't actually matter when you reach the point in time where the oscillations of the events which occurred before this administration can be considered to have long reached a steady state. And your response is to mention that I should brush up on diff eq's? Ditto to you, sir. I don't watch sports. I catch people on their stupidity for sport though. Oh, and since we now had enough time to watch the oscillations of the events put in motion by this administration to play out, I'll go ahead and mention again, that it is this and only this administration which is responsible for its abysmal performance. 10% of national resources wasted to produce .5% increase in meaningful results is a classic failure. You cannot blame it on a housing bubble anymore. Classic! It will be studied for years and year to come as a classic example of how incompetence can propel itself to power. This won't be over when Obama loses in 2012. This will be the lesson for the next 100 years. It will the defining moment of this century in American politics. We've had bubbles before. The only way a bubble's trough continues is when the current policies of price fixing are allowed to take hold. And price fixing (in various forms) is precisely what the 10% of the national resources are still wasted on for the 3rd year in a row.
Is there a bright line somewhere there?
The delineation is probably that any task which can be accomplished with a look-up table of under a a billion entries is not "sophisticated". Spelling certainly yields itself to such a lookup solution.
Find me a spam filter that can learn, without being explicitly *told* it made an error, and I'll start believing it's exhibiting intelligence.
Again, that's too tall an order. Find me a human being who can figure out each one of his spelling errors without external references. What if I insist that the human being correcting a spam filter's errors is acting like a teacher watching over a child who is trying to learn? Certainly you wouldn't expect the child not never make a mistake, would you? And certain mistakes would not be noticeable to a child without being first told that they are mistakes.
would argue that that's *part* of the brain, but not all of it. That's sort of lizard brain type of activity, that happens without conscious thought. Now, I suppose you could favorably compare a spam filter to a reptile (having had a snake before, those things act pretty much like robots - no real emotion or higher intelligence at all, just a wad of instincts and bayesian filters).
Why? The frontal cortex acts the same way. And, in fact, the ability to extrapolate knowledge from observed phenomena is not something one generally attributes to a lizard. A lizard wouldn't expect a sun to come up just because he's seen it many times. Such an expectation is unique to intelligence. This adaptation of expectations (or to put it in other way, moderation of instincts based on observed phenomena) is indicative of higher functions. And it is very much a Bayesian filter activity. The only missing part is "creativity". But one could argue that it's part of the extrapolation mechanism. And it is identical to a sophisticated hypothesis-forming mechanism. Since spam filters do have hypothesis-forming ability and they do adapt their behavior based on the observed data and the oversight correction, I am still not seeing how you can equate them to just a lizard.
I think your criteria probably needs some further filtering, though. For example, my spell checker starts off with a dictionary of words. When it makes a mistake, I tell it that it made a mistake, and it learns a new allowed word or spelling. I'll assert that this fits your definition of "learns on its own", even though you have to tell it that it made a mistake (just like you tell a spam filter to add something to a white list or black list). I'm not sure if you'd count a spell checker as "intelligent".
Well, no. If your spell checker realized that "necessity" is spelled with 1 "c" after being told that "necessary" is spelled with 1 "c", then it would be exhibiting a sign of intelligence. However, in general spelling is too primitive an activity (compared to reading, for example) to be used for measuring intelligence. This is as true in computers as it is in humans.
You might refine it to the following criteria - "if it learns on its own, by recognizing its own mistakes without being *told* it made a mistake, it is intelligent." This would exclude the spell checker, and probably to a great degree the spam filter.
That's too narrow. Human beings learn from feedback from their senses. Which, often enough, means they need to be "told" that they are incorrect. Let's go with the following scenario: a basketball player. He first learns how his hands respond by throwing the ball and associating the effort his hand made with the trajectory of the ball he is able to observe. This "feedback" that he gets on the initial throws allows him to make very drastic adjustments in his motions at first. This is the equivalent of the initial training of a spam filter. As the player gets better, he doesn't need to observe the ball for the full trajectory. Just it's final phase. He is making micro adjustments. Just as the spam filter makes less and less mistakes and only messes on the more subtle differences. Playing basketball may not be an act of intelligence. But it is learning. And learning from introspection, when combined with forming and testing hypothesis, becomes intelligence. Since spam filters are learning and they do form hypothesis (in the form of new testable criteria), they are intelligent.
Brain is a very sophisticated Bayesian filter. You don't "know" anything. You estimate probabilities. As the old saying goes, "when you see the sun come up everyday, you come to expect it." That is, when you observe a certain outcome to result from the same inputs, you estimate with high probability that it will continue to result from the same inputs.
Main point: if it learns on its own, it's intelligent. If it doesn't learn from its own mistakes, it's not. This goes for both programs and people, btw. Oh, and in my view, human brain is a just a very sophisticated Bayesian filter. So as far as I am concerned, brains and spam filters work on a similar principle: learning through re-enforcement.
love, ha-ha, cute, omg, yay, hahaha, happy, girl, hair, lol, hubby, and chocolate
how about "your back is all white" and "don't teach me how to live?"
I am gonna stop at this point. I think you are might be stuck in a tautology... something along the lines of "it's not intelligent because its programmed and nothing programmed can be intelligent." From what I see I answered the questions that you are posing again. If ever get less emotionally invested in your position, you might enjoy rereading this discussion. If not, I wish you well anyway.