Maybe I'm misunderstanding, but I get the impression from the summary that Bell is hijacking domain queries, meaning that users can't easily choose not to use their provider's DNS services. So the idea is that, even if you choose to use another DNS provider, Bell will intercept your query and give you their own response.
Not that there aren't ways around it, but why should users have to try to figure out ways around something like this? An ISP shouldn't be intercepting your traffic without your permission.
You can define anarchy however you want, but if I define anarchy as "a dog with a long body and short legs", then I'm not going to be too in sync with the rest of the world.
It can be an anarchy as long as there's no organization and no rules. Whether people are involved voluntarily isn't the issue. In a certain way of looking at it, we're all involved with our society voluntarily. The issue is whether, once you volunteer, there's any kind of organization to it and/or rules you have to follow.
So if the majority of people get together and start making rules (even if they're only "don't pollute") and backing that rule with organized force (i.e. "or else we'll form a huge posse to come get you"), then you essentially have a government with laws, and an army. Not an anarchy.
Second, it seems to me now that you are confusing formating with presentation.
Third, It seems to me now that you're being pedantic.
It sounds to me like what you mean by fine-grained control is to throw away all structural consistency and rather than format a document, do formating and presentation word by word by word?
Fourth, it seems to me now that you're setting up a straw man.
The formatting the average user can get from Word is a hell of a lot more fine-grained than what an average user can get from HTML. And considering that the average user isn't going to be willing to learn to use LaTeX, it doesn't really matter whether it's better than word. The point is, Word isn't going anywhere until you come up with another way to enable people to control formatting the way they want it, and yes, some people want pages.
Saying pagination is stupid is a little like saying fixed-width webpages are stupid. It may not be necessary for reading, and you personally may not like it, but depending on your project and your intent, it might still be important. It's possible that you could want to control your formatting and layout strictly enough that you want to know the size of the display medium you're working with. Now if you're not actually going to print the page, then the size of the page may be arbitrary. However, if you hit a situation where layout and formatting is important, then not having a fixed width and height may hinder whatever it is you're trying to do.
The premise of the article, however, is that Word "should die" because the fine-grained formatting allowed by Word is useless, and HTML (which doesn't give the same level of control) provides everything you could want/need.
It's not an issue of proper or improper formatting. The author is basically saying, "pagination is stupid and formatting doesn't need to be very controlled because we're not printing."
I think the key thing should be to disallow the physical infrastructure provider from providing service. I may be wrong, but it seems to me like this could open up competition.
So what I mean is, right now the telephone company and the cable company have a duopoly (in most places) for the physical infrastructure. However, you can still get 3rd party ISPs under certain circumstances. I have Speakeasy DSL, which runs over Verizon's network. So what I would suggest is this: Verizon be disallowed from providing voice services, ISP services, or video on their network. The cable company, likewise, should not be allowed to offer TV anymore, nor should they be allowed to be an ISP or VoIP provider. Instead, they'd have to open their networks to companies like Speakeasy to provide whatever services they wanted. Pricing for service providers should be required to be uniform, i.e. Speakeasy gets the same deal as every other provider, and the physical infrastructure providers (the telephone company and cable company) aren't allowed to make special deals. I think this should just be the trade-off for being granted the pseudo-monopolies you're talking about.
I think something like this is necessary because the right to build physical infrastructure must be, by it's nature, limited. We can't have lots of companies digging up the streets, fighting over who's going to run water or electricity to your house. It may be possible to have multiple networks, but we aren't ever going to have enough to have robust competition. Therefore, either they must be run by some level of government (not necessarily the federal government) or they must be pseudo-monopolies granted to private companies. In the latter case, those monopolies should be well-regulated so that service providers can compete openly.
I'm not sure I've made my case adequately, but hopefully I've made a little bit of sense.
The world would tell the polluters that however free you think you can bee, you can not mess up the planet for the rest of us, or else we will form a huge posse and come over.
Yes, and now you've just formed a government and army. Congratulations, your anarchy is over.
The more we talk, the more it sounds like you don't want anarchy. You want a democracy. You just want one that's transparent and fair. But of course, we all kind of want a democracy that's transparent and fair. The question is, how do we get it? And further, what sorts of checks and balances do we have to put in place to keep it?
