Why are all the knowledgeable slashdotters still talking about this? We all know computers are more stupid than slugs. They only do what we tell them to do (except when something goes wrong with the hardware). Even a slug *might* have a cognitive decision making process. I say might because it could be that they just respond predictably to stimuli. I'm not a biologist.
A computer program is only as smart as the people who designed and wrote it and can only do what those people told them to do. Even AI programs are the same. The "A" stands for "Artificial". A computer may be able to do many billion instructions a second, but that doesn't mean its smart. Water passes over billions of molecules every second. That doesn't make it smart. (a poor analogy but it's 5pm on a Friday, so...).
Separate your deparment out as if it were a contracted company. Treat every machine, telephone, and networking infrastructure in your company as if it were a resource. Your IT manager/director can decide how much of that is an already written off cost and how much is still being paid for, with how much still being paid for being an investment paid for by the company.
Everything else: support for the pre-existing PCs, new development work, maintaining of existing work, time spent on assistance on EVERYTHING, etc. is a resource your department pays for and expects recompense for, which pays for your machines, salaries, etc.
Now you hit the proverbial problem. Cost savings still hits. If you spend a lot of time travelling to people's machines, show how you can save money by installing VNC on every machine... and so on.
Just because the US cannot trust its government to do anything, it doesn't mean the other countries of the world haven't been able to do so. We haven't been able to trust the UK government to do anything for a while, but in the past, successive governments have made tremendous changes. Margaret Thatcher and the weakening of the unions (less strikes all of a sudden and things starting to work). Aneurin Bevan in 1946-48 formed the NHS and suddenly all citizens got free health care. Serious socio-economic problems in the post war era were solved (although the principles of the NHS existed in various non-profit hospitals before the act of parliament).
How about the EU? Mostly they seem a waste of space, but until 1999 we had no minimum wage law in this country - or even requirements on holiday entitlement or hours worked. Previous governments thought it would stifle the UK economy and (understandably) didn't want to be judged to be failing when companies did suffer. However, the minimum wage means that elderly people who's pension is low no longer have to work 60 hour weeks to afford a decent living on 2.50 and hour.
Plus, there are countless other laws passed throughout the years in an old country like the UK that have moulded history into civilisation until we are at the point we are now. Remember that the US wouldn't exist without these countries and their (albeit draconian) laws. The citizens disliked the governments and moved to the new world. Great Britain owned it still but what with it being so far away, it was much easier to be free. Then, the citizens of the US had a common enemy in Great Britain to fight against to gain independence. Then, the US constitution was born from a few gifted founders. Your whole lives are governed by it.
Don't belittle democracy by saying the government can never do anything for you. If you believe that, you may as well move to a monarchist and dictatorship state. They're cheaper and faster.
However unfortunate this may be, global trade means laws across major economies become similar. Either India will open up, or the rest of the world will close up. Simple as that. The case in point is the current drug laws. The US senate would ban alcohol if they could find a way to make it work as the east coast of america has puritanical roots, where pleasure with no benefit to anyone but self is bad. The US refused to trade with any country (or give visas to the citizens of it) that didn't make drugs illegal. Europe doesn't have this puritanical root and so many citizens don't understand the laws. The citizens of Nepal used to (and still do) consume much bhang (hashish), only now they will be put in prison if caught. Afghanistan/Pakistan was the same.
The point is, when we have global trade, wealthy countries prosper even more and can (and do) impose their laws on other societies - when it suits them. Poorer counties are given the opportunity for growth at the expense of being temporarily exploited by richer countries. Hopefully the system will level itself out eventually, but I'm not sure. There is only one way to find out.
To be fair, free speech isn't an inalienable right. It is something given to many citizens (including US) by law (or more explicitly by the constitution in the US). Most countries, in fact almost all, don't have the same freedom of speech. The Internet is global, as are any virtual worlds present on this Internet, and so the actual physical laws apply to the actual machines (whether switch or server) and the people using them, depending on the country in which they reside.
So, don't pretend that freedom of speech is present in virtual worlds when it isn't generally present in the real world. As an example, the UK mostly gives freedom of speech, except that because of the heteregeneous culture of the UK, we have laws to explicitly prevent people saying and/or printing things that might incite racial hatred and our libel laws mean that if you say something, make sure that you know what you say is scientifically/legally/epistemologically accurate and true as you could be prosecuted for spreading lies and discord.
I see many US websites that would be closed down in the UK because they fit this description. I for one believe in this restriction of free speech. Without laws on it, it is like saying that speech has no consequences, when the truth is that it has more indirect consequences than most other actions. If I kill someone, and it is never reported, the only people who are directly affected by this action are myself, the victim, and his/her family and friends. If I publish a story that says that NASA lied and no one ever went to the moon, that affects millions of people.
