Uh, defensive patents are a common thing in all industries. People just enjoy jumping down Microsoft's throat because they have nothing better to do.
No, people just don't like a company -- any company -- get a patent on something which (a) the company did not invent, (b) already existed more than a decade ago, (c) is really really obvious, (d) is in common use by nearly every computer user today.
It's like Microsoft said: "Hey, nobody got the idea to patent smileys yet! And everything should be patented by SOMEBODY! I mean, we can't have any concept not OWNED by someone, can we? So let's see if the patent office is stupid enough to grant us exclusive rights to something that is currently in the public domain! We can see what we do with such a patent later."
That, however, is the way it is used in the article.
Playing chess is not something that you can naturally represent as a binary classification task. Any approach that attempts to represent playing chess in this way is going to perform poorly.
Bayesian filtering for spam is not by definition binary classification. True, the end result is "spam" or "not spam", but what it does is calculating how likely a message is to be spam. Then, if the likelihood is above 90%, for instance, the message gets classified as spam, and otherwise not.
Chess playing can easily be represented as an evaluation task: that is actually how most chess programs are written. The engine has an evaluation algorithm that assigns a board position a value that represents the chance of winning in that position. A minimax algorithm then searches for the best move based on the evaluation of play sequences from the current board position.
The problem with this algorithm, however, is that it doesn't evaluate board positions. And if you don't do that, there is little reason to suppose that the program will generate good moves, except for maybe the opening moves.
" The original question was "Can a spam filter play chess?". Clearly, the answer to this is yes, but making it play well is not so easy."
It depends what you mean by "playing chess". Can a monkey play chess? If you let the monkey move pieces at random, and the board simply disallows illegal moves, is the monkey playing chess? If you say "yes", then sure, the spam-chess engine can play chess. But then anything that can move pieces can play chess. True, spam-chess plays a little better than random moves, that's why I said it can't play *well* -- and it NEVER will play well. But it is also true that the author compares his engine with the play of a three-year-old. However, the implication that the spam-chess engine might someday play a good game of chess is wrong.
"Perhaps most interestingly overall, it should be remembered that dbacl doesn't think ahead like most chess engines do. Its successes and failures are almost entirely based on the historical record of the game as it develops and mimicry of training games, not at all on calculating moves and countermoves in the future."
That's not novel. The first good checkers-playing program used learned patterns. NeuroGo plays a reasonable game of Go simply by having a Neural Network assign a weight to each board position when the current board is the input. Pattern matching is pretty common in boardgame-playing programs. The main difference between all these programs and spam-chess is that spam-chess learns move-sequences, not board-positions. And move sequences are pretty useless, because they provide little information on the board position if the sequence in not of sufficient length. And the computational requirements of move sequences of sufficient length are simply too high to ever solve the problem.
It seems to me that the author addresses this issue directly. I.e., the premise is fine -- he taught a bayesian filter to play chess, but not well, and the reason it sucks is because it only plays with history (no prediction).
The spam-chess-engine doesn't recognise illegal moves by itself, so does it play chess? Doesn't it leave the chess playing up to the separate interface which disallows illegal moves? And the author DOES use prediction: he predicts the next move from the move sequence. True, he is not using minimax to analyse the board position, but he doesn't need to: basically, the move sequence gives the same value a minimax searcher based on move sequences would return.
Anyway, as I said, the article is fun. It just doesn't describe a useful approach to chess-playing.
I'll wager that if you ran through a set of games, say from a collection of books on championship chess, then the bayesian filter would eventually learn to play like a grandmaster.
No, it won't. This is actually what was done in the article.
The problem is in the length of the sequences. If you could learn sequences of, say, length 60 (for 30-move games), maybe your filter would become a reasonably good player. Unfortunately, the need for computational resources increases exponentially with each extra move added.
The complexity of chess is simply too high to learn this way.
Chess openings might be learned this way, but it is not very useful to do so. The results will be worse than opening libraries, which are very good at the moment.