I think if you read my post, you'll see that I'm not arguing in favor of Word per se. I'm arguing against the idea that strict/complex formatting for a printed page is worthless. My argument boils down to, "Various formatting techniques can carry various kinds of information and make things easier or more pleasant to read. Therefore, for every bit of formatting you remove from a document, you also remove opportunities to convey information or control the reading experience. Even if you just remove page breaks, depending on the content and desired presentation, you may be losing something."
What matters is power and anarchism just aims for decentralized and equal power to all.
Right, but my whole point is that if you have decentralized and equal power for all, as a starting point, then it means no one has very much power. That's all well and good until someone gets some power for themselves and feels like bullying others. Then, as you say, the issue becomes who has the most power, or who has the biggest posse. So then...
Whether that bigger posse would consist of police officers, hired to beat down the troublemakers or of voluntary defenders of equality and justice for all, doesn't matter.
The problem is it's not likely to be your "voluntary defenders of equality", since by your viewpoint, those are the people who should be opposed to hierarchies and the pooling of power. The biggest and most powerful posses are likely to be lead by the power-hungry bastards who form the most well-regulated power structure.
I guess the idea of a free and equal anarchist utopia requires that most people will side with freedom and equality. And I think most people would.
It's possible that, for some period of time, "most people" would take the side of those who would want to keep power from pooling together. However, if you have 1 million individuals and 700,000 are each working in a decentralized individualistic way, and 300,000 working in a well-organized hierarchical army, the minority will probably roll right over the majority.
Anarchy is one of those things that sounds really great, and in small groups of people you don't need many rules. But when you have millions or billions of people, then you're definitely going to get posses of various sizes and with various agendas. Wouldn't you prefer that the biggest and most powerful posse is one with well-defined rules, a sense of justice, and that gives you a vote? Well the idea the founding fathers had, more or less, is you call that posse "the government", and whenever it stops doing a good job, you try to disband it and create a new biggest-posse.
Also, properly formatted pages look better than wikis or blog posts.
It's not just that they look better, either. Formatting rules have often been contrived for the purpose of conveying metadata and making things easier to read. Sure, you can do some simple formatting even in plain-text, including effective use of whitespace and non-letter characters (such as using a line of dashes as a dividing line in text).
But insofar as this debate comes down to whether formatting is important, I think it should be remembered the formatting sometimes carries important information. Just as a simple example, making headings larger and/or bold make it easier to pick them out and deliniate different subjects in a piece of writing. But also page breaks, changes in fonts, and colors can be used to give cues to the reader about context and organization that may be harder to include in plain-text.
Mine doesn't carry soldering irons, and they might have a place on the shelf for the adapters, but I'd be shocked if they have any stock.
Yeah, I went to a Radio Shack recently looking for a PS2 (as in Mini-DIN) gender changer. I figured it was a long shot, since PS2 connections aren't being used very often anymore, but Radio Shack was the only place I could think might carry something like that.
I guess I hadn't been to one in a while, because the store was nothing like what I remembered. It was more like a "Best Buy Lite". It was mostly cell phones and cell phone accessories, with a small selection of computer hardware and AV cables. There were a couple different models of keyboards and mice to choose from, HDMI cables in only a single length and only from a single vendor. There weren't really any electronic components, cable ends, or adapters being sold. I think they had some HDMIDVI adapters, some audio adapters (1/8"1/4"), and adapters for the cell phone chargers, and that was pretty much all they had in the way of adapters.
It's not too big of a deal for me since, as I've said, I haven't been in one in a while and get most of my stuff from the Internet. But it made me sad.
Also, I don't think it exists anymore. I may be wrong, but I assume you're referring to the stock that Microsoft bought in the late 90s, which I believe they sold after a couple years. Too bad, too, because I'm guessing the stock is worth a lot more now, and Microsoft would have made a nice little profit if they'd kept their investment.
To maintain equality is up to everyone. If people aren't into the anarchism or democracy, and see it as their business not only to not be oppressed themselves, but to speak out and organize against the oppression of anyone, it cannot work.
Yeah, my point was, let's say you get this nice little anarchy where everyone is equal, and then it turns out that one guy, by being more intelligent or strong or by some accident of circumstances, is able to become slightly more powerful than the other people around him. Using this power, he's able to gather more power to himself, and then to dominate others.