As regarding virtual worlds, their rules are decided by the owners of the virtual worlds and so they can impose whatever rules they like within the limitations of the law of the country they reside. In the UK, for instance, a public website couldn't restrict access to women, blacks, asians, muslims, or anyone else over 18 for fear of inciting racial hatred. I presume, however, that in the US, the owner of site could place such restrictions. You could create a klu klux clan virtual world if you wished.
> Since the vendor has way more data upon which > to base their bet (it is their product), I am > betting that it probably isn't a good deal for > me to bet against them.
I would normally agree, but it depends on where you buy the product from. In the UK, we have a national chain of shops called PC World. Their staff are generally crap and their prices are always around 6 months behind the rest of the world/country.
I bought a laptop from them because I was desperate and they gave me 6 month interest free credit (so I could get the money together in time). I bought the warranty and you wouldn't believe how often this useless pile of shit (the name of my computer) has broken down and is still not 100%. My hard disk died, the image connection to my LCD keeps failing, my keyboard stopped working (although i did spill coffee on it) and it kept overheating and turning off.
I am extremely glad I bought that warranty now. (Although the major faults happened during the 12 month manufacturer's warranty). If I can afford it, I'll do the same with my next laptop - especially if it isn't a brand name.
A Lakh is 100,000 and a crore is 10,000,000 (hundred thousand and ten million respectively).
Wages are low in India, but so is the cost of living. They have a serious class distinction there so the people who build, maintain, and produce and distribute food are paid just enough to keep them alive (and they're often living in slum accomodation and so pay little or no rent). This means that a an Indidan developer might not be able to afford much, but they should be able to pay the rent on their flats/apparments (especially if the company helps them out there).
$1 is about 50 rupees and you can buy a good meal for two in a standard restaurant/cafe for that price. You can get some clothes for that price too. The more tech jobs that move out there, especially with any assisted education that the government might have to help with to help fuel the growth will mean that it won't always be so cheap to employ Indians over there.
This is a side-effect of global trade. Us in wealthy countries get the benefit of cheap products and labour, but eventually as more of us use the labour in India, they get wealthier and demand more and so India will be a proper first world economy and will start importing its developers and workers from poorer countries (like malaysia or indonesia perhaps).
"There's simply no way to build artifical intelligence until we understand human intelligence. And when it comes to that, we're still way off."
This isn't strictly speaking true. Artificial Intelligence isn't intelligence, it's a program or application that can pretend to be intelligent. Even if you do mean real intelligence from a computer, why can't it happen unless we fully understand human intelligence? This kind of intelligence is created every day from people who haven't a clue about basic science, never mind computer programming. At some point along a child's development, it suddenly becomes self-aware and starts to learn. I presume that it is this point where we assume intelligence begins. We don't fully understand how it happens and possibly never will. However, surely a computer that is complex enough to form new programs/connections could just receive and process data and then all of a sudden, just suddenly become aware?
Personally, I'm not 100% convinced this could happen as I think there is something intangible about real intelligence that we may never be able to emulate in a machine. However, I fully accept that I cannot successfully argue my case. I think I'm just worried about the consequences of creating an intelligent machine. In my mind, an intelligent machine has as much right to 'life' and liberty as any other intelligent creature. If not, we create a new form of slavery.
I don't know how you guys do ground in the US, but in the UK some houses attach earth wires to the copper pipes that carry water into the home, and some have a metal rod embedded in the ground with wires going into that.
With the latter solution, if it hasn't rained for a while, then the ground is too dry and it doesn't drain the power and so flip the MCB (or blow the fuse). With the former solution, bits of corrosion can reduce the conductivity between wire and pipe and they cease to work correctly too.
The modern way of doing it is to stick a diode-based system on the neutral wire (behind the meter) that returns to the power station and attach the ground/earth wires to that. This ensures that any electricity that floods through ground goes straight back to the power station, and that the returning circuit current cannot instead go to earth and flood through someone/something that is touching an earthed item.
Now, even the more modern method relies on a component that could break and you wouldn't know it had broken until too late. This is why plastic is good. The best defense against wires touching the plastic covering and so slowly melting it, is to have a fuse of appropriate size in your plug. Wires only melt when too much current is going through them. If you have a fuse rated lower than the maximum current for all the wires in the device then that will blow before a wire catches fire. All UK plugs have fuses in them (although lazy people often just stick 13 amp fuses in them - even if it is only a lamp). Do US plugs have the same?