It's a fun article (if you are interested in these things, that is). However, the premise is all wrong, and that is why spam-chess fails:
The premise of a Bayesian filter is that is learns sequences of words, or characters, or whatever. Spam-chess learns sequences of moves. This premise is wrong, since good moves are related to complete board positions, not to what was done in the previous few moves.
Of course, the longer your string of moves is, the better it will represent the board position, especially during the opening phase of the game. And the example the article provides of reasonable play of spam-chess, is actually from the game's opening, where the learned sequences indeed represent the complete game.
For the middle game, however, spam chess will perform badly, always.
But, as I said before, the idea is quite a lot of fun. I enjoyed reading the article. You can learn a lot from it, both about spam filtering and about chess.
This would violate one of the principles of computer game design, namely that the player should notice his own progression all the time, and that the player should be able to observe that he has an effect on the game world with every action he takes.
When I have killed 50 rabbits, if I know I need to kill 10 more rabbits before being able to take on boss rabbit, I am driven to seek out those rabbits. If I don't know that, I will probably be bored with the game because I have no idea how much longer I need to continue killing rabbits before I am finally able to proceed. Especially MMOGs will be very boring without stats.
However, I fully agree that "stats" are a cop-out with respect to letting the player experience progression. There should be a system that is more integrated with the game.
...it infringed when using the tools to secure credit-card transactions, handle customer referrals and manage data
The (very short) article doesn't say what exactly Cedant is allegedly infringing, but "secure credit card transactions", "customer referrals", and especially "data management" seem trivial techniques which should never have been patented in the first place. If this goes to court, the judge might think so too. It could be the start of patent reforms.
Good case study for firms on HOW NOT TO IMPLEMENT DRM solutions.
He should have said "Good case study for firms on HOW CUSTOMERS DO NOT LIKE DRM IMPLEMENTED." Because that is what he means. However, the point of DRM is not that customers should like it. At best, customers don't notice it. At worst, customers hate it. For firms, at best they get a lot more money from customers. At worse, however, (and firms don't seem to realise this) DRM will cause customers not to do business with the firm anymore. Personally, that's how far I have gone. A couple of years ago I bought about fifty CDs a year. Now, I don't buy anything anymore, simply because I like to play my CDs in my computer, and with DRM on the CDs, I fear I will not be able to use the CDs as I want. And I am not interested in easy circumvention methods: I am NOT going to place an audio CD in my PC which I cannot play without hassle. I mean, if I really want new music, I have heard you can get it from something called a pee-toupee program without all these problems. I really should look into that.
I sure as hell didn't learn BASIC at age 12 because I thought it would get me a highly-individualistic, abstract, stressful job. I just wanted to make the computer do cool things.
But you DID take up a highly individualistic, abstract activity because you LIKED it. In general, girls like to spend their time on other things. They do not think creating computer programs is cool.
You could also track back to the video games you mention. Why do boys play video games and girls not (on average)? Does this point out a basic difference between men and women, or is it just cultural pressure?
My daughter is five and plays computer games, and a lot of her girlfriends do too. I am wearily waiting for the moment when she stops being interested in computers. But maybe I get lucky...
However, if she is eager to start hacking away, and Microsoft won't hire her now, she should be encouraged to contribute to the Open Source community - even on a Windows project. That way, she will learn not only how to code more, but also learn how to interact with developers across the globe. That, at that very young age, will surely look extremely impressive and will teach her infinite things.
Hmmmm. How deliciously evil. I like your thinking. THIS is the way to take on and replace the evil empire!
Or were you thinking "about programming" when you said "teach her infinite things"?
Or she just continues her studies and becomes an average student and average worker over time. I recently read about sociological research that pointed out that 'gifted' people are a lot less likely to become outstanding contributors to their chosen field than those that simply have to study hard for it.
And it's fairly ludicrous to assume that women don't get into the field because they just don't feel like it.
This is by no means a true statement. Men and women are different, and there are subjects where they generally feel different about (note that I say generally, this does not hold for individuals, of course). I strongly suspect the highly individualistic, abstract, stressful computer-related jobs are one of those subjects.
