See, this is the problem with science education these days. People are brought up to think things like SETI is a scientific process when it absolutely is not. Schools fail to teach their students that which is fundamental to all science, the scientific method. And that is the real problem with SETI, it is misrepresenting the scientific process and corrupting our children's view of what science really is.
To the poster, no, SETI is not more science. And science is not a "lottery", in fact it is very methodical. Science requires the scientific method, which requires your testing to actually accomplish something. If the test fails, then you know your hypothesis was wrong. Thats not the case with SETI, if their test fails (they are unable to find a signal) we know nothing more than we knew yesterday.
Most people also get upset when something happens to their car (and I don't mean the simple "damn, now I'll have to take the bus" reaction). Its a known fact that people can get attached to mechanical objects. Thats not what this study was about.
They developed two robots, one very mechanical, and one that giggled and appeared to interact with the children. The children treated the second robot much different from the first robot. The first they treated more or less as a toy, with all the rough treatment that entails. They may well have become upset had it been taken away (as kids do for most of their toys), but they interacted with it differently than they would another child. They second they treated much like they would treat another kid, from how they touched it to how they took care of it. And the most interesting thing was over the long term this interest lasted, while they got bored with the first robot.
So you are saying that because every medical condition hasn't been cured and the only new drugs you hear about are for impotence (of course they are the ones that get advertised the most, it only makes sense to advertise on TV a drug which you might ask a doctor about, not something they would have to diagnose), the medical industry has been complacent?
I am proof otherwise. I was born with a heart defect; had I been born a few generations earlier I would have had a very sickly life resulting in heart failure in my 30s or 40s. But instead I had a relatively easy surgery and I am perfectly healthy now. And people born with the same condition today apparently have it even easier, in fact their heart can remain beating throughout the surgery without the need of a bypass machine.
AIDS is no longer a death sentence. Many cancers that would have killed a few years ago can be treated. Diseases like chickenpox or mumps are ancient history to children today. We have drugs that can lower cholesterol, help battle extreme obesity, or treat individuals with devastating psychological illnesses. We can detect cancer or heart disease well in advance or perform surgeries that can help the blind see. Soldiers who receive wounds that would have been deadly in Vietnam now can make full recoveries. Don't say medicine hasn't progressed at all just because there are still some things it hasn't solved yet.
I mean by your standards the tech industry should be considered a dismal failure as well. Applications are nearly as slow on my 1.25 GB RAM machine as on our old 32 MB machine. Spam is still a problem, as is security. Applications still crash or lock up and most tech projects end up way overdue and far over budget without accomplishing much (look at Vista for proof of that). Companies are more interested in making their products look good than actually fixing reliability, performance, security, and usability concerns.
I'm sorry about your wife, I really am. I know someone with a son with that condition. But don't say the medical industry has failed just because the wonder drug that would cure that particular condition still eludes researchers when they have done so much to help improve the quality of life for hundreds of millions of people.
Oh, and yes, there are drugs out there that can increase the sex drive in women.
Similarly pink elephants from planet Zorgnon also exist in that sense, you mentioned them and therefore the idea of them are known. However, they really are not interesting outside of this conversation, therefore they are far too as esoteric subject to be present in a wikipedia article. The only people who may desire information on them would be those reading this thread, and then they would already know everything they would need to know about them. It makes no sense to include them in a reference like an encyclopedia.
Same with a webcomic with a small audience. No one outside of that audience would likely be interested in learning more about that comic (and then they already have access to the comic's website, which likely already contains all that information), so what is the point in listing it in an encyclopedia? Remember, that is the goal of the wikipedia, to be an encyclopedia. It is not simply a collection of meaningless blogs about drivel. And it is because of the focus on that goal that it is useful. I've seen wikis which were intended to be much more free form, where people could add whatever they want. The result is always one of two things, either it never gets updated because everyone is assuming someone else will do it, or it falls apart into a mess of unorganized crap where you will be lucky to find anything.
"Is this really a problem? Simply have 'London Bridge' indicate the famous bridge, with a link to a disambiguation page. If there were a megaband call 'London Bridge,' it would merit a Wikipedia article, no? Why not if it's a popular regional band? Why not if it's a popular webcomic?"
Why not if it is the title of a picture a little girl drew in preschool? Hell there you have four people who are impressed with the picture, the girl, the teacher, and both parents. Thats three more than the people who care about your webcomic.
