Does this not undermine their argument? When actual men are involved, it boils down to who is better looking. So how he moves is of little importance as long as the women find him attractive.
You've been watching waaaay too much Internet porn if you think that attractiveness is all about still photo visuals.
Movement is a major contributing factor. How elegant - or clumsy - people move can greatly enhance or diminish their physical appearance. I know a lot of women who became interested in a guy due to his dancing. It also works on men - women that aren't really my type (but aren't ugly) can become attractive if they show rhythm, elegant movement, good dancing. On the other hand, quite a few beauties lost much of their appeal after they showed pitiful attempts at movement on the dance floor.
The study is, like many scientific studies, examining the obvious. But instead of a dim feeling it is trying to add verification and some analysis to the topic.
How is it flat if they are always at or above your level? As you improve the enemies improve as well.
Because there is no change in the challenge. Let me illustrate by a simplified example: Your enemies have always 100 hitpoints more than you do. That means the challenge is always, unchanging, "do 100 points more damage to them than they do to me". Once you've figured it out, it is purely repetitive, because the difference between you and them never changes. Only numbers change - instead of hitting them 2 times, you may have to hit them 5 or 20 times, but aside from that it is the same.
You also lose all sense of accomplishment. If there are some enemies that are almost impossible at level 2, challenging at level 5 and easy at level 10 - then you can have the feeling of finally having "conquered" those enemies, of having become clearly better. If everyone in the game world levels with you, then what is the point of levelling at all? I could complete the game while staying level 1, and it would be the same experience.
If it gets harder as I get better then I still have to go through the process of figuring things out.
In which game? Where is the difference? In most implementations, the enemy now has 200 instead of 100 hitpoints. But you do now 20 instead of 10 points of damage. Zero difference, it takes 10 hits to kill them.
Auto-levelling is just a lazy shortcut by developers who are afraid of the player becoming bored because he is "too good". There are better ways to handle that.
And, frankly, it is highly satisfying to be able to walk all over those enemies that gave you trouble 10 levels back.
It isn't just security. I supervise the IT audits in our company, and I can't list anymore how often fake procedures have been tried to pass of as actual processes. Right now, our software development managers try to tell everyone how "agile" they are - but the real work their people do has nothing to do with agile development whatsoever. I've seen so-called "change management" that wasn't worthy of even being in the same room with actual change management, and "access controls" that were essentially bullshit in paper form.
There are usually two causes for this: Malicious people who are greedy for either power and/or money, or incompetent people who don't understand what they're doing (or managing) but are too afraid to ask for help and too stupid to find it on their own. Both kinds of people try to pass off what they're doing as the real thing and will respond to any attempts at questioning or changing it with hostility. In fact, that hostility is a pretty good indicator of both snake oil and incompetence.
You start off saying that auto-adapting is the reason for games being boring and then go on to say you want more of it.
Not at all, I may have been unclear.
I can see where in some games, a limited kind of auto-adapting could have its place - but then I proceed to show how leaving it out is actually the better choice even though at first glance it appears that automation would make things easier for the user.
I also don't see how a game that is always at or just above your level cannot be challenging or interesting.
Because it is flat. That is what I meant by grinding. Killing 1000 enemies of the same kind is quite a bit less interesting and challenging than killing, say, 10 enemies each of 100 different kinds. It is a question of how much mental agility you have to excercise.
If I have to die lots of times at the same section to hone my skills I don't see how that is more challenging than if I hardly ever died across a larger number of ever-increasing sections.
Because the challenge gets out of it when you know exactly what to do and it becomes a matter of pressing the right buttons in the right sequence at the right time - that is a different and simpler challenge than figuring those buttons out in the first place.
Adaptive monster levels is one of the reasons games are becoming boring excercises in flat-out grinding.
Where is the challenge? Challenges consist of you having to adapt - to learn a new skill, to become quicker, smarter, better. That is one part of the equation. The other is drama. Drama consists of changes in suspense. If everything is equally easy or equally hard, there is no drama in the story, it all becomes flat.