"You published information on a public medium. Case mismissed."
I don't think it is this easy. If you write something, you've got copyrights. You don't even need to CLAIM copyright by adding a copyright statement, that just helps to prove your rights in court. You have copyrights as soon as you author something.
As copyright holder, you can display your works to the public. That does not give the public the right to reproduce the work.
As copyright holder, as soon as you stop distributing your work, it is no longer accessible to the public, unless you granted the public that right. No-one else is allowed to start showing your work again, unless they have permission.
I completely agree that when you publish something on the Internet, it is up for grabs. There is no way you can expect to control the information you release.
If you buy a book, you can enjoy the book as long as you like, and you can show it to other people. If the author wants to retract the book, that is impossible. You have actually paid for the privilige to have the book in your home, and to be able to use it in any way you like, except for republishing it.
When an author publishes on the Internet, it is similar to publishing in a book that is distributed to the whole world and nobody has to pay for. However, redistribution rights are not granted. And it seems to me that redistribution is exactly what the Internet Archive is doing.
It would be a shame if this case will be the end of the Internet Archive, but it seems the only legal conclusion to me.
No it doesn't, but I could have spelled it out more clearly.
Situation one: The bus company employs its own team of lawyers. These people are expensive. The bus company starts wondering whether it really needs all these lawyers who are not contributing to the core business. The lawyers suddenly come up with an inspired idea...
Situation two: There is an independent law firm. The lawyers are not doing too well. They are badly in need of new BMWs and need to build pools with their new country villas. They need new business. "Someone should hire us!" they cry out. But who? Then someone gets an idea: Let's approach the bus company, and convince them that...
Left to themselves lawyers come up with stuff like... um.. the US Constitution.
Perhaps the "scientific" lawyers come up with the Constitution. The practicing lawyers are in it for the money. They need to sell themselves. It's all about marketing: a bad product which you can convince people to buy still makes you rich.
I know lawyer bashing is popular here, but I know a couple of practicing lawyers, and I know this is how they work. And yes, I know "scientific" lawyers too, and this is not how THEY work, but they don't get rich.
I am no physicist or astronomer. I looked up the link. Something I don't understand:
Aren't the L4 and L5 points not actually circles? They are points on a two-dimensional map, but space is at least of three dimensions.
Furthermore, if the L4 and L5 points are circles, since they are the only stable points, wouldn't that mean there is nothing to "fight over"? There is room enough for everybody.
Except that all British Citizens have paid for this music whether they chose to or not. That would be the same as if the government charged everyone $15,000 and then gave everyone a "free" car. It's not exactly fair to the competition.
That's not the same thing. I think car manufacturers would be very happy because the government has to buy those cars from someone -- it's good for business, it's good for economy. It's not good for the environment or for the ability to get to work on time, but that's another matter.
Now, what happened with the BBC music, is also good for the economy. First, the BBC pays the orchestra, so about 150 people have work. Second, people get in touch with classical music, and may be stimulated to listen to or even BUY more of it. Since buying music is good for business, companies profit here too.
Government is in the hair of companies ALL THE TIME. If the government provides railroads, it's bad for car manufacturers. If government lays a new road, it is bad for toll roads. If government abolishes software patents, it's bad for the lawyers who specialised in sueing programmers.
The difference between the government and companies is that the government should be in it for the good of the people, while the companies are in it for the good of themselves. They are not really competing, although they might cover some common area.
Granted, companies have rights too, but they do not have the right that the government should completely avoid their business. They chose their own business, and if that business overlaps some of the government's responsibilities, it's their own problem if their business is hurt by that.
A French bus company sues cleaning ladies who carpool.
Let me guess who came up with this bright idea...
Uhmmm... A LAWYER!
Face it, there are too many lawyers in the world today (especially in Europe where law is not practised by the best and brightest, but by those wanted to get a university diploma in the easiest way possible). These people need to earn money while not being able to produce anything, so they create their own work by coming up with ridiculous claims.