Except if every piece of recordable human knowledge is present (as the original poster was calling for) that Disambiguation page grows to the point where its impossible to find something. If every song, band, comic, or poem written by a 3rd grader gets added to that list, within no time it gets unmanageable.
And thats just the list of individual articles. What about when all that crap gets added to the articles themselves. When every bit of meaningless drivel about the subject gets added to the article, they themselves become impossible to read.
I've been critical of the wikipedia in the past (well, not the wikipedia itself, but more how people tend to use it), but they do a pretty good job at organizing its content. Thats why it is so easy to use. Don't complain that their vision is wrong just because you want to use it as your personal blog to store things about your life even your own mother probably isn't interested in.
"The big problem is the systemic denial that Wikipedia could eventually be the sum of all recordable knowledge"
Thats a reality, not a denial. More is not always better, and frankly it is often worse. The most valuable function a work of reference has is filtering out unimportant irrelevant crap that makes it harder to find what you really want. If when I search for the term "London Bridge" I have to go through articles on every work of literature, popular culture reference, or inside joke between a group of nerds with Wikipedia access to the London Bridge before I finally find the article on the bridge that I wanted, well that just wasted a lot of my time.
Consider this thought experiment. I have constructed a library consisting every work of literature that exists and that could possibly exist. To make it easy to find things, I have provided a search engine that will search the full index of each book and return the closest match. See the problem? Since any combination of characters could conceivably be a work of literature, each combination of characters would have to be in the library as its own "book". As a result, the search engine doesn't help, as you basically need to input the entire text of the book you are searching for in order to find it. You have to know exactly what it is you are looking for in order to find it. In other words, by containing so much, it essentially has zero information.
A wise man doesn't know more information than a foolish man, just what he does know is more relevant.
First, it wasn't a movie that "got things right", it was a book that the movie happened to be loosely based on.
Second, no one these days is really doubting that Velociraptor is a small chicken sized scavenger that lived in Asia, not a human sized predator that lived in North America. Crichton's book was more likely about a different dinosaur, the Deinonychus, which for a brief period of time (which happened to be while he was writing his book) was classified by some to be a type of Velociraptor. That classification didn't last long, but Jurassic Park was such a success that the term 'raptor' stuck and has become the nickname for the entire Dromaeosauridae family (which includes the Deinonychus and several other large apparent predators).
Yes but the existence of other news sources that are covering the protests (especially US-based sources like Fox or MSNBC) pretty much refutes his argument that CNN (an internationally focused network that has not been known for being close to the Bush administration) has lack of coverage of the protests due to the government forcing it to hide news stories that may show the US government in a bad light.
First, if you are claiming the US government controls the US media the way the Russian government controls the Russian government just because there are other things going on other than a bunch of people walking around with signs and thinking they are making a difference in the world, you are an idiot.
Second, Fox News currently (as of 5:32 PM, EST) has this as their top story. So unless you want to concede that Fox is the most independent news outlet while CNN is a Bush lapdog, I'd rethink your argument...
Here are a few reviews from people who did read the book (or at least who claim to have read it, I admit I did not sit down and watch them each read it from cover to cover):
Now I did not go and seek out reviews that were critical of the book, these were just the first 5 I found. In fact most do recommend the book in the end. However, they generally agree his book has a few flaws. Not that his work isn't interesting or that he is clearly wrong in his arguments (though most generally agree that some of his claims are not fully substantiated), but that despite Wolfram's near megalomaniac claims to the contrary, his approach really isn't all that new. Some react to this fact with amusement (like Kurzweil), some with anger (like Shalizi), but regardless it is clearly a valid criticism that Wolfram's work really isn't all that new. Don't claim that the reason people are critical of him is that they are just resisting thinking about things differently.
Don't. I'm not trying to sound mean, but there is really no reason to feel sorry for them. They get 2 months of severance pay and get to get out before things really get bad (read, bankruptcy). Plus now that they are no longer working for AOL, maybe their neighbors will be willing to befriend them again. They are the lucky ones.
If that is what the image is of (I didn't go in and check that) a blank alt is correct, but then WTF are they doing using a transparent pixel as their text box's label?
Well the second option doesn't really fit his question as he is asking how to teach himself math, but I agree that it is the best option. Especially if you are not personally skilled at math (as which seems to be the case here as he was unable to pass high school math). Professors, even at community colleges, are trained and skilled at teaching the subject, so why not use their knowledge?
