But that still doesn't explain how anyone would value a domain name that has never displayed anything but a blank page at hundreds of thousands of dollars. Where would the high traffic be coming from? The traffic is obviously faked. Anyone who can cough up 386K is not an idiot (or would have lost the money before this). So where are all these ridiculous bids coming from?
But the question is: had you expected anything else?
Ferchrissakes you KNOW what this movie is about. You KNOW what is going to happen. So what is there to spoil?
And if you look at EIGHTY pictures on a page about FORTY screens high, and at the end say "Damn it, I've been spoiled", then that's entirely your own fault, isn't it?
(a) Let James Earl Jones do a voice-over, or
(b) Release a new version of episodes IV-VI where the voice of Vader has been changed to that of Hayden Christensen?
Knowing Lucas, I think (b) will be the choice...
And to add insult to injury, in the new versions Lucas will let Han shoot first.
I've never heard of employer pressure causing this type of thing.
Actually, I had TWO employers tell me "You need to patent more!". Then I told them that I could pull a new (software) patent out of my ass every day, but would they be willing to cough up about 40K to drag each of them through the legal department and then to a few of the patent offices around the world, and after that again cough up legal fees to defend those patents, IF they were granted? In both cases, that was the last I heard about it.
It would be a great boon for the anti-software-patent lobby if this patent would be granted.
Think of it: it should be easy to convince even a judge that this is an absolutely ridiculous patent claim. So invariably the judge will arrive at two conclusions: (a) this patent is invalid, and (b) the USPTO cannot do a good job. Especially (b) will go a long way in going back to a saner patent system.
The American Go Association is reporting that Go for the 5x5 board has been solved by the computer program MIGOS, reports the program's creator, Erik Van Der Werk,
His name is Eric van der Werf.
a professor at the University of Maastricht
He is not a professor. He was a Ph.D. student. He received his Ph.D. title January 27 of this year.
in Holland.
That should be "The Netherlands". Holland is part of The Netherlands, but Maastricht is not located in Holland.
At about a quarter of the full-board version, 5x5 go
That's about 1/14th of a full board (25 points as opposed to 361 points).
is miniscule, similar in scale to "solving" 2X2 chess.
It is similar to solving 5x5 or 6x6 chess.
The fact that a programmer
Calling Van der Werf a "professor" is a bit too much, but calling him a "programmer" is not enough.
would even consider this a noteworthy challenge is itself a remarkable testament to the game's complexity.
Basically, it was not done before, and could be done with a couple of weeks computation time. That's not to belittle Eric's work; it is only a small part of his work. Read his thesis to see what he has done for the field of Go research.
Van Der Werk's
Again, it is "Van der Werf".
approach is described in detail in an article at the Netherlands Organization for Scientific Research (NOSR).
That should be NWO, not NOSR, and the approach is not described in detail in the article. For details, visit Eric's website.
Markus Enzenberger's NeuroGo implements a neural network to play 9x9 Go. The program is reasonably strong, but no match for the more traditionally designed programs.
There's been a general dumbing of this forum over the years. Sure, we've always had "First Post!" types here, but I consider them amusing. What once was a technoscience community, with the kind of background knowledge that implies, now includes more than its share of people who discredit science for political, economic, and religious reasons.
That said, the fact that the "debunking" posts usually get modded up, is a sign that the crowd is still predominantly scientifically oriented.
It is so simple: by creating a 1337 d1x10n4r33, Microsoft attempts to ensure that 1337$p34k becomes totally unkewl. The best way to get a teen to drop his obsessive stupid behaviour is by legitimising it. W4y 2 go, Micr0$0pht!!!111!?@#*!!
Imitation occurs, that is a fact. Kids imitate peers, idols, games and movies.
As a fun fact: A researcher once investigated the sexual behaviour of teens. He found that these kids obviously watched lots of porn movies, because of their tendency to perform facial cumshots.
Kids imitating games and movies during gameplay is, of course, pretty normal.