It's a new bubble. Lawyers create something from nothing, and will make us all rich!
But someone has to pay these lawyers to do their dirty deeds. And when their employers realise these cases are indeed ridiculous and are only costing bags of money, the bubble will burst. Just give it a while.
Seriously folks, when will the madness stop? You can't patch a broken design combined with user unawareness by semi-working cannot be trusted commercial programs!
Interesting comment, which reminded me of a story:
I once worked for a bank, where there was a computer that processed all electronic banking files. The majority of the programs on this computer were written by a guy I worked with. This guy considered himself a programming god, while I thought he was below average.
Now, one of the quite critical programs that ran on this computer was in the habit of crashing occasionally. The guy attributed this to an OS fluke, and instead of debugging the program and resolving the error, he wrote a program that simply checked whether the crashing program was running, and if it wasn't, would restart it.
Without our department knowing, the crashes increased in frequency. We didn't know this, because the crashing program was restarted all the time. Unfortunately, at a certain point in time the crashes occurred about every few seconds, and our system basically went down. I was part of the team that analysed and resolved the problem, and, of course, we found that it was a basic DESIGN flaw in the crashing program. I won't go into details, but basically, with some knowledge of file transfer protocols, this flaw would have been avoided.
Now, why is this story on topic? Because Windows is JUST like this crashing program, Microsoft is JUST like the guy who wrote the crashing program, and AntiSpam/AntiVirus/Firewalls are JUST like the program that restarted the crashing program.
What I expect to find, in the not-too-distant future, is that our Windows systems will simply stop running because the patch programs need all computing resources to keep Windows from going down. And the only way to resolve this, is a redesign. Which should be done by people who know how to design a good system, and not by a marketing company.
This sounds very much like the demonstration of the classic counting horse, which was actually responding to unconscious signals of its trainer, or of the apes who were said to be able to learn language, but were actually just doing mostly random stuff which the experimenter interpreted as intelligent (when they made mistakes, the experimenter said they were "teasing" or "sulky").
It seems to me that a parrot understanding "none" is not too weird; it's the difference between "nothing" and "something". However, there is no reason for a parrot to know the difference between five and six. I am a father of a five-year old (her birthday was three months ago), and while my daughter can currently do additions and multiplications in her head to about 30, a year ago she still had to physically count items to tell me how many there are. A parrot's brain is certainly less advanced than a four-year-old's brain, so it seems doubtful to me that a parrot could identify an amount just by looking.
Furthermore, the way the article is written seems to indicate that the parrot spontaneously came up with the concept of "none", without being trained to do so. This seems a rather bold claim, and I don't really believe that happened. A parrot can be trained, and it can probably learn, but I seriously doubt it can learn language or math, because those are useless for a parrot.
Slashdot Mirror
No, people just don't like a company -- any company -- get a patent on something which (a) the company did not invent, (b) already existed more than a decade ago, (c) is really really obvious, (d) is in common use by nearly every computer user today.
It's like Microsoft said: "Hey, nobody got the idea to patent smileys yet! And everything should be patented by SOMEBODY! I mean, we can't have any concept not OWNED by someone, can we? So let's see if the patent office is stupid enough to grant us exclusive rights to something that is currently in the public domain! We can see what we do with such a patent later."
No it isn't. Kerk is Dutch for Church, while Kirch is German for Church.
That, however, is the way it is used in the article.
Playing chess is not something that you can naturally represent as a binary classification task. Any approach that attempts to represent playing chess in this way is going to perform poorly.
Bayesian filtering for spam is not by definition binary classification. True, the end result is "spam" or "not spam", but what it does is calculating how likely a message is to be spam. Then, if the likelihood is above 90%, for instance, the message gets classified as spam, and otherwise not.
Chess playing can easily be represented as an evaluation task: that is actually how most chess programs are written. The engine has an evaluation algorithm that assigns a board position a value that represents the chance of winning in that position. A minimax algorithm then searches for the best move based on the evaluation of play sequences from the current board position.