So a game that is always "at your level" or even always "just ahead of you" is neither challenging, nor interesting. This is doubly true for free-exploration games like Oblivion (one of the earliest mods available was to remove the auto-levelling).
In a railroaded game like most sidescrollers or FPS, a certain level of adaptation might save the player from the frustration of having to try the same sequence for the 100th time. But most current auto-adaptation fails in picking out when the player needs some help and would enjoy a reduced difficulty and when he is enjoying the challenge and doesn't want the game to be dumbed down.
So, until the time we get true AI, an explicit difficulty setting (bonus points if it can be changed mid-game) is still much preferable.
Switch places on the couch. What's your distance to the screen? Let me guess it's about 5 metres. If you move your head a bit to the side, just regular movement to change position or pick up a drink, say 10 cm to a side, you should get a viewing-angle difference at things in 5m distance of 1.1 if I calculated correctly. That's pretty much visible, and your brain will expect it.
But your expensive TV doesn't provide it. More importantly, the furniture right in front or next to the TV will do this perspective shift, making the part of your visual field that doesn't look even more weird.
In the movie theatre, at 30m distance to the screen, your change is 0.2 - much less noticeable. In addition, there isn't much else in view that tells your brain that something is amiss - most of the other stuff you see is much closer to you (you know, the sexy blonde to your left and the huge asshole right in front of you).
Finally a great comment instead of all the pointless whining.
Just one thing to add: 3D in a movie theatre works pretty well, because distance to the screen (and thus the perceived scenery) is so large that movement of the head would not have much of an effect anyways, so it doesn't feel weird.
On your TV set, it would.
That's why 3D movies work, even though they aren't really 3D as you pointed out, but 3D TV doesn't.
It's not a matter of "trust," it's a matter of respect. Maybe someone who just lost a friend to the Taliban might not really be in the mood for seeing a game where they can re-enact killing their friend.
I have this nice bridge, very well conserved, great investment, you interested?
All the "respect" part is bullshit. Someone who had a friend killed in a war zone has real problems to deal with, messing around with something in the imaginary world is not going to help. And, quite frankly, if it is going to hinder, he has some even more real problems to deal with, like seperation between fantasy and reality.
No, what this is really about - and why WW2 games don't scare anyone - is that the conflict is still "on". During an active conflict, you have to keep a certain mindset up, in both the fighting force and the people at home. The one thing that you can not allow to happen is sympathy with the enemy. Where "sympathy" starts at "realizing that they are humans, too". It reduces moral == willingness to kill them, == willingness to support the war, == willingness to re-elect the people who started it or continued it, == willingness to ignore all the war crimes, propaganda and other stuff going on.
Psychology is a major factor in any conflict. Even such a small thing as being able to see the conflict through the enemies eyes is bad in that light. It errodes the black-and-white world view that a war requires.
What if too many people realized that while many of the Taliban are evil, psychotic, religious fanatics - just as many are simple farmers with no other options, who through their propaganda machine have been given pretty much the same picture about us that we've been given about them? We get shock videos about Taliban stoning a young woman to death. I'm sure a single, randomly-picked hardcore video creates the same amount of shock in a society that has a sex moral straight out of the 8th century. Just look at what it does to many 21st century americans, and then substract 13 centuries. And I'm sure an american air bombardment doesn't look so much different to the average afghan villager than the 9/11 attacks looked to the average New Yorker.
The UN's telecom chief says governments have legitimate security concerns,
And I have legitimate privacy concerns. So - this kind of empty statement is meant to "weigh in" on a debate? I always thought to "weigh in", you'd need some... you know... weight.
Saying someone has a legitimate reason means nothing if you only look at one side of the equation. Society is all about the balances we strike between the legitimate reasons of everyone involved.
Linux had X since 1992 (http://www.linux.org/info/linux_timeline.html). At that time, GUI or no GUI made no difference whatsoever to market share, as it was entirely unknown by anyone outside academic circles.
a much larger percentage of people prefer Windows-like Desktop Manager looks over the (wide area of) available Linux Desktop manager(s).