Videos and CDs explicitly have in their copyright statement that the content cannot be broadcast without permission from the copyright owner. Now, music and video comes under copyright law (although the RIAA is trying to change that in the US) but copyright law was intended for printed media
Copyright disclaimers in books actually say that you cannot duplicate the content and store it in any retrieval system. I presume the law allows for that addition to the original copyright law. However, it mentions nothing of broadcast. Do libraries have to pay more for the books they lend out? Am I allowed to read the book out aloud on radio?
If we can answer the questions on books, then perhaps we can answer the question for CD and video.
We've had this in the UK for a year or more. Our (pretty much only) satellite distributor, Sky, offer Sky+ for 10 more a month and a higher installation cost (to cover the cost of a better box) and you get all this Tivo capability. Catch up!;-)
The wireless telegraphy act makes sense. We're only a small country and a typical radio FM transmitter can cover a fair proportion (about 1/10-1/20) of the population. Just my twiddling a screw in most FM transmitters, you can get it to broadcast on any frequency, and (for instance) stick it in your local neighbourhood and broadcast something other than your local radio station on a specific frequency. Video senders (boxes that transmit video signals over UHF and FM bandwidths so a TV upstairs can pick it up) were banned for a while for similar reasons. They found a way to make them legal and everything was fine:-)
The second line of this post says:
The estimates vary widely from $10 billion to $87 billion per year for American workers, and even more for global costs.
Although most of the IP addresses in the world were allocated to the US (and the US started the Internet), a hell of a lot of the rest of the world uses the distributed inter-networking protocols. All spam that gets through my filters is from a US company targeting solely US residents (I've investigated the odd one I'm interested in and I'm not eligible as I'm not a US citizen).
EU and UK anti-spam laws cannot be targeted at US spammers. I get so much useless noise - useless because I don't want it and cannot use it even if I wanted to. In the name of worldwide social responsibility, sort out your spammers. As of yet, I still haven't received UK-resident targeted spam.
In my experience, the problem is US-based and I don't have the power to do anything against your spamming companies and I'm unlikely to have that power any time soon. Please, sort yourselves out!
According to some recent statistics, almost 2 million households in the UK now have broadband Internet access. There are only 56 million people in the UK. Assume the average broadband household has 4 people in it (which is entirely plucked out of thin air), and that means 1 in 7 UK residents have broadband at home. We're heavy users of the Internet and I don't see why we should be besieged by unruly US spammers when it is a wasted of both our resources.
When I look in a mirror (although, thankfully, I'm not as thin as I was). I'm Type I diabetic. I don't know about insulin telling your body to create more fat from the sugar in your blood, but I know that when I was injecting myself with more insulin, I was generally thinner (although more likely to drop my blood sugars to obscenely low levels).
Also, starch isn't just loads of sugar waiting to be released quickly. Glucuse and sucrose are the sugars that are waiting to be released quickly. Sugar is sugar, yes (which is why, incidentally, we use calories to measure our energy intake), but starches break down slowly. they break down in your mouth, your stomach, and your duodenum in your small intestine before being absorbed. If you have high (soluble) fibre in your diet too, this rate is reduced even more.
As everyone says, take in less than you use. Lots of soluble fibre and water fills you up (and helps guarantee that the carbohydrate you do eat is released slowly throughout the day).
I had to start snacking to put on weight. I am 5'6'' and weighed 9.5 stone. I'm now going over 11 stone so I want to start being careful again, but I know I can do it. No snacks, lots of fibre and long-chain carbohydrates (starches)in my meals.
Although I am very much against ID schemes as the UK government has restricted my rights enough, thank you very much, there are some good side effects that has come out of the government trying to tell us what is best and reduce our freedom in some way
In England, it is almost the case that it is illegal to discriminate against persons, in any way. Legal contracts cannot restict who may partake in them. There are exceptions - e.g. children, and certain roles that require a certain sex or race, but these roles have to be stipulated by the home secretary.
For a country that doesn't have a constitution (except to say that the monarch is strictly speaking the ruler and gives power to parliament) we do have some real equality across the country. There are still racists, bigots, sexists, homophobes, etc. throughout the country, but no legal contract can ever place restrictions based on these opinions. Unlike many of the US property contracts, for instance. We're also not allowed to publish anything that might incite racial hatred.
So if we have an ID scheme, it means the government can more easily identify us. The Data Protection Act stipulates that organizations cannot hold irrelevant information on us (and we can request all their data at any time). They would not be permitted to hold ID data that wasn't directly relevant (like race and colour).