Teaching yourself is very dangerous, you risk not only wasting your time by not learning anything, but you could actually learn things incorrectly. Unfortunately today in the age of Google and the Wikipedia, people think that by spending a few hours researching something on the net they can become an expert on any subject. But that is really not true.
"As has been mentioned by other posters, it's quite possibly a browser config and interpretation issue."
Those other posters are wrong. There are clear guidelines for how web applications are supposed to be written which every web developer needs to be aware of. Using <label> elements to identify input elements, using alt attributes to describe images, etc. And not only do following those guidelines help disabled users, it helps all users use your application in a more predictable and easy to understand manner.
Well the ADA is a federal law, and the WCAG guidelines are international. Californians may be more likely to sue over accessibility (hell Californians may be more likely to sue for just about everything), but accessibility itself is hardly a California issue.
I took a brief look at it from the standpoint of a former web developer who had to deal with a lot of accessibility defects, it does look like they have a long way to go. Missing alt attributes for images, bad label elements, much of the navigation was based on images, it would be very difficult for a screen reader to pick them up.
It is perfectly possible to have a neat looking webpage while still being accessible, it just requires to make alternative constructs for the screen readers to go by (they can be hidden to sighted users who are just browsing the page). So the fact that it looks like a normal website to you doesn't matter, an accessible page can very easily look like a run of the mill commercial site as well. This isn't like the brick and mortar world where "handicap accessible" means restricting access to the nearest parking spots or having ramps all over the place.
"but what are the "and headings are missing that are needed for navigation"?"
I would guess that means things like tables are missing properly formatted (meaning they can be picked up by the naked eye) headers. There are numerous accessibility guidelines that websites are generally required to follow, unfortunately many developers are completely unaware of them or put them at a very low priority. Its more fun to develop that neat web 2.0 javascript widget than it is to ensure all your inputs have properly formatted labels.
"Also, the shortcut keys that didn't work seem to be more of a browser-related config issue than anything, so I don't see how Target could be held responsible."
What that generally means is that the page isn't following the correct conventions, so the browser isn't able to pick up how the page is supposed to be rendered. For instance, from looking at the page today (after they made their so-called improvements), this is how they display their search box:
Lets skip over for a moment that they still don't have alt text for that image. They do have a text label for their search box, problem is it is inside a div next to the input. Now that is easy enough for a user with vision to tell what it is talking about, but a browser with a screenreader cannot just look for text that is next to the input. They have to look for the associated <label> element, and in this case all that element contains is an image. So when the browser comes across the text input and the user uses the browser shortcut to tell them what the input is for, instead of reading "Site Search" it will probably try to describe an image and a hyperlink. What the page should have done is put the text in the label element and put the nice looking image with the hyperlink sit next to the input for sighted users to read.
Must... resist... temptation to make joke... about people's "Wii"s gathering dust....
Anyway, we all knew when the latest video game wars started that the Wii was playing to a different demographic than Sony or MS. They were trying to move beyond the stereotypical gamer market and make games that other people would enjoy. And that worked, it has been a success by any definition of the word. Meanwhile the PS3 has been by most accounts a failure. And that still continues today, if you don't believe me, explain why a year after its release I still can't find one at any of the local stores (and no, I'm not going down there first thing in the morning when they get their shipments in, but if the Wii popularity were bursting there should be a few left over by lunch time when I do stop by). Yes, some people (especially those who are clearly more in the Sony/MS target market than Nintendo's) may well be unhappy with their Wii's performance (ahh, another joke opportunity, must resist...), but a few dissatisfied customers do not make a trend.
And hey, if your wife has stopped turning on your Wii, there are blue pills to help you do that. Ah crap, I had resisted for so long...
Re:Sure it is possible to search 10^60
on
Cracking Go
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· Score: 1
Thats about what I figured, and I think thats the number the article mentioned. Which is around 10 billion googol times greater 10^60.
To put that in perspective, if you were able to develop a computer which were able to evaluate all 10^60 final chess positions (which as pointed out by the guy I was responding to is a big number on its own) in a second, and have one such computer for each star in the visible universe (which I believe is estimated to be around 10^22), it would take you somewhere around 10^70 times the estimated age of the universe to finish calculating all these Go positions. And that, my friends, is why we don't use exhaustive approaches to these problems and instead use techniques like those discussed in the article.