That is a meaningless statement. You assume from the market share of the OSes in question that people prefer the desktop manager. But there are many aspects the determine market share, and look&feel is probably one of the least important. In the particular case of windows, OEM deals, familarity and a massive existing installed base are bigger contributors, as are ability to run more software, or even preference of the entire OS over the other alternatives - which still doesn't mean the preference extends to the desktop manager.
If anything, then this is a demonstration that your claim is not true, because if you can make Linux look exactly like windows, and it still doesn't fly off the shelves, then very obviously there are other factors that result in its miniscule market share, and the desktop manager doesn't really mean all that much.
People are amazing at adapting, yes including old folks.
What they're not good at is handling negative feedback. Very few of us ever learn that art. And most non-techie people have received a lot of negative feedback from computers, especially windows. That leads to reluctance and a kind of fear. The main difference between a techie confronted with a new system or progam and a non-techie is the willingness to explore, to just try out things. Non-techie folks are careful if they dare at all, for fear of breaking something. Us techies we have a good guess at what could possibly go wrong and what to look out for and among that don't fear to explore and thus discover the new thing.
And the fragility of a windows system is, due to its popularity, a major contributor to this fear. Who hasn't been to a friend or family member to "fix" their machine when it was really just that they changed something (like hiding the menu bar) and didn't know how to get it back?
For special-purposes like this, it would be much, much better and more convenient to have a UI designed for the purpose. If web-surfing is the only thing that the thing should do (as most lobby PCs), set it up so that it will have the browser running at all times, the browser is always maximized and can not be closed (or if closed, relaunches instantly).
If it has more, but still a small set of functions, a big full-screen menu to choose among them is a ton better than Start->Programs->Manufacturer->Program Name.
As you said: Once inside the browser, most users don't care anymore. So why put even the smallest hurdle between them and it?
"Do you find my Linux computer easy to use?" and the guest hadn't even realized it wasn't Windows XP.
Which means the answer was probably "no, it's got this horrible UI, but I can manage because I'm used to it."
Really, grow up, people. Copying good examples is a great way to catch up. Copying the bad stuff isn't. And MS is getting ripped new ones every time they change their UI again, because despite all the talent they hire, they apparently don't let the UI experts actually design the UI.
There appear to be links between all our systems. Even "purely rational" decisions are, on close inspection, often prompted by emotions and then justified by rational thinking after the fact.
We're not isolated beings. There is little on this planet that is as much inter-connected as a human brain. Quite frankly, anyone who claims that two brain functions are not linked should be the one to show it.
This sounds exactly like corporatism, the economic side of the fascism. "Democracy" inside a company, on other people's money? You must be brainwashed...
I've had five years of hands-on experience with this system, you've apparently just heard about it. Here, read a little about it before you make up your mind. It's not a perfect solution, but in many places it helps a lot by having smaller, smarter solutions than a nation-wide law or regulation would provide.
You can't review performance if (1) the reviewee can't be fired and (2) the state is banning proper documenting of their work. How do you review a slacked who knows he can't be fired and his job is 100% computer-based, when you're not allowed to monitor computer and Internet usage?
I was apparently not clear. I will say it again: You can monitor and review performance. Don't tell me you can't, I was personally involved in negotiations about performance monitoring and review.
Funny how reasonable/unreasonable is not left to the firing person, or to the employment contract, but to a special work courthosue fully bending to the will of the unions.
Nonsense. I have personally been to those courts. Which, as all courts, are the last resort. You don't have to go to court to fire someone, in fact it is not even that common. However, you can not simply fire someone "just because", you have to have a reason. Again, I've had all this for years hands-on. I know what I'm talking about. I've seen a good share of people being fired, so excuse me if I find the claim that you can't fire someone completely ridiculous.
My words are "pretty true" when saying that I believe you are a brainwashed fascist, corporatist moron who's dividing his own people into "citizens" and "sub-citizens". Shame on you.
Actually, if you read through our exchange, you will find that you were the one introducing the concept of "sub-citizens" into it. I have just used that word for the first time.