I can see why the public generally claimed to be for it. Especially if Joe Public is the joe public who think we're being overrun by paedophiles, spongers of the state, and illegal immigrants.
Another issue, which is mad, is the windows shutdown comman in XP. It enables you to shut down any NT-based machine on your network as long as you have better than Basic User rights on that machine. If you login to a domain, most administrators allow all their users to have these rights on the client machines so that you can install stuff and get at your work colleagues' stuff. This means I can bring my XP laptop to work, log on to the domain, and shut down any machine I feel like. Madness.
My wife had some diamonds left to her from a necklace of her grandma's. We got the biggest, got someone to design the ring, and paid someone to make it.
Okay, my wife used to work at Cartier and so knew goldsmiths and jewellery designers, but this is one good way of avoiding the mess. If diamonds are forever, then inherit them from grandparents.
Alternatively, use anything else. Diamonds exist in abundance, but DeBeers restrict the supply. There are far more cost-effficient stones and you can make rings out of yellow gold, white gold, pink gold, platinum, or silver.
A little more than that is done. The final version of the.NET Framework came out in January. The full version is available only for Windows. The Shared Source CLI (the source code) is available for Windows and FreeBSD.
The.NET Framework has been released as an open standard via ECMA. Microsoft have added some useful extensions to it to keep them competitive (which may be standardized soon) but the heart of the.NET Framework - the IL standard (like Java bytecode) and the CLR - are open.
I like.NET and so do Ximian. Once you get past the prejudices towards MS, you learn that they have created an excellent, well documented, and open development framework. Yes, so has Linux. However, I like code that runs in a managed environment (I like scripting too). Plus any object oriented language can be converted to run under the.NET Framewoork. I can create a library in JavaScript and reference it from C#, J#, or Visual Basic. This is incredibly useful.
And yes, if the CLR and some of the class libraries are ported to another platform, then by copying the rest of the class libraries and having an implementation or way to work around the GAC, you can run any.NET code on that platform.
Depends on your point of view. We are more advanced re: mobile phone usage in the UK and although pay as you go mobiles are often tied to one or two providers, contract users are free to stick whatever SIM card they want in the phone and so use any provider. Why shouldn't the US have the same privelege?
Not all publishers screw authors. Yes, contracts tend to attempt to reduce the risk to the publisher, but that is because it is the publisher that books time at the press, pays the money to print, pays the distributors, gets the sales guys to convince every bookshop to own a copy, deals with translations, sorts out marketing deals when the books aren't selling as well as they'd like, etc. There are always many thousands of up front costs that have to be covered, aside from the staff wages and printing costs.
Most of the profits don't go to the publisher, but to the shops who sell them. True they have a risk in carrying all this combustible material that may not sell and has to be shifted if it doesn't, but publishers can get a relatively small share. Not all, but some. Find a relatively small publisher, like O'Reilly or Wrox for IT books, and negotiate a deal. If they really want to publish your work, then they will strike a deal.
Copyright was invented for writers of printed material, to protect both the author (and his family) and the original publisher. Make it work for you.
Re:Chinese Rooms and Software Guys
on
Arguing A.I.
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· Score: 1
That isn't a trivial refutation, unless you have explained it incorrectly. The books know nothing. The person writing them did. The same happens in computers. The programmer provides a look-up table, and the computer works against it.
Don't talk to me about metaphysics. However, you are right. There isn't a problem with dualism and AI.
Re:Chinese Rooms and Software Guys
on
Arguing A.I.
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· Score: 1
The Chinese Room Argument goes like this:
Assume that you have a man in a room with a number of translation books that will translate English to Chinese and vice versa. Someone passes some English text through into the room. The guy looks up every word and writes down the result in Chinese, passing the translated text out the other side. A piece of Chinese text is sent back - he does the same translating it into English through the books.
Searle argues that a computer is exactly like this Chinese room scenario. The guy doing the translating, doesn't actually understand Chinese (and to be honest, doesn't have to understand English either) but the texts are being translated due to the very good dictionaries he is looking through. A computer never does and never will understand is Searle's point. And understanding, as we all know when we say "Don't just learn the answers, understand them" is Intelligence.
As to whether anyone has brought up a good argument to refute it, I can't remember as it was a long time ago when I did this in philosophy, but I think it went along the lines of each individual "unit" in our brain has no understanding either, and the man in the chinese room is just like a few neurones in the brain. However, the whole does 'understand'. However, we get into the usual intelligence/existentialism tangle here as who is "I". If I am just a collection of cells, then where does this sense of "I" come from.