However, a kid that can't distinguish between gameplay and reality is obviously fucked up. Fucking up the kid is not caused by the movies or the games, but either by the kids genetics, or, more likely, by his peers or parents.
So now, BigMegaCorp calls HugeCustomer and says: Hey we have this new product that you'll love, it's patented, so send us $1M!
HugeCustomer replies: "Hum, sorry, our admins just found this great little tool off the net that runs on linux and does everything your app does and then some."
The BigMegaCorp says: "Wait a moment, having the patent means we can't just sue the programmers who wrote the tool that violates the patent, but we can also sue those that use that tool. So, HugeCustomer, you have a choice: either you buy our new product for $1M, or we sue your ass off for a lot more than that. And since you are already in violation of our patent, those are the ONLY choices you have."
Then HugeCustomer says: "And once again, it has been shown there is no such thing as a free lunch. I'll fire the admins which downloaded that 'free' tool from the net, and fork over the $1M. That seems to be the cheapest solution. Darn it."
What Bill Gates believed 14 years ago is certainly going to be different than what he believes now.
But Bill probably does not believe anything different now from 14 years ago. He probably still thinks patents are bad for innovation. At the time, however, he considered Microsoft to be an innovative company (which at the time it was, kind of). So he has just changed his opinion on whether patents are bad or good for Microsoft, and this opinion has changed because Microsoft has changed.
I would assume rich people would have a huge house and therefore not have to worry about the few cubic feet of storage space even a 1000 dvd's take up. (time for me to think of useless things to sell to dumb rich people).
I am not rich but I own over a 1000 DVDs (yes, that's how big my penis is), and I can say storage space is not really the issue for me. For me the issue is "when am I going to watch all these?" Seriously, at any time I have at least a hundred movies which I own but didn't watch yet. Let alone all the movies I would like to watch a second or third time.
About two years ago, because of this issue, I decided to stop bying movies unless I really, really wanted them, or their price dropped well below 10 euros. At the moment, almost every movie drops below that price six months after being released on DVD. So I am back where I started.
Any AI researcher who claimed to be trying to replicate human sentience at this date would be laughed at.
As an AI researcher, I can tell you that replicating human intelligence (or something better) actually is the ultimate goal of most if not all AI researchers. The point is that nobody expects to achieve anything like that during their own lifetime. But it is all about making small steps.
Actually, the people involved in the project are already aware of this;
Yes, they are aware of this. But being aware of this is no good by itself; they should design their experiments so that they can objectively judge the results.
Their suggestion that they also do it the other way around, they look for world events and then see if these were predicted by their random number generator, is no good either: when you know you can always find a real world event for a peak, you should also know that you can also find a peak for a real world event.
Who is judging which real world events should have peaks, and which shouldn't? Who is judging how long before the event the peak should arise? These so-called scientists seem to have no idea. They are just looking for data that suits their purpose. That is not good science.
What they should do is the following: they should let a computer predict automatically from the data when an important real world event is going to happen. That prediction should be as explicit as possible: "something will happen in the coming 24 hours", is not good enough. Furthermore, without looking at the computer's predictions, the scientists should observe world events and specify which ones should be predicted by their random number generator, and at what specific moment. If they can do this with a high enough accuracy (few false positives AND few false negatives), they have proven their point.
However, I predict they cannot do that. They are doing exactly the same thing as the "paranormal" soothsayers do; they make vague predictions and explain after the fact. That is not good science. It is nothing.
Finally, the Dutch play a more positive role in this debacle. However, there is still the problem that decisions of the Dutch Parliament may be ignored by its governmental representatives in the EU (it happened before with the software patenting mess). Unfortunately, software patent news is small potatoes, so they won't lose a significant amount of votes by going against the wishes of the Parliament. And on the other side of the fence there are their buddies of Philips, who really would like to have software patents in Europe. And, they reason, what is good for Philips, is good for the Dutch economy. Personally, I think software patents are also bad for Philips, but IANAL.