The problem with this algorithm, however, is that it doesn't evaluate board positions. And if you don't do that, there is little reason to suppose that the program will generate good moves, except for maybe the opening moves.
It depends what you mean by "playing chess". Can a monkey play chess? If you let the monkey move pieces at random, and the board simply disallows illegal moves, is the monkey playing chess? If you say "yes", then sure, the spam-chess engine can play chess. But then anything that can move pieces can play chess. True, spam-chess plays a little better than random moves, that's why I said it can't play *well* -- and it NEVER will play well. But it is also true that the author compares his engine with the play of a three-year-old. However, the implication that the spam-chess engine might someday play a good game of chess is wrong.
"Perhaps most interestingly overall, it should be remembered that dbacl doesn't think ahead like most chess engines do. Its successes and failures are almost entirely based on the historical record of the game as it develops and mimicry of training games, not at all on calculating moves and countermoves in the future."
That's not novel. The first good checkers-playing program used learned patterns. NeuroGo plays a reasonable game of Go simply by having a Neural Network assign a weight to each board position when the current board is the input. Pattern matching is pretty common in boardgame-playing programs. The main difference between all these programs and spam-chess is that spam-chess learns move-sequences, not board-positions. And move sequences are pretty useless, because they provide little information on the board position if the sequence in not of sufficient length. And the computational requirements of move sequences of sufficient length are simply too high to ever solve the problem.
It seems to me that the author addresses this issue directly. I.e., the premise is fine -- he taught a bayesian filter to play chess, but not well, and the reason it sucks is because it only plays with history (no prediction).
The spam-chess-engine doesn't recognise illegal moves by itself, so does it play chess? Doesn't it leave the chess playing up to the separate interface which disallows illegal moves? And the author DOES use prediction: he predicts the next move from the move sequence. True, he is not using minimax to analyse the board position, but he doesn't need to: basically, the move sequence gives the same value a minimax searcher based on move sequences would return.
Anyway, as I said, the article is fun. It just doesn't describe a useful approach to chess-playing.
No, it won't. This is actually what was done in the article.
The problem is in the length of the sequences. If you could learn sequences of, say, length 60 (for 30-move games), maybe your filter would become a reasonably good player. Unfortunately, the need for computational resources increases exponentially with each extra move added.
The complexity of chess is simply too high to learn this way.
Chess openings might be learned this way, but it is not very useful to do so. The results will be worse than opening libraries, which are very good at the moment.
How much does your wife normally charge for an hour of "entertainment", then?
The premise of a Bayesian filter is that is learns sequences of words, or characters, or whatever. Spam-chess learns sequences of moves. This premise is wrong, since good moves are related to complete board positions, not to what was done in the previous few moves.
Of course, the longer your string of moves is, the better it will represent the board position, especially during the opening phase of the game. And the example the article provides of reasonable play of spam-chess, is actually from the game's opening, where the learned sequences indeed represent the complete game.
For the middle game, however, spam chess will perform badly, always.
But, as I said before, the idea is quite a lot of fun. I enjoyed reading the article. You can learn a lot from it, both about spam filtering and about chess.
When I have killed 50 rabbits, if I know I need to kill 10 more rabbits before being able to take on boss rabbit, I am driven to seek out those rabbits. If I don't know that, I will probably be bored with the game because I have no idea how much longer I need to continue killing rabbits before I am finally able to proceed. Especially MMOGs will be very boring without stats.
However, I fully agree that "stats" are a cop-out with respect to letting the player experience progression. There should be a system that is more integrated with the game.
The (very short) article doesn't say what exactly Cedant is allegedly infringing, but "secure credit card transactions", "customer referrals", and especially "data management" seem trivial techniques which should never have been patented in the first place. If this goes to court, the judge might think so too. It could be the start of patent reforms.
It certainly beats Episode I.