As regards the mind being separate from the brain. Linguistically, this is true, but practically, is it so? If you're a christian, you don't have a problem here as your mind is your 'eternal soul' but philosophers and scientists have great trouble with a non-corporeal presence influencing a corporeal world. The idea of a mind separate from body is dualism.
It has a great developer environment too. ProjectBuilder is okay as a tool to build Objective C and Java apps with. All the usual UNIX development tools are available or pre-installed with it, and Java is integrated really well. You can access the Cocoa graphics layer from within Java and so create native looking objects, and as Java is well integrated, you don't really lose any performance with it.
Slashdot Mirror
Why are all the knowledgeable slashdotters still talking about this? We all know computers are more stupid than slugs. They only do what we tell them to do (except when something goes wrong with the hardware). Even a slug *might* have a cognitive decision making process. I say might because it could be that they just respond predictably to stimuli. I'm not a biologist.
A computer program is only as smart as the people who designed and wrote it and can only do what those people told them to do. Even AI programs are the same. The "A" stands for "Artificial". A computer may be able to do many billion instructions a second, but that doesn't mean its smart. Water passes over billions of molecules every second. That doesn't make it smart. (a poor analogy but it's 5pm on a Friday, so...).
Separate your deparment out as if it were a contracted company. Treat every machine, telephone, and networking infrastructure in your company as if it were a resource. Your IT manager/director can decide how much of that is an already written off cost and how much is still being paid for, with how much still being paid for being an investment paid for by the company.
Everything else: support for the pre-existing PCs, new development work, maintaining of existing work, time spent on assistance on EVERYTHING, etc. is a resource your department pays for and expects recompense for, which pays for your machines, salaries, etc.
Now you hit the proverbial problem. Cost savings still hits. If you spend a lot of time travelling to people's machines, show how you can save money by installing VNC on every machine... and so on.
Just because the US cannot trust its government to do anything, it doesn't mean the other countries of the world haven't been able to do so. We haven't been able to trust the UK government to do anything for a while, but in the past, successive governments have made tremendous changes. Margaret Thatcher and the weakening of the unions (less strikes all of a sudden and things starting to work). Aneurin Bevan in 1946-48 formed the NHS and suddenly all citizens got free health care. Serious socio-economic problems in the post war era were solved (although the principles of the NHS existed in various non-profit hospitals before the act of parliament).
How about the EU? Mostly they seem a waste of space, but until 1999 we had no minimum wage law in this country - or even requirements on holiday entitlement or hours worked. Previous governments thought it would stifle the UK economy and (understandably) didn't want to be judged to be failing when companies did suffer. However, the minimum wage means that elderly people who's pension is low no longer have to work 60 hour weeks to afford a decent living on 2.50 and hour.
Plus, there are countless other laws passed throughout the years in an old country like the UK that have moulded history into civilisation until we are at the point we are now. Remember that the US wouldn't exist without these countries and their (albeit draconian) laws. The citizens disliked the governments and moved to the new world. Great Britain owned it still but what with it being so far away, it was much easier to be free. Then, the citizens of the US had a common enemy in Great Britain to fight against to gain independence. Then, the US constitution was born from a few gifted founders. Your whole lives are governed by it.
Don't belittle democracy by saying the government can never do anything for you. If you believe that, you may as well move to a monarchist and dictatorship state. They're cheaper and faster.
However unfortunate this may be, global trade means laws across major economies become similar. Either India will open up, or the rest of the world will close up. Simple as that. The case in point is the current drug laws. The US senate would ban alcohol if they could find a way to make it work as the east coast of america has puritanical roots, where pleasure with no benefit to anyone but self is bad. The US refused to trade with any country (or give visas to the citizens of it) that didn't make drugs illegal. Europe doesn't have this puritanical root and so many citizens don't understand the laws. The citizens of Nepal used to (and still do) consume much bhang (hashish), only now they will be put in prison if caught. Afghanistan/Pakistan was the same.
The point is, when we have global trade, wealthy countries prosper even more and can (and do) impose their laws on other societies - when it suits them. Poorer counties are given the opportunity for growth at the expense of being temporarily exploited by richer countries. Hopefully the system will level itself out eventually, but I'm not sure. There is only one way to find out.
To be fair, free speech isn't an inalienable right. It is something given to many citizens (including US) by law (or more explicitly by the constitution in the US). Most countries, in fact almost all, don't have the same freedom of speech. The Internet is global, as are any virtual worlds present on this Internet, and so the actual physical laws apply to the actual machines (whether switch or server) and the people using them, depending on the country in which they reside.