This is quickly becoming a semantic debate. You can call non-human-intelligence anything that would fail the Turing test but some clever devices that are not aim at masquerading as humans can have their use. I'm sure HAL9000 would fail a turing test yet it is incontestably useful and intelligent.
I agree completely. In fact, this is what I believe the whole AI thing will end up with - special purpose devices. Self-aware robots that don't walk around trying to figure out the meaning of life and which job they should take, but instead self-aware robots that are aware of themselves because they're built into a space station and making the machine self-aware with a desire to "survive", i.e. remain functional, is the easiest way to make the station take care of itself with repairs and maintainance.
Yes, we can try to simply copy. It would be interesting to see what evolves.
Then again, why build from scratch if you already have perfectly good human brains to work with? Wouldn't a much faster path be to take babies and put their brains into a machine? No need to create a copy brain, now you just have to have it do all the learning and evolving and adapting.
Science. I would. We regularily sacrifice thousands and occasionally millions of adults for less interesting purposes. We just call it "war" instead of science, and rightfully so, because while it usually is a big experiment, it's a test of egos and national powers and it's neither double-blind nor controlled nor scientific in any other sense.
You mean, brain hardware isn't like silicon logic. That doesn't mean that it is a given that silicon logic can't do what brain hardware can do. That's the beauty of computing - processes that are wholly unlike digital logic may be created by virtue of the flexibility the machine.
Maye. So far, that is an assumption. We know a whole lot about what's going on in the brain, but then again there is even more that we don't know. All those beautiful "brain scan" images that you see in articles usually don't spell out what their resolution is - every pixel on them is many thousands of neurons. We have absolutely no friggin idea how the brain works on the detail level below that. We don't know if it maybe does even stranger things. One theory even postulates that quantum superposition plays a crucial role.
The breadth of computing is really quite striking. Chemical, electrical, mechanical and even quantum behaviors are all easily implemented on digital hardware. And since that, in turn, represents the length and breadth of the machinery available to the human brain that we are even *suspicious* of, much less certain of, there's every reason to see them as a workable fit.
That's like saying building a Dyson Sphere is workable because we know all the fundamental technologies that go into one. The truth is that we know enough to form theories about what could work. You don't know if it will until you've tried. And then you may find out that you've missed something, or that while it is theoretically possible it is entirely unfeasable to actually do it.
More importantly, many such "technological marvels" throughout history have never become a reality even though after some time they had become possible and feasable. The most common reason is that other technology has leaped over it and offered more interesting advances. In that spirit, I still hold that I find it more likely that we will advance our own intelligence through embedded computers and genetic engineering than that we replace ourselves by intelligent machines.
You are assuming that analysis of complex problems is possible without emotions. Current research indicates that at least for humans, intuition works considerably better at complex problems than reasoning. That may be because our reasoning is so weak, or because problem solving requires more than objective analysis.
The knowledge we have about the workings of emotions is very wide and clearer every day, and is rightfully thought as being unnecessary (outside a theory of mind) if we want to build a machine with human-like cognition abilities.
That is not in the stuff that I read. Yes, emotions were discarded. However, AFAIK their importance is on the rise again, as we realize, for example, that you can't even make decision (not good decisions, any decision at all) without emotions being involved.
They have their importance in psychology, but they seem really useless when it comes to cognition.
My argument is that you can not seperate "cognition" out from an intelligence and still end up with something that we would consider intelligent in the same sense we do consider humans. It would be "smart" in the sense of a well-programmed computer, maybe have typical today AI applications like speech recognition, but we wouldn't call it an AI.
No sir. You, simply believe in rights and rights and rights . We believe in truths.
You conveniently ignore which truths you believe in. Let me help you: We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights,
Looks like truths and rights aren't the opposites you try to make them.;-)
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Does this not undermine their argument? When actual men are involved, it boils down to who is better looking. So how he moves is of little importance as long as the women find him attractive.
You've been watching waaaay too much Internet porn if you think that attractiveness is all about still photo visuals.