He should have said "Good case study for firms on HOW CUSTOMERS DO NOT LIKE DRM IMPLEMENTED." Because that is what he means. However, the point of DRM is not that customers should like it. At best, customers don't notice it. At worst, customers hate it. For firms, at best they get a lot more money from customers. At worse, however, (and firms don't seem to realise this) DRM will cause customers not to do business with the firm anymore. Personally, that's how far I have gone. A couple of years ago I bought about fifty CDs a year. Now, I don't buy anything anymore, simply because I like to play my CDs in my computer, and with DRM on the CDs, I fear I will not be able to use the CDs as I want. And I am not interested in easy circumvention methods: I am NOT going to place an audio CD in my PC which I cannot play without hassle. I mean, if I really want new music, I have heard you can get it from something called a pee-toupee program without all these problems. I really should look into that.
But you DID take up a highly individualistic, abstract activity because you LIKED it. In general, girls like to spend their time on other things. They do not think creating computer programs is cool.
You could also track back to the video games you mention. Why do boys play video games and girls not (on average)? Does this point out a basic difference between men and women, or is it just cultural pressure?
My daughter is five and plays computer games, and a lot of her girlfriends do too. I am wearily waiting for the moment when she stops being interested in computers. But maybe I get lucky...
Hmmmm. How deliciously evil. I like your thinking. THIS is the way to take on and replace the evil empire!
Or were you thinking "about programming" when you said "teach her infinite things"?
Or she just continues her studies and becomes an average student and average worker over time. I recently read about sociological research that pointed out that 'gifted' people are a lot less likely to become outstanding contributors to their chosen field than those that simply have to study hard for it.
This is by no means a true statement. Men and women are different, and there are subjects where they generally feel different about (note that I say generally, this does not hold for individuals, of course). I strongly suspect the highly individualistic, abstract, stressful computer-related jobs are one of those subjects.
I expect that this is not an exclusive or.
I don't think it is this easy. If you write something, you've got copyrights. You don't even need to CLAIM copyright by adding a copyright statement, that just helps to prove your rights in court. You have copyrights as soon as you author something.
As copyright holder, you can display your works to the public. That does not give the public the right to reproduce the work.
As copyright holder, as soon as you stop distributing your work, it is no longer accessible to the public, unless you granted the public that right. No-one else is allowed to start showing your work again, unless they have permission.
I completely agree that when you publish something on the Internet, it is up for grabs. There is no way you can expect to control the information you release.
If you buy a book, you can enjoy the book as long as you like, and you can show it to other people. If the author wants to retract the book, that is impossible. You have actually paid for the privilige to have the book in your home, and to be able to use it in any way you like, except for republishing it.
When an author publishes on the Internet, it is similar to publishing in a book that is distributed to the whole world and nobody has to pay for. However, redistribution rights are not granted. And it seems to me that redistribution is exactly what the Internet Archive is doing.
It would be a shame if this case will be the end of the Internet Archive, but it seems the only legal conclusion to me.
Submitting a story about an old website on your favorite retro-game can get you accepted? I have gone about this completely the wrong way!
Never mind, I found the answer: the Earth and the Sun also rotate around each other, which adds a plane to the whole system.
No it doesn't, but I could have spelled it out more clearly.
Situation one: The bus company employs its own team of lawyers. These people are expensive. The bus company starts wondering whether it really needs all these lawyers who are not contributing to the core business. The lawyers suddenly come up with an inspired idea...
Situation two: There is an independent law firm. The lawyers are not doing too well. They are badly in need of new BMWs and need to build pools with their new country villas. They need new business. "Someone should hire us!" they cry out. But who? Then someone gets an idea: Let's approach the bus company, and convince them that...
Left to themselves lawyers come up with stuff like ... um .. the US Constitution.
Perhaps the "scientific" lawyers come up with the Constitution. The practicing lawyers are in it for the money. They need to sell themselves. It's all about marketing: a bad product which you can convince people to buy still makes you rich.
I know lawyer bashing is popular here, but I know a couple of practicing lawyers, and I know this is how they work. And yes, I know "scientific" lawyers too, and this is not how THEY work, but they don't get rich.