Pretty sure the US Patent Office has a say in what is and isn't patentable.
No. The law tells us what is and isn't patentable. The USPTO is just the institute that applies the law and has the power to grant patents. Unfortunately, by and large the USPTO lacks the (scientific) knowledge to apply the law according to its spirit.
If the embedded data rate is low enough, it's completely impossible to detect even if it was constructed using simple steganographic techniques.
This is absolutely true. If you want to hide a 1Kb message, and you use a 300Mb movie to store it in, it is completely undetectable. That is, unless you use a movie that is publicly available, then a simple comparison can do the trick. But pick a home movie, and you're in the clear. Even better, if you just generate a file with 300Mb of noise, you don't even have to go through the trouble of taping a one-hour movie. One drawback with that: it is easy to recognise by an outsider that you are transmitting absolute nonsense, so they might suspect something fishy is going on. But the message will never be found.
On what legal basis could the museum possibly have refused to pay his bill after contracting him?
None, of course. And don't think they didn't profess to be very happy about this deal, and displayed the piece proudly (they moved it outside sometime later, since it was taking up valuable space). Only the citizens were unhappy, seeing that their tax money was spend on such crud.
However, ripping a museum off to the tune of £1m, by socially engineering... that is art.
In that case, they should have put up billboards in the next room, telling the story, and displaying the contract. And there should be a five-minute looped video in the room, showing the artist who is laughing all the way to the bank.
In the city where I live (which is in Europe), a new museum opened. The museum paid a famous American artist (forgot the name, sorry) a million bucks to create a new piece for the grand opening. The artist couldn't come, but he sent them a fax that described what the piece should look like. Basically, it consisted of a pile of bricks. The museum hired a couple of construction workers to build the pile of bricks. Unfortunately, the room where the pile should be constructed, didn't have the right dimensions. So the construction workers decided to build a completely different pile of bricks. The museum staff took pictures of the new pile, and faxed them to the artist, asking if this was OK. The artist sent a fax back that is was fine; evidently, the purpose of his artwork was not that a specific pile of bricks was to be built, but just that there was a pile of bricks. The museum paid his bill.
Getting back to the subject, I think that most people would reject the notion that a computer can create art. The point is that art should be created with a purpose. A computer has no purpose (of itself). Of course, it can be argued that the human who created the program is the artist, and the computer is just one of his tools, just as in the case above the fax machine and the construction workers were tools of said artist.
Personally, I think neither is art, since in my opinion art is not only about ideas, but also about execution. I don't think randomness is execution. But that's just me. You can call this art if you want to, but then I can argue that anything is art.
Without having read the book, but having read several reviews, it seems to me that this book primarily appeals to people who do not know how to think well, and by "Blink" get an ego-boost because it allows them to believe that quick judgements are actually better than seeking good arguments.
That is my quick judgement. So if quick judgements are right, the book is crap. And if not, well, then the book talks nonsense, so it is also crap. O, how I love judging a book by its cover!
Slashdot Mirror
So, as soon as this site becomes an ad-fest, or turns into a travel agency, you are going to stop visiting, is it not?
But that still doesn't explain how anyone would value a domain name that has never displayed anything but a blank page at hundreds of thousands of dollars. Where would the high traffic be coming from? The traffic is obviously faked. Anyone who can cough up 386K is not an idiot (or would have lost the money before this). So where are all these ridiculous bids coming from?
Furthermore, why the hell would a site with only a blank page on it be high traffic? No reason at all.
Ferchrissakes you KNOW what this movie is about. You KNOW what is going to happen. So what is there to spoil?
And if you look at EIGHTY pictures on a page about FORTY screens high, and at the end say "Damn it, I've been spoiled", then that's entirely your own fault, isn't it?
No problem for uncle George. He will release a new version of RotJ where he changes this particular line in the dialogue.