So, don't pretend that freedom of speech is present in virtual worlds when it isn't generally present in the real world. As an example, the UK mostly gives freedom of speech, except that because of the heteregeneous culture of the UK, we have laws to explicitly prevent people saying and/or printing things that might incite racial hatred and our libel laws mean that if you say something, make sure that you know what you say is scientifically/legally/epistemologically accurate and true as you could be prosecuted for spreading lies and discord.
I see many US websites that would be closed down in the UK because they fit this description. I for one believe in this restriction of free speech. Without laws on it, it is like saying that speech has no consequences, when the truth is that it has more indirect consequences than most other actions. If I kill someone, and it is never reported, the only people who are directly affected by this action are myself, the victim, and his/her family and friends. If I publish a story that says that NASA lied and no one ever went to the moon, that affects millions of people.
As regarding virtual worlds, their rules are decided by the owners of the virtual worlds and so they can impose whatever rules they like within the limitations of the law of the country they reside. In the UK, for instance, a public website couldn't restrict access to women, blacks, asians, muslims, or anyone else over 18 for fear of inciting racial hatred. I presume, however, that in the US, the owner of site could place such restrictions. You could create a klu klux clan virtual world if you wished.
> Since the vendor has way more data upon which > to base their bet (it is their product), I am > betting that it probably isn't a good deal for > me to bet against them.
I would normally agree, but it depends on where you buy the product from. In the UK, we have a national chain of shops called PC World. Their staff are generally crap and their prices are always around 6 months behind the rest of the world/country.
I bought a laptop from them because I was desperate and they gave me 6 month interest free credit (so I could get the money together in time). I bought the warranty and you wouldn't believe how often this useless pile of shit (the name of my computer) has broken down and is still not 100%. My hard disk died, the image connection to my LCD keeps failing, my keyboard stopped working (although i did spill coffee on it) and it kept overheating and turning off.
I am extremely glad I bought that warranty now. (Although the major faults happened during the 12 month manufacturer's warranty). If I can afford it, I'll do the same with my next laptop - especially if it isn't a brand name.
A Lakh is 100,000 and a crore is 10,000,000 (hundred thousand and ten million respectively).
Wages are low in India, but so is the cost of living. They have a serious class distinction there so the people who build, maintain, and produce and distribute food are paid just enough to keep them alive (and they're often living in slum accomodation and so pay little or no rent). This means that a an Indidan developer might not be able to afford much, but they should be able to pay the rent on their flats/apparments (especially if the company helps them out there).
$1 is about 50 rupees and you can buy a good meal for two in a standard restaurant/cafe for that price. You can get some clothes for that price too. The more tech jobs that move out there, especially with any assisted education that the government might have to help with to help fuel the growth will mean that it won't always be so cheap to employ Indians over there.
This is a side-effect of global trade. Us in wealthy countries get the benefit of cheap products and labour, but eventually as more of us use the labour in India, they get wealthier and demand more and so India will be a proper first world economy and will start importing its developers and workers from poorer countries (like malaysia or indonesia perhaps).
"There's simply no way to build artifical intelligence until we understand human intelligence. And when it comes to that, we're still way off."
This isn't strictly speaking true. Artificial Intelligence isn't intelligence, it's a program or application that can pretend to be intelligent. Even if you do mean real intelligence from a computer, why can't it happen unless we fully understand human intelligence? This kind of intelligence is created every day from people who haven't a clue about basic science, never mind computer programming. At some point along a child's development, it suddenly becomes self-aware and starts to learn. I presume that it is this point where we assume intelligence begins. We don't fully understand how it happens and possibly never will. However, surely a computer that is complex enough to form new programs/connections could just receive and process data and then all of a sudden, just suddenly become aware?
Personally, I'm not 100% convinced this could happen as I think there is something intangible about real intelligence that we may never be able to emulate in a machine. However, I fully accept that I cannot successfully argue my case. I think I'm just worried about the consequences of creating an intelligent machine. In my mind, an intelligent machine has as much right to 'life' and liberty as any other intelligent creature. If not, we create a new form of slavery.
With the latter solution, if it hasn't rained for a while, then the ground is too dry and it doesn't drain the power and so flip the MCB (or blow the fuse). With the former solution, bits of corrosion can reduce the conductivity between wire and pipe and they cease to work correctly too.
The modern way of doing it is to stick a diode-based system on the neutral wire (behind the meter) that returns to the power station and attach the ground/earth wires to that. This ensures that any electricity that floods through ground goes straight back to the power station, and that the returning circuit current cannot instead go to earth and flood through someone/something that is touching an earthed item.