The number 10^60 in the article was referring to the number of end positions in chess, which is much easier to 'solve' than Go. The real number for Go is over a googol times that. Thats 10,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000 times the number you gave, assuming I counted correctly. Though of course these "brute force" algorithms are not solving each of those any more than Deep Blue solved each of the 10^60 chess end games. They are merely searching down a dozen or so plays into the game.
And you are also incorrect in disputing the gp's assertion that the game is subtle. Unlike chess, where there is an easily defined end of game, Go has no such concept. The game is over when both players say it is over. The article also covers how facts like those make Go AIs even more difficult to program.
Re:Sure it is possible to search 10^60
on
Cracking Go
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· Score: 1
From TFA, 10^60 is the number of end positions in chess, in Go its much, much more. So its more like, don't expect to finish before either the Big Rip (when the universe stretches to the point where all matter rips apart) or the Big Crunch (when the universe collapses into a black hole), depending on which cosmological theory you find more compelling.
First, Chess has 10^60 possible end positions. They make that pretty clear in the article (I know, I must be new here, yada yada yada). Go has many, many more. The article gives the number of possible game positions as 10^170, and since any game position technically can be an ending in Go (the game ends when both players agree its over, there is no "checkmate" in chess), thats going to be around the number of end positions. 10^170 a googol times as great as 10^60 times 10 billion.
Second, way to go captain obvious. Pure exhaustive methods don't work here. Thank you for pointing that out, you have successfully advanced the subject of AI for all humanity.
Of course if you were to RTFA, you would know they already knew that. When they say "brute-force", they mean the same thing as Deep Blue (which did not search all of the 10^60 chess games). They search around a dozen or so moves ahead (much more than a human alone could search) and evaluate the positions there.
And a lot of people do that as well. I know plenty of people who are virtually impossible to contact outside of normal work hours (even though I work for a company that does not block personal work during business hours).
Of course a lot of that has to do with your job function. Some job functions are perfectly doable within normal business hours, while others do require substantial unpaid overtime (I would include my job in that category, but I know my friends currently in medical school would object to my definition of overtime).
And of course those who pull an hourly wage instead of a salary (like contractors) love overtime as then they get to pull in time and a half.
Slashdot Mirror
See, this is the problem with science education these days. People are brought up to think things like SETI is a scientific process when it absolutely is not. Schools fail to teach their students that which is fundamental to all science, the scientific method. And that is the real problem with SETI, it is misrepresenting the scientific process and corrupting our children's view of what science really is.
To the poster, no, SETI is not more science. And science is not a "lottery", in fact it is very methodical. Science requires the scientific method, which requires your testing to actually accomplish something. If the test fails, then you know your hypothesis was wrong. Thats not the case with SETI, if their test fails (they are unable to find a signal) we know nothing more than we knew yesterday.
Most people also get upset when something happens to their car (and I don't mean the simple "damn, now I'll have to take the bus" reaction). Its a known fact that people can get attached to mechanical objects. Thats not what this study was about.
They developed two robots, one very mechanical, and one that giggled and appeared to interact with the children. The children treated the second robot much different from the first robot. The first they treated more or less as a toy, with all the rough treatment that entails. They may well have become upset had it been taken away (as kids do for most of their toys), but they interacted with it differently than they would another child. They second they treated much like they would treat another kid, from how they touched it to how they took care of it. And the most interesting thing was over the long term this interest lasted, while they got bored with the first robot.
So you are saying that because every medical condition hasn't been cured and the only new drugs you hear about are for impotence (of course they are the ones that get advertised the most, it only makes sense to advertise on TV a drug which you might ask a doctor about, not something they would have to diagnose), the medical industry has been complacent?
I am proof otherwise. I was born with a heart defect; had I been born a few generations earlier I would have had a very sickly life resulting in heart failure in my 30s or 40s. But instead I had a relatively easy surgery and I am perfectly healthy now. And people born with the same condition today apparently have it even easier, in fact their heart can remain beating throughout the surgery without the need of a bypass machine.
AIDS is no longer a death sentence. Many cancers that would have killed a few years ago can be treated. Diseases like chickenpox or mumps are ancient history to children today. We have drugs that can lower cholesterol, help battle extreme obesity, or treat individuals with devastating psychological illnesses. We can detect cancer or heart disease well in advance or perform surgeries that can help the blind see. Soldiers who receive wounds that would have been deadly in Vietnam now can make full recoveries. Don't say medicine hasn't progressed at all just because there are still some things it hasn't solved yet.