Now in this scenario, what are the "others" supposed to do? In a non-anarchy, they would have some kind of collective (public) powers via their government to keep an individual's power in check. So for example, if your neighbor starts trying to bully you in an unjust way, you can call the police. But assuming you have police, it's not (strictly speaking) an anarchy.
And so the problem with trying to maintain anarchic systems is that, absent an established social order, people will create one.
f there are powerful and weak, then there's a hierarchy and if there's hierarchy, that's no longer anarchy.
You can look at it that way. I'd say that it's anarchy if there isn't any kind of uniform or recognized government, but let's use your definition and say that as soon as there are powerful and weak, you have hierarchy, and therefore it's not anarchy.
So how are you going to keep that anarchy? By what force are you going to keep people from becoming more powerful than others?
Does anyone know if Google's app on the iPhone supported SMS messages? I know the web interface has the ability to send SMS messages (I think for free).
I think there are other iPhone apps that provide some kind of free SMS messaging, but I think the other free SMS programs require that the messages be sent to/from a different number or email address or something, and not to your normal voice number. It seems like Google Voice, which ties free SMS together with a separate phone number, could present a real problem for AT&T.
Really, the school system needs reformed, more critical thinking, less multiple choice or single-answer questions, because like it or not that isn't the real world.
Right, well the first thing to do is hire more teachers. After all, essay tests take longer to grade than multiple choice/single answer questions. Multiple choice scantron tests can be fed through a computer and graded very quickly, but to grade an essay test, a teacher has to read the essay, think about the answer given, and try to figure out a fair/appropriate grade.
Further, if you want to teach critical thinking, you'll probably have to hire better teachers. Maybe it's just me, but the vast majority of teachers that I had, during the time I went through school, didn't display anything like "good critical thinking skills". After all, you can't teach what you don't know, and you can't grade critical thinking in essays unless you're able to understand and assess an argument that may be relatively subtle or complex. Not that most high school students are all that subtle or complex, but if one student was, you'd want his teachers to recognize that, right?
So we have to hire more teachers and better teachers. The process of hiring better teachers is likely to include paying teachers more. So where is that money going to come from? Where are you going to find money to hire a lot more teachers, and also raise the income of teachers in general?
Nobody is going to want to pay much more money, and if they do, they're going to want assurances that their money is being well spent. According to current beliefs about how to do that, they'll want to encourage competition by having some kind of performance metrics, and having those metrics determine where funding goes. What will happen is someone will come up with standardized tests, and whichever school gets the best test grades will get more funding. Of course, this will encourage schools to teach to the standardized tests so that they can get more funding.
Now all your teachers are focused on teaching their students to perform well on standardized multiple-choice scantron tests. You're back where you started. My question to you would be, what part of that chain of events do you think you can fix? If you can fix it, I'll be a huge fan, but I'm not sure where to begin.
Perhaps it could set a precedent against deleting data from users' devices in general.
Or perhaps it could set a precedent which cements Amazon's legal right to do these things. I would certainly hope not, but it's possible. The government hasn't exactly been pro-consumer during the past few decades.
Yeah, I'm not sure I buy the idea that roads are smart, but my problem wouldn't be that they need maintenance. My point is, if you wanted to talk about the intelligence of our road system, you'd have to assume that roads wanted something, and then see whether roads were good at getting that thing. Then you'd throw up obstacles and figure out if roads were good at finding ways around the obstacles. The more complex the obstacles the roads were capable of overcoming, and the more complex behavior they're able to exhibit in order to overcome them, the smarter you'd have to acknowledge the roads are. My objection to roads being intelligent is that they don't want anything, and they don't actively go out and get anything. If roads are being maintained, it's because society is intelligent, and society wants roads.
But if roads were active things that had motives, I wouldn't assume they were stupid just because they weren't good at solving math word problems. (Again, I was always good at solving math word problems, so this isn't about me trying to advance myself as "intelligent")
Cockroaches aren't stockpiling Twinkies, but it's not clear they have any reason to. AFAIK, the reason people cite the idea that "if there's a nuclear war, only cockroaches will survive" is that they will survive. They'll survive even without hoarding Twinkies.
Rainman figured things out without memorizing. He looked retarded and acted retarded, but he was not retarded. He counted toothpicks and cheated at cards. Autistic, sure, but not retarded. Dustin Hoffman didn't go full retard.