Now, even the more modern method relies on a component that could break and you wouldn't know it had broken until too late. This is why plastic is good. The best defense against wires touching the plastic covering and so slowly melting it, is to have a fuse of appropriate size in your plug. Wires only melt when too much current is going through them. If you have a fuse rated lower than the maximum current for all the wires in the device then that will blow before a wire catches fire. All UK plugs have fuses in them (although lazy people often just stick 13 amp fuses in them - even if it is only a lamp). Do US plugs have the same?
Copyright disclaimers in books actually say that you cannot duplicate the content and store it in any retrieval system. I presume the law allows for that addition to the original copyright law. However, it mentions nothing of broadcast. Do libraries have to pay more for the books they lend out? Am I allowed to read the book out aloud on radio?
If we can answer the questions on books, then perhaps we can answer the question for CD and video.
We've had this in the UK for a year or more. Our (pretty much only) satellite distributor, Sky, offer Sky+ for 10 more a month and a higher installation cost (to cover the cost of a better box) and you get all this Tivo capability. Catch up! ;-)
The wireless telegraphy act makes sense. We're only a small country and a typical radio FM transmitter can cover a fair proportion (about 1/10-1/20) of the population. Just my twiddling a screw in most FM transmitters, you can get it to broadcast on any frequency, and (for instance) stick it in your local neighbourhood and broadcast something other than your local radio station on a specific frequency. Video senders (boxes that transmit video signals over UHF and FM bandwidths so a TV upstairs can pick it up) were banned for a while for similar reasons. They found a way to make them legal and everything was fine :-)
Bizarrely enough, I just heard that joke being given by a man on the street about 2 hours ago on the Paramount Comedy Channel. Freaky.
The estimates vary widely from $10 billion to $87 billion per year for American workers, and even more for global costs.
Although most of the IP addresses in the world were allocated to the US (and the US started the Internet), a hell of a lot of the rest of the world uses the distributed inter-networking protocols. All spam that gets through my filters is from a US company targeting solely US residents (I've investigated the odd one I'm interested in and I'm not eligible as I'm not a US citizen).
EU and UK anti-spam laws cannot be targeted at US spammers. I get so much useless noise - useless because I don't want it and cannot use it even if I wanted to. In the name of worldwide social responsibility, sort out your spammers. As of yet, I still haven't received UK-resident targeted spam.
In my experience, the problem is US-based and I don't have the power to do anything against your spamming companies and I'm unlikely to have that power any time soon. Please, sort yourselves out!
According to some recent statistics, almost 2 million households in the UK now have broadband Internet access. There are only 56 million people in the UK. Assume the average broadband household has 4 people in it (which is entirely plucked out of thin air), and that means 1 in 7 UK residents have broadband at home. We're heavy users of the Internet and I don't see why we should be besieged by unruly US spammers when it is a wasted of both our resources.
When I look in a mirror (although, thankfully, I'm not as thin as I was). I'm Type I diabetic. I don't know about insulin telling your body to create more fat from the sugar in your blood, but I know that when I was injecting myself with more insulin, I was generally thinner (although more likely to drop my blood sugars to obscenely low levels).
Also, starch isn't just loads of sugar waiting to be released quickly. Glucuse and sucrose are the sugars that are waiting to be released quickly. Sugar is sugar, yes (which is why, incidentally, we use calories to measure our energy intake), but starches break down slowly. they break down in your mouth, your stomach, and your duodenum in your small intestine before being absorbed. If you have high (soluble) fibre in your diet too, this rate is reduced even more.
As everyone says, take in less than you use. Lots of soluble fibre and water fills you up (and helps guarantee that the carbohydrate you do eat is released slowly throughout the day).
I had to start snacking to put on weight. I am 5'6'' and weighed 9.5 stone. I'm now going over 11 stone so I want to start being careful again, but I know I can do it. No snacks, lots of fibre and long-chain carbohydrates (starches)in my meals.
In England, it is almost the case that it is illegal to discriminate against persons, in any way. Legal contracts cannot restict who may partake in them. There are exceptions - e.g. children, and certain roles that require a certain sex or race, but these roles have to be stipulated by the home secretary.
For a country that doesn't have a constitution (except to say that the monarch is strictly speaking the ruler and gives power to parliament) we do have some real equality across the country. There are still racists, bigots, sexists, homophobes, etc. throughout the country, but no legal contract can ever place restrictions based on these opinions. Unlike many of the US property contracts, for instance. We're also not allowed to publish anything that might incite racial hatred.
So if we have an ID scheme, it means the government can more easily identify us. The Data Protection Act stipulates that organizations cannot hold irrelevant information on us (and we can request all their data at any time). They would not be permitted to hold ID data that wasn't directly relevant (like race and colour). I can see why the public generally claimed to be for it. Especially if Joe Public is the joe public who think we're being overrun by paedophiles, spongers of the state, and illegal immigrants.