Aren't the L4 and L5 points not actually circles? They are points on a two-dimensional map, but space is at least of three dimensions.
Furthermore, if the L4 and L5 points are circles, since they are the only stable points, wouldn't that mean there is nothing to "fight over"? There is room enough for everybody.
That's not the same thing. I think car manufacturers would be very happy because the government has to buy those cars from someone -- it's good for business, it's good for economy. It's not good for the environment or for the ability to get to work on time, but that's another matter.
Now, what happened with the BBC music, is also good for the economy. First, the BBC pays the orchestra, so about 150 people have work. Second, people get in touch with classical music, and may be stimulated to listen to or even BUY more of it. Since buying music is good for business, companies profit here too.
Government is in the hair of companies ALL THE TIME. If the government provides railroads, it's bad for car manufacturers. If government lays a new road, it is bad for toll roads. If government abolishes software patents, it's bad for the lawyers who specialised in sueing programmers.
The difference between the government and companies is that the government should be in it for the good of the people, while the companies are in it for the good of themselves. They are not really competing, although they might cover some common area.
Granted, companies have rights too, but they do not have the right that the government should completely avoid their business. They chose their own business, and if that business overlaps some of the government's responsibilities, it's their own problem if their business is hurt by that.
Let me guess who came up with this bright idea...
Uhmmm... A LAWYER!
Face it, there are too many lawyers in the world today (especially in Europe where law is not practised by the best and brightest, but by those wanted to get a university diploma in the easiest way possible). These people need to earn money while not being able to produce anything, so they create their own work by coming up with ridiculous claims.
It's a new bubble. Lawyers create something from nothing, and will make us all rich!
But someone has to pay these lawyers to do their dirty deeds. And when their employers realise these cases are indeed ridiculous and are only costing bags of money, the bubble will burst. Just give it a while.
Interesting comment, which reminded me of a story:
I once worked for a bank, where there was a computer that processed all electronic banking files. The majority of the programs on this computer were written by a guy I worked with. This guy considered himself a programming god, while I thought he was below average.
Now, one of the quite critical programs that ran on this computer was in the habit of crashing occasionally. The guy attributed this to an OS fluke, and instead of debugging the program and resolving the error, he wrote a program that simply checked whether the crashing program was running, and if it wasn't, would restart it.
Without our department knowing, the crashes increased in frequency. We didn't know this, because the crashing program was restarted all the time. Unfortunately, at a certain point in time the crashes occurred about every few seconds, and our system basically went down. I was part of the team that analysed and resolved the problem, and, of course, we found that it was a basic DESIGN flaw in the crashing program. I won't go into details, but basically, with some knowledge of file transfer protocols, this flaw would have been avoided.
Now, why is this story on topic? Because Windows is JUST like this crashing program, Microsoft is JUST like the guy who wrote the crashing program, and AntiSpam/AntiVirus/Firewalls are JUST like the program that restarted the crashing program.
What I expect to find, in the not-too-distant future, is that our Windows systems will simply stop running because the patch programs need all computing resources to keep Windows from going down. And the only way to resolve this, is a redesign. Which should be done by people who know how to design a good system, and not by a marketing company.
It seems to me that a parrot understanding "none" is not too weird; it's the difference between "nothing" and "something". However, there is no reason for a parrot to know the difference between five and six. I am a father of a five-year old (her birthday was three months ago), and while my daughter can currently do additions and multiplications in her head to about 30, a year ago she still had to physically count items to tell me how many there are. A parrot's brain is certainly less advanced than a four-year-old's brain, so it seems doubtful to me that a parrot could identify an amount just by looking.
Furthermore, the way the article is written seems to indicate that the parrot spontaneously came up with the concept of "none", without being trained to do so. This seems a rather bold claim, and I don't really believe that happened. A parrot can be trained, and it can probably learn, but I seriously doubt it can learn language or math, because those are useless for a parrot.