Intelligence simply means being able to figure out logical solutions to problems.
I think I'd agree with that a little more quickly if you dropped "logical" from that sentence. I think intelligence should be measured by the ability to figure out how to overcome obstacles toward a goal, when properly motivated. The problem is, how do you motivate things? Among living things, there's almost a universal desire to survive, and so in that sense, ability to survive seems like a contender as a measurement for intelligence. *However*, it seems to me like you'd have to assume that everything is being presented with complex problems that serve as obstacles to its own survival, and that the solutions are being arrived at by something that could be considered a mental faculty.
That's a pretty good idea, but how can you measure a thing's "ability to learn" without trying to teach it some particular thing and seeing how quickly it learns an expected response?
So in a simple example, you try to teach me geometry, and I don't learn. Am I therefore stupid? Maybe. Or maybe I'm not motivated to learn it. It's also possible that you're a bad teacher, or that I'm not good at math but I would be good at learning about other subjects. Or maybe-- and this is kind of a whacky thought-- maybe I already know non-Euclidean geometry while you're trying to teach me Euclidean geometry, and so I don't seem to be learning because I keep giving you answers you don't expect.
But I really think "motivation" is highly underestimated when talking about intelligence. No, I don't just mean, "Billy is smart, but he's failing calculus because he's not motivated." I mean when you're looking at designing AI, I think it won't just be about coding a program that can learn. It will be about coding a program that has a reason to learn.
Imagine you had a baby, but it never got hungry, never felt lonely, and never felt pleasure or pain. Do you think it would learn? I can't imagine it would. People only learn when appetite meets obstacle. If every one of your desires-- even your desire for intellectual stimulation-- were to be met in full from now until the rest of your life without any effort from you, do you think you'd ever bother to learn a new skill?
Slashdot Mirror
Maybe I'm misunderstanding, but I get the impression from the summary that Bell is hijacking domain queries, meaning that users can't easily choose not to use their provider's DNS services. So the idea is that, even if you choose to use another DNS provider, Bell will intercept your query and give you their own response.
Not that there aren't ways around it, but why should users have to try to figure out ways around something like this? An ISP shouldn't be intercepting your traffic without your permission.
You can define anarchy however you want, but if I define anarchy as "a dog with a long body and short legs", then I'm not going to be too in sync with the rest of the world.
It can be an anarchy as long as there's no organization and no rules. Whether people are involved voluntarily isn't the issue. In a certain way of looking at it, we're all involved with our society voluntarily. The issue is whether, once you volunteer, there's any kind of organization to it and/or rules you have to follow.
So if the majority of people get together and start making rules (even if they're only "don't pollute") and backing that rule with organized force (i.e. "or else we'll form a huge posse to come get you"), then you essentially have a government with laws, and an army. Not an anarchy.
Second, it seems to me now that you are confusing formating with presentation.
Third, It seems to me now that you're being pedantic.
It sounds to me like what you mean by fine-grained control is to throw away all structural consistency and rather than format a document, do formating and presentation word by word by word?
Fourth, it seems to me now that you're setting up a straw man.
The formatting the average user can get from Word is a hell of a lot more fine-grained than what an average user can get from HTML. And considering that the average user isn't going to be willing to learn to use LaTeX, it doesn't really matter whether it's better than word. The point is, Word isn't going anywhere until you come up with another way to enable people to control formatting the way they want it, and yes, some people want pages.
Saying pagination is stupid is a little like saying fixed-width webpages are stupid. It may not be necessary for reading, and you personally may not like it, but depending on your project and your intent, it might still be important. It's possible that you could want to control your formatting and layout strictly enough that you want to know the size of the display medium you're working with. Now if you're not actually going to print the page, then the size of the page may be arbitrary. However, if you hit a situation where layout and formatting is important, then not having a fixed width and height may hinder whatever it is you're trying to do.
The premise of the article, however, is that Word "should die" because the fine-grained formatting allowed by Word is useless, and HTML (which doesn't give the same level of control) provides everything you could want/need.
It's not an issue of proper or improper formatting. The author is basically saying, "pagination is stupid and formatting doesn't need to be very controlled because we're not printing."
I think the key thing should be to disallow the physical infrastructure provider from providing service. I may be wrong, but it seems to me like this could open up competition.