Movement is a major contributing factor. How elegant - or clumsy - people move can greatly enhance or diminish their physical appearance. I know a lot of women who became interested in a guy due to his dancing. It also works on men - women that aren't really my type (but aren't ugly) can become attractive if they show rhythm, elegant movement, good dancing. On the other hand, quite a few beauties lost much of their appeal after they showed pitiful attempts at movement on the dance floor.
The study is, like many scientific studies, examining the obvious. But instead of a dim feeling it is trying to add verification and some analysis to the topic.
How is it flat if they are always at or above your level? As you improve the enemies improve as well.
Because there is no change in the challenge. Let me illustrate by a simplified example: Your enemies have always 100 hitpoints more than you do. That means the challenge is always, unchanging, "do 100 points more damage to them than they do to me". Once you've figured it out, it is purely repetitive, because the difference between you and them never changes. Only numbers change - instead of hitting them 2 times, you may have to hit them 5 or 20 times, but aside from that it is the same.
You also lose all sense of accomplishment. If there are some enemies that are almost impossible at level 2, challenging at level 5 and easy at level 10 - then you can have the feeling of finally having "conquered" those enemies, of having become clearly better. If everyone in the game world levels with you, then what is the point of levelling at all? I could complete the game while staying level 1, and it would be the same experience.
If it gets harder as I get better then I still have to go through the process of figuring things out.
In which game? Where is the difference? In most implementations, the enemy now has 200 instead of 100 hitpoints. But you do now 20 instead of 10 points of damage. Zero difference, it takes 10 hits to kill them.
Auto-levelling is just a lazy shortcut by developers who are afraid of the player becoming bored because he is "too good". There are better ways to handle that.
And, frankly, it is highly satisfying to be able to walk all over those enemies that gave you trouble 10 levels back.
I know, I'm being too impatient. Half a decade is not long enough, I shouldn't be so hasty...
It isn't just security. I supervise the IT audits in our company, and I can't list anymore how often fake procedures have been tried to pass of as actual processes. Right now, our software development managers try to tell everyone how "agile" they are - but the real work their people do has nothing to do with agile development whatsoever. I've seen so-called "change management" that wasn't worthy of even being in the same room with actual change management, and "access controls" that were essentially bullshit in paper form.
There are usually two causes for this: Malicious people who are greedy for either power and/or money, or incompetent people who don't understand what they're doing (or managing) but are too afraid to ask for help and too stupid to find it on their own. Both kinds of people try to pass off what they're doing as the real thing and will respond to any attempts at questioning or changing it with hostility. In fact, that hostility is a pretty good indicator of both snake oil and incompetence.
And that's what I was asking for - an explicit difficulty setting, choosen by the user. ;-)
You start off saying that auto-adapting is the reason for games being boring and then go on to say you want more of it.
Not at all, I may have been unclear.
I can see where in some games, a limited kind of auto-adapting could have its place - but then I proceed to show how leaving it out is actually the better choice even though at first glance it appears that automation would make things easier for the user.
I also don't see how a game that is always at or just above your level cannot be challenging or interesting.
Because it is flat. That is what I meant by grinding. Killing 1000 enemies of the same kind is quite a bit less interesting and challenging than killing, say, 10 enemies each of 100 different kinds. It is a question of how much mental agility you have to excercise.
If I have to die lots of times at the same section to hone my skills I don't see how that is more challenging than if I hardly ever died across a larger number of ever-increasing sections.
Because the challenge gets out of it when you know exactly what to do and it becomes a matter of pressing the right buttons in the right sequence at the right time - that is a different and simpler challenge than figuring those buttons out in the first place.
Adaptive monster levels is one of the reasons games are becoming boring excercises in flat-out grinding.
Where is the challenge? Challenges consist of you having to adapt - to learn a new skill, to become quicker, smarter, better. That is one part of the equation. The other is drama. Drama consists of changes in suspense. If everything is equally easy or equally hard, there is no drama in the story, it all becomes flat.