I mean by your standards the tech industry should be considered a dismal failure as well. Applications are nearly as slow on my 1.25 GB RAM machine as on our old 32 MB machine. Spam is still a problem, as is security. Applications still crash or lock up and most tech projects end up way overdue and far over budget without accomplishing much (look at Vista for proof of that). Companies are more interested in making their products look good than actually fixing reliability, performance, security, and usability concerns.
I'm sorry about your wife, I really am. I know someone with a son with that condition. But don't say the medical industry has failed just because the wonder drug that would cure that particular condition still eludes researchers when they have done so much to help improve the quality of life for hundreds of millions of people.
Oh, and yes, there are drugs out there that can increase the sex drive in women.
Similarly pink elephants from planet Zorgnon also exist in that sense, you mentioned them and therefore the idea of them are known. However, they really are not interesting outside of this conversation, therefore they are far too as esoteric subject to be present in a wikipedia article. The only people who may desire information on them would be those reading this thread, and then they would already know everything they would need to know about them. It makes no sense to include them in a reference like an encyclopedia.
Same with a webcomic with a small audience. No one outside of that audience would likely be interested in learning more about that comic (and then they already have access to the comic's website, which likely already contains all that information), so what is the point in listing it in an encyclopedia? Remember, that is the goal of the wikipedia, to be an encyclopedia. It is not simply a collection of meaningless blogs about drivel. And it is because of the focus on that goal that it is useful. I've seen wikis which were intended to be much more free form, where people could add whatever they want. The result is always one of two things, either it never gets updated because everyone is assuming someone else will do it, or it falls apart into a mess of unorganized crap where you will be lucky to find anything.
"Is this really a problem? Simply have 'London Bridge' indicate the famous bridge, with a link to a disambiguation page. If there were a megaband call 'London Bridge,' it would merit a Wikipedia article, no? Why not if it's a popular regional band? Why not if it's a popular webcomic?"
Why not if it is the title of a picture a little girl drew in preschool? Hell there you have four people who are impressed with the picture, the girl, the teacher, and both parents. Thats three more than the people who care about your webcomic.
Things that don't exist are not in the wikipedia? So I guess you are saying Decapodians, Manbearpig, and Bigfoot all exist?
Might want to rethink that argument...
Except if every piece of recordable human knowledge is present (as the original poster was calling for) that Disambiguation page grows to the point where its impossible to find something. If every song, band, comic, or poem written by a 3rd grader gets added to that list, within no time it gets unmanageable.
And thats just the list of individual articles. What about when all that crap gets added to the articles themselves. When every bit of meaningless drivel about the subject gets added to the article, they themselves become impossible to read.
I've been critical of the wikipedia in the past (well, not the wikipedia itself, but more how people tend to use it), but they do a pretty good job at organizing its content. Thats why it is so easy to use. Don't complain that their vision is wrong just because you want to use it as your personal blog to store things about your life even your own mother probably isn't interested in.
"The big problem is the systemic denial that Wikipedia could eventually be the sum of all recordable knowledge"
Thats a reality, not a denial. More is not always better, and frankly it is often worse. The most valuable function a work of reference has is filtering out unimportant irrelevant crap that makes it harder to find what you really want. If when I search for the term "London Bridge" I have to go through articles on every work of literature, popular culture reference, or inside joke between a group of nerds with Wikipedia access to the London Bridge before I finally find the article on the bridge that I wanted, well that just wasted a lot of my time.
Consider this thought experiment. I have constructed a library consisting every work of literature that exists and that could possibly exist. To make it easy to find things, I have provided a search engine that will search the full index of each book and return the closest match. See the problem? Since any combination of characters could conceivably be a work of literature, each combination of characters would have to be in the library as its own "book". As a result, the search engine doesn't help, as you basically need to input the entire text of the book you are searching for in order to find it. You have to know exactly what it is you are looking for in order to find it. In other words, by containing so much, it essentially has zero information.
A wise man doesn't know more information than a foolish man, just what he does know is more relevant.
First, it wasn't a movie that "got things right", it was a book that the movie happened to be loosely based on.