So what I mean is, right now the telephone company and the cable company have a duopoly (in most places) for the physical infrastructure. However, you can still get 3rd party ISPs under certain circumstances. I have Speakeasy DSL, which runs over Verizon's network. So what I would suggest is this: Verizon be disallowed from providing voice services, ISP services, or video on their network. The cable company, likewise, should not be allowed to offer TV anymore, nor should they be allowed to be an ISP or VoIP provider. Instead, they'd have to open their networks to companies like Speakeasy to provide whatever services they wanted. Pricing for service providers should be required to be uniform, i.e. Speakeasy gets the same deal as every other provider, and the physical infrastructure providers (the telephone company and cable company) aren't allowed to make special deals. I think this should just be the trade-off for being granted the pseudo-monopolies you're talking about.
I think something like this is necessary because the right to build physical infrastructure must be, by it's nature, limited. We can't have lots of companies digging up the streets, fighting over who's going to run water or electricity to your house. It may be possible to have multiple networks, but we aren't ever going to have enough to have robust competition. Therefore, either they must be run by some level of government (not necessarily the federal government) or they must be pseudo-monopolies granted to private companies. In the latter case, those monopolies should be well-regulated so that service providers can compete openly.
I'm not sure I've made my case adequately, but hopefully I've made a little bit of sense.
The world would tell the polluters that however free you think you can bee, you can not mess up the planet for the rest of us, or else we will form a huge posse and come over.
Yes, and now you've just formed a government and army. Congratulations, your anarchy is over.
The more we talk, the more it sounds like you don't want anarchy. You want a democracy. You just want one that's transparent and fair. But of course, we all kind of want a democracy that's transparent and fair. The question is, how do we get it? And further, what sorts of checks and balances do we have to put in place to keep it?
I think if you read my post, you'll see that I'm not arguing in favor of Word per se. I'm arguing against the idea that strict/complex formatting for a printed page is worthless. My argument boils down to, "Various formatting techniques can carry various kinds of information and make things easier or more pleasant to read. Therefore, for every bit of formatting you remove from a document, you also remove opportunities to convey information or control the reading experience. Even if you just remove page breaks, depending on the content and desired presentation, you may be losing something."
What matters is power and anarchism just aims for decentralized and equal power to all.
Right, but my whole point is that if you have decentralized and equal power for all, as a starting point, then it means no one has very much power. That's all well and good until someone gets some power for themselves and feels like bullying others. Then, as you say, the issue becomes who has the most power, or who has the biggest posse. So then...
Whether that bigger posse would consist of police officers, hired to beat down the troublemakers or of voluntary defenders of equality and justice for all, doesn't matter.
The problem is it's not likely to be your "voluntary defenders of equality", since by your viewpoint, those are the people who should be opposed to hierarchies and the pooling of power. The biggest and most powerful posses are likely to be lead by the power-hungry bastards who form the most well-regulated power structure.
I guess the idea of a free and equal anarchist utopia requires that most people will side with freedom and equality. And I think most people would.
It's possible that, for some period of time, "most people" would take the side of those who would want to keep power from pooling together. However, if you have 1 million individuals and 700,000 are each working in a decentralized individualistic way, and 300,000 working in a well-organized hierarchical army, the minority will probably roll right over the majority.
Anarchy is one of those things that sounds really great, and in small groups of people you don't need many rules. But when you have millions or billions of people, then you're definitely going to get posses of various sizes and with various agendas. Wouldn't you prefer that the biggest and most powerful posse is one with well-defined rules, a sense of justice, and that gives you a vote? Well the idea the founding fathers had, more or less, is you call that posse "the government", and whenever it stops doing a good job, you try to disband it and create a new biggest-posse.
Also, properly formatted pages look better than wikis or blog posts.
It's not just that they look better, either. Formatting rules have often been contrived for the purpose of conveying metadata and making things easier to read. Sure, you can do some simple formatting even in plain-text, including effective use of whitespace and non-letter characters (such as using a line of dashes as a dividing line in text).
But insofar as this debate comes down to whether formatting is important, I think it should be remembered the formatting sometimes carries important information. Just as a simple example, making headings larger and/or bold make it easier to pick them out and deliniate different subjects in a piece of writing. But also page breaks, changes in fonts, and colors can be used to give cues to the reader about context and organization that may be harder to include in plain-text.