Another issue, which is mad, is the windows shutdown comman in XP. It enables you to shut down any NT-based machine on your network as long as you have better than Basic User rights on that machine. If you login to a domain, most administrators allow all their users to have these rights on the client machines so that you can install stuff and get at your work colleagues' stuff. This means I can bring my XP laptop to work, log on to the domain, and shut down any machine I feel like. Madness.
My wife had some diamonds left to her from a necklace of her grandma's. We got the biggest, got someone to design the ring, and paid someone to make it.
Okay, my wife used to work at Cartier and so knew goldsmiths and jewellery designers, but this is one good way of avoiding the mess. If diamonds are forever, then inherit them from grandparents.
Alternatively, use anything else. Diamonds exist in abundance, but DeBeers restrict the supply. There are far more cost-effficient stones and you can make rings out of yellow gold, white gold, pink gold, platinum, or silver.
The .NET Framework has been released as an open standard via ECMA. Microsoft have added some useful extensions to it to keep them competitive (which may be standardized soon) but the heart of the .NET Framework - the IL standard (like Java bytecode) and the CLR - are open.
I like .NET and so do Ximian. Once you get past the prejudices towards MS, you learn that they have created an excellent, well documented, and open development framework. Yes, so has Linux. However, I like code that runs in a managed environment (I like scripting too). Plus any object oriented language can be converted to run under the .NET Framewoork. I can create a library in JavaScript and reference it from C#, J#, or Visual Basic. This is incredibly useful.
And yes, if the CLR and some of the class libraries are ported to another platform, then by copying the rest of the class libraries and having an implementation or way to work around the GAC, you can run any .NET code on that platform.
You crazy americans scare me ;-)
Depends on your point of view. We are more advanced re: mobile phone usage in the UK and although pay as you go mobiles are often tied to one or two providers, contract users are free to stick whatever SIM card they want in the phone and so use any provider. Why shouldn't the US have the same privelege?
Not all publishers screw authors. Yes, contracts tend to attempt to reduce the risk to the publisher, but that is because it is the publisher that books time at the press, pays the money to print, pays the distributors, gets the sales guys to convince every bookshop to own a copy, deals with translations, sorts out marketing deals when the books aren't selling as well as they'd like, etc. There are always many thousands of up front costs that have to be covered, aside from the staff wages and printing costs.
Most of the profits don't go to the publisher, but to the shops who sell them. True they have a risk in carrying all this combustible material that may not sell and has to be shifted if it doesn't, but publishers can get a relatively small share. Not all, but some. Find a relatively small publisher, like O'Reilly or Wrox for IT books, and negotiate a deal. If they really want to publish your work, then they will strike a deal.
Copyright was invented for writers of printed material, to protect both the author (and his family) and the original publisher. Make it work for you.
Don't talk to me about metaphysics. However, you are right. There isn't a problem with dualism and AI.
Assume that you have a man in a room with a number of translation books that will translate English to Chinese and vice versa. Someone passes some English text through into the room. The guy looks up every word and writes down the result in Chinese, passing the translated text out the other side. A piece of Chinese text is sent back - he does the same translating it into English through the books.
Searle argues that a computer is exactly like this Chinese room scenario. The guy doing the translating, doesn't actually understand Chinese (and to be honest, doesn't have to understand English either) but the texts are being translated due to the very good dictionaries he is looking through. A computer never does and never will understand is Searle's point. And understanding, as we all know when we say "Don't just learn the answers, understand them" is Intelligence.
As to whether anyone has brought up a good argument to refute it, I can't remember as it was a long time ago when I did this in philosophy, but I think it went along the lines of each individual "unit" in our brain has no understanding either, and the man in the chinese room is just like a few neurones in the brain. However, the whole does 'understand'. However, we get into the usual intelligence/existentialism tangle here as who is "I". If I am just a collection of cells, then where does this sense of "I" come from.
As regards the mind being separate from the brain. Linguistically, this is true, but practically, is it so? If you're a christian, you don't have a problem here as your mind is your 'eternal soul' but philosophers and scientists have great trouble with a non-corporeal presence influencing a corporeal world. The idea of a mind separate from body is dualism.
It has a great developer environment too. ProjectBuilder is okay as a tool to build Objective C and Java apps with. All the usual UNIX development tools are available or pre-installed with it, and Java is integrated really well. You can access the Cocoa graphics layer from within Java and so create native looking objects, and as Java is well integrated, you don't really lose any performance with it.
Java apps are like native code.