(a) Let James Earl Jones do a voice-over, or
(b) Release a new version of episodes IV-VI where the voice of Vader has been changed to that of Hayden Christensen?
Knowing Lucas, I think (b) will be the choice...
And to add insult to injury, in the new versions Lucas will let Han shoot first.
Actually, I had TWO employers tell me "You need to patent more!". Then I told them that I could pull a new (software) patent out of my ass every day, but would they be willing to cough up about 40K to drag each of them through the legal department and then to a few of the patent offices around the world, and after that again cough up legal fees to defend those patents, IF they were granted? In both cases, that was the last I heard about it.
Think of it: it should be easy to convince even a judge that this is an absolutely ridiculous patent claim. So invariably the judge will arrive at two conclusions: (a) this patent is invalid, and (b) the USPTO cannot do a good job. Especially (b) will go a long way in going back to a saner patent system.
His name is Eric van der Werf.
a professor at the University of Maastricht
He is not a professor. He was a Ph.D. student. He received his Ph.D. title January 27 of this year.
in Holland.
That should be "The Netherlands". Holland is part of The Netherlands, but Maastricht is not located in Holland.
At about a quarter of the full-board version, 5x5 go
That's about 1/14th of a full board (25 points as opposed to 361 points).
is miniscule, similar in scale to "solving" 2X2 chess.
It is similar to solving 5x5 or 6x6 chess.
The fact that a programmer
Calling Van der Werf a "professor" is a bit too much, but calling him a "programmer" is not enough.
would even consider this a noteworthy challenge is itself a remarkable testament to the game's complexity.
Basically, it was not done before, and could be done with a couple of weeks computation time. That's not to belittle Eric's work; it is only a small part of his work. Read his thesis to see what he has done for the field of Go research.
Van Der Werk's
Again, it is "Van der Werf".
approach is described in detail in an article at the Netherlands Organization for Scientific Research (NOSR).
That should be NWO, not NOSR, and the approach is not described in detail in the article. For details, visit Eric's website.
Markus Enzenberger's NeuroGo implements a neural network to play 9x9 Go. The program is reasonably strong, but no match for the more traditionally designed programs.
That said, the fact that the "debunking" posts usually get modded up, is a sign that the crowd is still predominantly scientifically oriented.
It is so simple: by creating a 1337 d1x10n4r33, Microsoft attempts to ensure that 1337$p34k becomes totally unkewl. The best way to get a teen to drop his obsessive stupid behaviour is by legitimising it. W4y 2 go, Micr0$0pht!!!111!?@#*!!
As a fun fact: A researcher once investigated the sexual behaviour of teens. He found that these kids obviously watched lots of porn movies, because of their tendency to perform facial cumshots.
Kids imitating games and movies during gameplay is, of course, pretty normal.
However, a kid that can't distinguish between gameplay and reality is obviously fucked up. Fucking up the kid is not caused by the movies or the games, but either by the kids genetics, or, more likely, by his peers or parents.
The BigMegaCorp says: "Wait a moment, having the patent means we can't just sue the programmers who wrote the tool that violates the patent, but we can also sue those that use that tool. So, HugeCustomer, you have a choice: either you buy our new product for $1M, or we sue your ass off for a lot more than that. And since you are already in violation of our patent, those are the ONLY choices you have."
Then HugeCustomer says: "And once again, it has been shown there is no such thing as a free lunch. I'll fire the admins which downloaded that 'free' tool from the net, and fork over the $1M. That seems to be the cheapest solution. Darn it."
But Bill probably does not believe anything different now from 14 years ago. He probably still thinks patents are bad for innovation. At the time, however, he considered Microsoft to be an innovative company (which at the time it was, kind of). So he has just changed his opinion on whether patents are bad or good for Microsoft, and this opinion has changed because Microsoft has changed.
I am not rich but I own over a 1000 DVDs (yes, that's how big my penis is), and I can say storage space is not really the issue for me. For me the issue is "when am I going to watch all these?" Seriously, at any time I have at least a hundred movies which I own but didn't watch yet. Let alone all the movies I would like to watch a second or third time.