Ok, so now you have a nice little posse. What's to stop you from running around bullying your neighbors now?
Mine doesn't carry soldering irons, and they might have a place on the shelf for the adapters, but I'd be shocked if they have any stock.
Yeah, I went to a Radio Shack recently looking for a PS2 (as in Mini-DIN) gender changer. I figured it was a long shot, since PS2 connections aren't being used very often anymore, but Radio Shack was the only place I could think might carry something like that.
I guess I hadn't been to one in a while, because the store was nothing like what I remembered. It was more like a "Best Buy Lite". It was mostly cell phones and cell phone accessories, with a small selection of computer hardware and AV cables. There were a couple different models of keyboards and mice to choose from, HDMI cables in only a single length and only from a single vendor. There weren't really any electronic components, cable ends, or adapters being sold. I think they had some HDMIDVI adapters, some audio adapters (1/8"1/4"), and adapters for the cell phone chargers, and that was pretty much all they had in the way of adapters.
It's not too big of a deal for me since, as I've said, I haven't been in one in a while and get most of my stuff from the Internet. But it made me sad.
It also has the connotation of "shacking up", and there's that song "Love Shack". Maybe they intend to start selling porn?
Also, I don't think it exists anymore. I may be wrong, but I assume you're referring to the stock that Microsoft bought in the late 90s, which I believe they sold after a couple years. Too bad, too, because I'm guessing the stock is worth a lot more now, and Microsoft would have made a nice little profit if they'd kept their investment.
To maintain equality is up to everyone. If people aren't into the anarchism or democracy, and see it as their business not only to not be oppressed themselves, but to speak out and organize against the oppression of anyone, it cannot work.
Yeah, my point was, let's say you get this nice little anarchy where everyone is equal, and then it turns out that one guy, by being more intelligent or strong or by some accident of circumstances, is able to become slightly more powerful than the other people around him. Using this power, he's able to gather more power to himself, and then to dominate others.
Now in this scenario, what are the "others" supposed to do? In a non-anarchy, they would have some kind of collective (public) powers via their government to keep an individual's power in check. So for example, if your neighbor starts trying to bully you in an unjust way, you can call the police. But assuming you have police, it's not (strictly speaking) an anarchy.
And so the problem with trying to maintain anarchic systems is that, absent an established social order, people will create one.
I think they released a fix for this bug a couple days ago.
f there are powerful and weak, then there's a hierarchy and if there's hierarchy, that's no longer anarchy.
You can look at it that way. I'd say that it's anarchy if there isn't any kind of uniform or recognized government, but let's use your definition and say that as soon as there are powerful and weak, you have hierarchy, and therefore it's not anarchy.
So how are you going to keep that anarchy? By what force are you going to keep people from becoming more powerful than others?
What's really crazy is that AT&T is making a lot of revenue from SMS. Don't get me wrong, SMS can be handy, but it's hardly resource intensive.
Does anyone know if Google's app on the iPhone supported SMS messages? I know the web interface has the ability to send SMS messages (I think for free).
I think there are other iPhone apps that provide some kind of free SMS messaging, but I think the other free SMS programs require that the messages be sent to/from a different number or email address or something, and not to your normal voice number. It seems like Google Voice, which ties free SMS together with a separate phone number, could present a real problem for AT&T.
He had a jury trial, he also admitted to doing what he was accused of doing. In a criminal trial that's pleading guilty.
In a criminal trial, wouldn't it be more like confessing on the stand?
Well yes, I didn't mean to imply that motivation was the only thing needed for intelligence.
Really, the school system needs reformed, more critical thinking, less multiple choice or single-answer questions, because like it or not that isn't the real world.
Right, well the first thing to do is hire more teachers. After all, essay tests take longer to grade than multiple choice/single answer questions. Multiple choice scantron tests can be fed through a computer and graded very quickly, but to grade an essay test, a teacher has to read the essay, think about the answer given, and try to figure out a fair/appropriate grade.
Further, if you want to teach critical thinking, you'll probably have to hire better teachers. Maybe it's just me, but the vast majority of teachers that I had, during the time I went through school, didn't display anything like "good critical thinking skills". After all, you can't teach what you don't know, and you can't grade critical thinking in essays unless you're able to understand and assess an argument that may be relatively subtle or complex. Not that most high school students are all that subtle or complex, but if one student was, you'd want his teachers to recognize that, right?