So a game that is always "at your level" or even always "just ahead of you" is neither challenging, nor interesting. This is doubly true for free-exploration games like Oblivion (one of the earliest mods available was to remove the auto-levelling).
In a railroaded game like most sidescrollers or FPS, a certain level of adaptation might save the player from the frustration of having to try the same sequence for the 100th time. But most current auto-adaptation fails in picking out when the player needs some help and would enjoy a reduced difficulty and when he is enjoying the challenge and doesn't want the game to be dumbed down.
So, until the time we get true AI, an explicit difficulty setting (bonus points if it can be changed mid-game) is still much preferable.
It's not a question of price or size.
Switch places on the couch. What's your distance to the screen? Let me guess it's about 5 metres. If you move your head a bit to the side, just regular movement to change position or pick up a drink, say 10 cm to a side, you should get a viewing-angle difference at things in 5m distance of 1.1 if I calculated correctly. That's pretty much visible, and your brain will expect it.
But your expensive TV doesn't provide it. More importantly, the furniture right in front or next to the TV will do this perspective shift, making the part of your visual field that doesn't look even more weird.
In the movie theatre, at 30m distance to the screen, your change is 0.2 - much less noticeable. In addition, there isn't much else in view that tells your brain that something is amiss - most of the other stuff you see is much closer to you (you know, the sexy blonde to your left and the huge asshole right in front of you).
Finally a great comment instead of all the pointless whining.
Just one thing to add: 3D in a movie theatre works pretty well, because distance to the screen (and thus the perceived scenery) is so large that movement of the head would not have much of an effect anyways, so it doesn't feel weird.
On your TV set, it would.
That's why 3D movies work, even though they aren't really 3D as you pointed out, but 3D TV doesn't.
It's not a matter of "trust," it's a matter of respect. Maybe someone who just lost a friend to the Taliban might not really be in the mood for seeing a game where they can re-enact killing their friend.
I have this nice bridge, very well conserved, great investment, you interested?
All the "respect" part is bullshit. Someone who had a friend killed in a war zone has real problems to deal with, messing around with something in the imaginary world is not going to help. And, quite frankly, if it is going to hinder, he has some even more real problems to deal with, like seperation between fantasy and reality.
No, what this is really about - and why WW2 games don't scare anyone - is that the conflict is still "on". During an active conflict, you have to keep a certain mindset up, in both the fighting force and the people at home. The one thing that you can not allow to happen is sympathy with the enemy. Where "sympathy" starts at "realizing that they are humans, too". It reduces moral == willingness to kill them, == willingness to support the war, == willingness to re-elect the people who started it or continued it, == willingness to ignore all the war crimes, propaganda and other stuff going on.
Psychology is a major factor in any conflict. Even such a small thing as being able to see the conflict through the enemies eyes is bad in that light. It errodes the black-and-white world view that a war requires.
What if too many people realized that while many of the Taliban are evil, psychotic, religious fanatics - just as many are simple farmers with no other options, who through their propaganda machine have been given pretty much the same picture about us that we've been given about them? We get shock videos about Taliban stoning a young woman to death. I'm sure a single, randomly-picked hardcore video creates the same amount of shock in a society that has a sex moral straight out of the 8th century. Just look at what it does to many 21st century americans, and then substract 13 centuries.
And I'm sure an american air bombardment doesn't look so much different to the average afghan villager than the 9/11 attacks looked to the average New Yorker.
The UN's telecom chief says governments have legitimate security concerns,
And I have legitimate privacy concerns. So - this kind of empty statement is meant to "weigh in" on a debate? I always thought to "weigh in", you'd need some... you know... weight.
Saying someone has a legitimate reason means nothing if you only look at one side of the equation. Society is all about the balances we strike between the legitimate reasons of everyone involved.
That was when?
Linux had X since 1992 (http://www.linux.org/info/linux_timeline.html). At that time, GUI or no GUI made no difference whatsoever to market share, as it was entirely unknown by anyone outside academic circles.
a much larger percentage of people prefer Windows-like Desktop Manager looks over the (wide area of) available Linux Desktop manager(s).