Second, no one these days is really doubting that Velociraptor is a small chicken sized scavenger that lived in Asia, not a human sized predator that lived in North America. Crichton's book was more likely about a different dinosaur, the Deinonychus, which for a brief period of time (which happened to be while he was writing his book) was classified by some to be a type of Velociraptor. That classification didn't last long, but Jurassic Park was such a success that the term 'raptor' stuck and has become the nickname for the entire Dromaeosauridae family (which includes the Deinonychus and several other large apparent predators).
Yes but the existence of other news sources that are covering the protests (especially US-based sources like Fox or MSNBC) pretty much refutes his argument that CNN (an internationally focused network that has not been known for being close to the Bush administration) has lack of coverage of the protests due to the government forcing it to hide news stories that may show the US government in a bad light.
First, if you are claiming the US government controls the US media the way the Russian government controls the Russian government just because there are other things going on other than a bunch of people walking around with signs and thinking they are making a difference in the world, you are an idiot.
Second, Fox News currently (as of 5:32 PM, EST) has this as their top story. So unless you want to concede that Fox is the most independent news outlet while CNN is a Bush lapdog, I'd rethink your argument...
Here are a few reviews from people who did read the book (or at least who claim to have read it, I admit I did not sit down and watch them each read it from cover to cover):
Now I did not go and seek out reviews that were critical of the book, these were just the first 5 I found. In fact most do recommend the book in the end. However, they generally agree his book has a few flaws. Not that his work isn't interesting or that he is clearly wrong in his arguments (though most generally agree that some of his claims are not fully substantiated), but that despite Wolfram's near megalomaniac claims to the contrary, his approach really isn't all that new. Some react to this fact with amusement (like Kurzweil), some with anger (like Shalizi), but regardless it is clearly a valid criticism that Wolfram's work really isn't all that new. Don't claim that the reason people are critical of him is that they are just resisting thinking about things differently.
"I feel sorry for the canned individuals"
Don't. I'm not trying to sound mean, but there is really no reason to feel sorry for them. They get 2 months of severance pay and get to get out before things really get bad (read, bankruptcy). Plus now that they are no longer working for AOL, maybe their neighbors will be willing to befriend them again. They are the lucky ones.
If that is what the image is of (I didn't go in and check that) a blank alt is correct, but then WTF are they doing using a transparent pixel as their text box's label?
Well the second option doesn't really fit his question as he is asking how to teach himself math, but I agree that it is the best option. Especially if you are not personally skilled at math (as which seems to be the case here as he was unable to pass high school math). Professors, even at community colleges, are trained and skilled at teaching the subject, so why not use their knowledge?
Teaching yourself is very dangerous, you risk not only wasting your time by not learning anything, but you could actually learn things incorrectly. Unfortunately today in the age of Google and the Wikipedia, people think that by spending a few hours researching something on the net they can become an expert on any subject. But that is really not true.
"As has been mentioned by other posters, it's quite possibly a browser config and interpretation issue."
Those other posters are wrong. There are clear guidelines for how web applications are supposed to be written which every web developer needs to be aware of. Using <label> elements to identify input elements, using alt attributes to describe images, etc. And not only do following those guidelines help disabled users, it helps all users use your application in a more predictable and easy to understand manner.
Well the ADA is a federal law, and the WCAG guidelines are international. Californians may be more likely to sue over accessibility (hell Californians may be more likely to sue for just about everything), but accessibility itself is hardly a California issue.
I took a brief look at it from the standpoint of a former web developer who had to deal with a lot of accessibility defects, it does look like they have a long way to go. Missing alt attributes for images, bad label elements, much of the navigation was based on images, it would be very difficult for a screen reader to pick them up.
It is perfectly possible to have a neat looking webpage while still being accessible, it just requires to make alternative constructs for the screen readers to go by (they can be hidden to sighted users who are just browsing the page). So the fact that it looks like a normal website to you doesn't matter, an accessible page can very easily look like a run of the mill commercial site as well. This isn't like the brick and mortar world where "handicap accessible" means restricting access to the nearest parking spots or having ramps all over the place.
"but what are the "and headings are missing that are needed for navigation"?"
I would guess that means things like tables are missing properly formatted (meaning they can be picked up by the naked eye) headers. There are numerous accessibility guidelines that websites are generally required to follow, unfortunately many developers are completely unaware of them or put them at a very low priority. Its more fun to develop that neat web 2.0 javascript widget than it is to ensure all your inputs have properly formatted labels.
"Also, the shortcut keys that didn't work seem to be more of a browser-related config issue than anything, so I don't see how Target could be held responsible."