So we have to hire more teachers and better teachers. The process of hiring better teachers is likely to include paying teachers more. So where is that money going to come from? Where are you going to find money to hire a lot more teachers, and also raise the income of teachers in general?
Nobody is going to want to pay much more money, and if they do, they're going to want assurances that their money is being well spent. According to current beliefs about how to do that, they'll want to encourage competition by having some kind of performance metrics, and having those metrics determine where funding goes. What will happen is someone will come up with standardized tests, and whichever school gets the best test grades will get more funding. Of course, this will encourage schools to teach to the standardized tests so that they can get more funding.
Now all your teachers are focused on teaching their students to perform well on standardized multiple-choice scantron tests. You're back where you started. My question to you would be, what part of that chain of events do you think you can fix? If you can fix it, I'll be a huge fan, but I'm not sure where to begin.
Perhaps it could set a precedent against deleting data from users' devices in general.
Or perhaps it could set a precedent which cements Amazon's legal right to do these things. I would certainly hope not, but it's possible. The government hasn't exactly been pro-consumer during the past few decades.
Yeah, I'm not sure I buy the idea that roads are smart, but my problem wouldn't be that they need maintenance. My point is, if you wanted to talk about the intelligence of our road system, you'd have to assume that roads wanted something, and then see whether roads were good at getting that thing. Then you'd throw up obstacles and figure out if roads were good at finding ways around the obstacles. The more complex the obstacles the roads were capable of overcoming, and the more complex behavior they're able to exhibit in order to overcome them, the smarter you'd have to acknowledge the roads are. My objection to roads being intelligent is that they don't want anything, and they don't actively go out and get anything. If roads are being maintained, it's because society is intelligent, and society wants roads.
But if roads were active things that had motives, I wouldn't assume they were stupid just because they weren't good at solving math word problems. (Again, I was always good at solving math word problems, so this isn't about me trying to advance myself as "intelligent")
Cockroaches aren't stockpiling Twinkies, but it's not clear they have any reason to. AFAIK, the reason people cite the idea that "if there's a nuclear war, only cockroaches will survive" is that they will survive. They'll survive even without hoarding Twinkies.
Rainman figured things out without memorizing. He looked retarded and acted retarded, but he was not retarded. He counted toothpicks and cheated at cards. Autistic, sure, but not retarded. Dustin Hoffman didn't go full retard.
Intelligence simply means being able to figure out logical solutions to problems.
I think I'd agree with that a little more quickly if you dropped "logical" from that sentence. I think intelligence should be measured by the ability to figure out how to overcome obstacles toward a goal, when properly motivated. The problem is, how do you motivate things? Among living things, there's almost a universal desire to survive, and so in that sense, ability to survive seems like a contender as a measurement for intelligence. *However*, it seems to me like you'd have to assume that everything is being presented with complex problems that serve as obstacles to its own survival, and that the solutions are being arrived at by something that could be considered a mental faculty.
That's a pretty good idea, but how can you measure a thing's "ability to learn" without trying to teach it some particular thing and seeing how quickly it learns an expected response?
So in a simple example, you try to teach me geometry, and I don't learn. Am I therefore stupid? Maybe. Or maybe I'm not motivated to learn it. It's also possible that you're a bad teacher, or that I'm not good at math but I would be good at learning about other subjects. Or maybe-- and this is kind of a whacky thought-- maybe I already know non-Euclidean geometry while you're trying to teach me Euclidean geometry, and so I don't seem to be learning because I keep giving you answers you don't expect.
But I really think "motivation" is highly underestimated when talking about intelligence. No, I don't just mean, "Billy is smart, but he's failing calculus because he's not motivated." I mean when you're looking at designing AI, I think it won't just be about coding a program that can learn. It will be about coding a program that has a reason to learn.
Imagine you had a baby, but it never got hungry, never felt lonely, and never felt pleasure or pain. Do you think it would learn? I can't imagine it would. People only learn when appetite meets obstacle. If every one of your desires-- even your desire for intellectual stimulation-- were to be met in full from now until the rest of your life without any effort from you, do you think you'd ever bother to learn a new skill?