About two years ago, because of this issue, I decided to stop bying movies unless I really, really wanted them, or their price dropped well below 10 euros. At the moment, almost every movie drops below that price six months after being released on DVD. So I am back where I started.
As an AI researcher, I can tell you that replicating human intelligence (or something better) actually is the ultimate goal of most if not all AI researchers. The point is that nobody expects to achieve anything like that during their own lifetime. But it is all about making small steps.
Yes, they are aware of this. But being aware of this is no good by itself; they should design their experiments so that they can objectively judge the results.
Their suggestion that they also do it the other way around, they look for world events and then see if these were predicted by their random number generator, is no good either: when you know you can always find a real world event for a peak, you should also know that you can also find a peak for a real world event.
Who is judging which real world events should have peaks, and which shouldn't? Who is judging how long before the event the peak should arise? These so-called scientists seem to have no idea. They are just looking for data that suits their purpose. That is not good science.
What they should do is the following: they should let a computer predict automatically from the data when an important real world event is going to happen. That prediction should be as explicit as possible: "something will happen in the coming 24 hours", is not good enough. Furthermore, without looking at the computer's predictions, the scientists should observe world events and specify which ones should be predicted by their random number generator, and at what specific moment. If they can do this with a high enough accuracy (few false positives AND few false negatives), they have proven their point.
However, I predict they cannot do that. They are doing exactly the same thing as the "paranormal" soothsayers do; they make vague predictions and explain after the fact. That is not good science. It is nothing.
Finally, the Dutch play a more positive role in this debacle. However, there is still the problem that decisions of the Dutch Parliament may be ignored by its governmental representatives in the EU (it happened before with the software patenting mess). Unfortunately, software patent news is small potatoes, so they won't lose a significant amount of votes by going against the wishes of the Parliament. And on the other side of the fence there are their buddies of Philips, who really would like to have software patents in Europe. And, they reason, what is good for Philips, is good for the Dutch economy. Personally, I think software patents are also bad for Philips, but IANAL.
Perhaps that one was already taken?
No. The law tells us what is and isn't patentable. The USPTO is just the institute that applies the law and has the power to grant patents. Unfortunately, by and large the USPTO lacks the (scientific) knowledge to apply the law according to its spirit.
This is absolutely true. If you want to hide a 1Kb message, and you use a 300Mb movie to store it in, it is completely undetectable. That is, unless you use a movie that is publicly available, then a simple comparison can do the trick. But pick a home movie, and you're in the clear. Even better, if you just generate a file with 300Mb of noise, you don't even have to go through the trouble of taping a one-hour movie. One drawback with that: it is easy to recognise by an outsider that you are transmitting absolute nonsense, so they might suspect something fishy is going on. But the message will never be found.
None, of course. And don't think they didn't profess to be very happy about this deal, and displayed the piece proudly (they moved it outside sometime later, since it was taking up valuable space). Only the citizens were unhappy, seeing that their tax money was spend on such crud.
However, ripping a museum off to the tune of £1m, by socially engineering ... that is art.
In that case, they should have put up billboards in the next room, telling the story, and displaying the contract. And there should be a five-minute looped video in the room, showing the artist who is laughing all the way to the bank.
Getting back to the subject, I think that most people would reject the notion that a computer can create art. The point is that art should be created with a purpose. A computer has no purpose (of itself). Of course, it can be argued that the human who created the program is the artist, and the computer is just one of his tools, just as in the case above the fax machine and the construction workers were tools of said artist.
Personally, I think neither is art, since in my opinion art is not only about ideas, but also about execution. I don't think randomness is execution. But that's just me. You can call this art if you want to, but then I can argue that anything is art.
That is my quick judgement. So if quick judgements are right, the book is crap. And if not, well, then the book talks nonsense, so it is also crap. O, how I love judging a book by its cover!