What that generally means is that the page isn't following the correct conventions, so the browser isn't able to pick up how the page is supposed to be rendered. For instance, from looking at the page today (after they made their so-called improvements), this is how they display their search box:
Lets skip over for a moment that they still don't have alt text for that image. They do have a text label for their search box, problem is it is inside a div next to the input. Now that is easy enough for a user with vision to tell what it is talking about, but a browser with a screenreader cannot just look for text that is next to the input. They have to look for the associated <label> element, and in this case all that element contains is an image. So when the browser comes across the text input and the user uses the browser shortcut to tell them what the input is for, instead of reading "Site Search" it will probably try to describe an image and a hyperlink. What the page should have done is put the text in the label element and put the nice looking image with the hyperlink sit next to the input for sighted users to read.
Must... resist... temptation to make joke... about people's "Wii"s gathering dust....
Anyway, we all knew when the latest video game wars started that the Wii was playing to a different demographic than Sony or MS. They were trying to move beyond the stereotypical gamer market and make games that other people would enjoy. And that worked, it has been a success by any definition of the word. Meanwhile the PS3 has been by most accounts a failure. And that still continues today, if you don't believe me, explain why a year after its release I still can't find one at any of the local stores (and no, I'm not going down there first thing in the morning when they get their shipments in, but if the Wii popularity were bursting there should be a few left over by lunch time when I do stop by). Yes, some people (especially those who are clearly more in the Sony/MS target market than Nintendo's) may well be unhappy with their Wii's performance (ahh, another joke opportunity, must resist...), but a few dissatisfied customers do not make a trend.
And hey, if your wife has stopped turning on your Wii, there are blue pills to help you do that. Ah crap, I had resisted for so long...
Thats about what I figured, and I think thats the number the article mentioned. Which is around 10 billion googol times greater 10^60.
To put that in perspective, if you were able to develop a computer which were able to evaluate all 10^60 final chess positions (which as pointed out by the guy I was responding to is a big number on its own) in a second, and have one such computer for each star in the visible universe (which I believe is estimated to be around 10^22), it would take you somewhere around 10^70 times the estimated age of the universe to finish calculating all these Go positions. And that, my friends, is why we don't use exhaustive approaches to these problems and instead use techniques like those discussed in the article.
This is getting old, but...
The number 10^60 in the article was referring to the number of end positions in chess, which is much easier to 'solve' than Go. The real number for Go is over a googol times that. Thats 10,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000 times the number you gave, assuming I counted correctly. Though of course these "brute force" algorithms are not solving each of those any more than Deep Blue solved each of the 10^60 chess end games. They are merely searching down a dozen or so plays into the game.
And you are also incorrect in disputing the gp's assertion that the game is subtle. Unlike chess, where there is an easily defined end of game, Go has no such concept. The game is over when both players say it is over. The article also covers how facts like those make Go AIs even more difficult to program.
From TFA, 10^60 is the number of end positions in chess, in Go its much, much more. So its more like, don't expect to finish before either the Big Rip (when the universe stretches to the point where all matter rips apart) or the Big Crunch (when the universe collapses into a black hole), depending on which cosmological theory you find more compelling.
First, Chess has 10^60 possible end positions. They make that pretty clear in the article (I know, I must be new here, yada yada yada). Go has many, many more. The article gives the number of possible game positions as 10^170, and since any game position technically can be an ending in Go (the game ends when both players agree its over, there is no "checkmate" in chess), thats going to be around the number of end positions. 10^170 a googol times as great as 10^60 times 10 billion.
Second, way to go captain obvious. Pure exhaustive methods don't work here. Thank you for pointing that out, you have successfully advanced the subject of AI for all humanity.
Of course if you were to RTFA, you would know they already knew that. When they say "brute-force", they mean the same thing as Deep Blue (which did not search all of the 10^60 chess games). They search around a dozen or so moves ahead (much more than a human alone could search) and evaluate the positions there.
And a lot of people do that as well. I know plenty of people who are virtually impossible to contact outside of normal work hours (even though I work for a company that does not block personal work during business hours).
Of course a lot of that has to do with your job function. Some job functions are perfectly doable within normal business hours, while others do require substantial unpaid overtime (I would include my job in that category, but I know my friends currently in medical school would object to my definition of overtime).
And of course those who pull an hourly wage instead of a salary (like contractors) love overtime as then they get to pull in time and a half.