That is a meaningless statement. You assume from the market share of the OSes in question that people prefer the desktop manager. But there are many aspects the determine market share, and look&feel is probably one of the least important. In the particular case of windows, OEM deals, familarity and a massive existing installed base are bigger contributors, as are ability to run more software, or even preference of the entire OS over the other alternatives - which still doesn't mean the preference extends to the desktop manager.
If anything, then this is a demonstration that your claim is not true, because if you can make Linux look exactly like windows, and it still doesn't fly off the shelves, then very obviously there are other factors that result in its miniscule market share, and the desktop manager doesn't really mean all that much.
People are amazing at adapting, yes including old folks.
What they're not good at is handling negative feedback. Very few of us ever learn that art. And most non-techie people have received a lot of negative feedback from computers, especially windows. That leads to reluctance and a kind of fear. The main difference between a techie confronted with a new system or progam and a non-techie is the willingness to explore, to just try out things. Non-techie folks are careful if they dare at all, for fear of breaking something. Us techies we have a good guess at what could possibly go wrong and what to look out for and among that don't fear to explore and thus discover the new thing.
And the fragility of a windows system is, due to its popularity, a major contributor to this fear. Who hasn't been to a friend or family member to "fix" their machine when it was really just that they changed something (like hiding the menu bar) and didn't know how to get it back?
For special-purposes like this, it would be much, much better and more convenient to have a UI designed for the purpose. If web-surfing is the only thing that the thing should do (as most lobby PCs), set it up so that it will have the browser running at all times, the browser is always maximized and can not be closed (or if closed, relaunches instantly).
If it has more, but still a small set of functions, a big full-screen menu to choose among them is a ton better than Start->Programs->Manufacturer->Program Name.
As you said: Once inside the browser, most users don't care anymore. So why put even the smallest hurdle between them and it?
"Do you find my Linux computer easy to use?" and the guest hadn't even realized it wasn't Windows XP.
Which means the answer was probably "no, it's got this horrible UI, but I can manage because I'm used to it."
Really, grow up, people. Copying good examples is a great way to catch up. Copying the bad stuff isn't. And MS is getting ripped new ones every time they change their UI again, because despite all the talent they hire, they apparently don't let the UI experts actually design the UI.
I know this is /., but - http://scholar.google.de/scholar?q=intuition+and+emotions&hl=de&as_sdt=0&as_vis=1&oi=scholart - that takes ten seconds to do, less than writing a reply.
There appear to be links between all our systems. Even "purely rational" decisions are, on close inspection, often prompted by emotions and then justified by rational thinking after the fact.
We're not isolated beings. There is little on this planet that is as much inter-connected as a human brain. Quite frankly, anyone who claims that two brain functions are not linked should be the one to show it.
This sounds exactly like corporatism, the economic side of the fascism. "Democracy" inside a company, on other people's money? You must be brainwashed...
I've had five years of hands-on experience with this system, you've apparently just heard about it. Here, read a little about it before you make up your mind. It's not a perfect solution, but in many places it helps a lot by having smaller, smarter solutions than a nation-wide law or regulation would provide.
You can't review performance if (1) the reviewee can't be fired and (2) the state is banning proper documenting of their work. How do you review a slacked who knows he can't be fired and his job is 100% computer-based, when you're not allowed to monitor computer and Internet usage?
I was apparently not clear. I will say it again: You can monitor and review performance. Don't tell me you can't, I was personally involved in negotiations about performance monitoring and review.
Funny how reasonable/unreasonable is not left to the firing person, or to the employment contract, but to a special work courthosue fully bending to the will of the unions.
Nonsense. I have personally been to those courts. Which, as all courts, are the last resort. You don't have to go to court to fire someone, in fact it is not even that common. However, you can not simply fire someone "just because", you have to have a reason. Again, I've had all this for years hands-on. I know what I'm talking about. I've seen a good share of people being fired, so excuse me if I find the claim that you can't fire someone completely ridiculous.
My words are "pretty true" when saying that I believe you are a brainwashed fascist, corporatist moron who's dividing his own people into "citizens" and "sub-citizens". Shame on you.
Actually, if you read through our exchange, you will find that you were the one introducing the concept of "sub-citizens" into it. I have just used that word for the first time.
This is quickly becoming a semantic debate. You can call non-human-intelligence anything that would fail the Turing test but some clever devices that are not aim at masquerading as humans can have their use. I'm sure HAL9000 would fail a turing test yet it is incontestably useful and intelligent.
I agree completely. In fact, this is what I believe the whole AI thing will end up with - special purpose devices. Self-aware robots that don't walk around trying to figure out the meaning of life and which job they should take, but instead self-aware robots that are aware of themselves because they're built into a space station and making the machine self-aware with a desire to "survive", i.e. remain functional, is the easiest way to make the station take care of itself with repairs and maintainance.
Not ==, but linked.
Good point.
Yes, we can try to simply copy. It would be interesting to see what evolves.
Then again, why build from scratch if you already have perfectly good human brains to work with? Wouldn't a much faster path be to take babies and put their brains into a machine? No need to create a copy brain, now you just have to have it do all the learning and evolving and adapting.
Why would you do this to a baby *or* an AI?
Science. I would. We regularily sacrifice thousands and occasionally millions of adults for less interesting purposes. We just call it "war" instead of science, and rightfully so, because while it usually is a big experiment, it's a test of egos and national powers and it's neither double-blind nor controlled nor scientific in any other sense.
You mean, brain hardware isn't like silicon logic. That doesn't mean that it is a given that silicon logic can't do what brain hardware can do. That's the beauty of computing - processes that are wholly unlike digital logic may be created by virtue of the flexibility the machine.
Maye. So far, that is an assumption. We know a whole lot about what's going on in the brain, but then again there is even more that we don't know. All those beautiful "brain scan" images that you see in articles usually don't spell out what their resolution is - every pixel on them is many thousands of neurons. We have absolutely no friggin idea how the brain works on the detail level below that. We don't know if it maybe does even stranger things. One theory even postulates that quantum superposition plays a crucial role.
The breadth of computing is really quite striking. Chemical, electrical, mechanical and even quantum behaviors are all easily implemented on digital hardware. And since that, in turn, represents the length and breadth of the machinery available to the human brain that we are even *suspicious* of, much less certain of, there's every reason to see them as a workable fit.
That's like saying building a Dyson Sphere is workable because we know all the fundamental technologies that go into one. The truth is that we know enough to form theories about what could work. You don't know if it will until you've tried. And then you may find out that you've missed something, or that while it is theoretically possible it is entirely unfeasable to actually do it.
More importantly, many such "technological marvels" throughout history have never become a reality even though after some time they had become possible and feasable. The most common reason is that other technology has leaped over it and offered more interesting advances. In that spirit, I still hold that I find it more likely that we will advance our own intelligence through embedded computers and genetic engineering than that we replace ourselves by intelligent machines.
You are assuming that analysis of complex problems is possible without emotions. Current research indicates that at least for humans, intuition works considerably better at complex problems than reasoning. That may be because our reasoning is so weak, or because problem solving requires more than objective analysis.
The knowledge we have about the workings of emotions is very wide and clearer every day, and is rightfully thought as being unnecessary (outside a theory of mind) if we want to build a machine with human-like cognition abilities.
That is not in the stuff that I read. Yes, emotions were discarded. However, AFAIK their importance is on the rise again, as we realize, for example, that you can't even make decision (not good decisions, any decision at all) without emotions being involved.
They have their importance in psychology, but they seem really useless when it comes to cognition.
My argument is that you can not seperate "cognition" out from an intelligence and still end up with something that we would consider intelligent in the same sense we do consider humans. It would be "smart" in the sense of a well-programmed computer, maybe have typical today AI applications like speech recognition, but we wouldn't call it an AI.
No sir. You, simply believe in rights and rights and rights . We believe in truths.
You conveniently ignore which truths you believe in. Let me help you:
We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights,
Looks like truths and rights aren't the opposites you try to make them. ;-)