The truth is that the more famous an artist the more likely there are fakes. Add to this that artists are survived by many of their own works in various private collections and may not be discovered until after their death and you see that it's difficult to know how many works an artist created and which were actually created by him. This thread has argued that the authenticity matters because of the emotional connection of owning something created by the artist but the reality is that if there was no financial gain to be made these tests would serve o real purpose.
Ok, now consider that someone came into your house in the middle of the night and replaced the pocketwatch chain with an identical copy that you can't tell is a different chain. You'd never know the difference and your memories would be jut as strong. Let's say the original chain is given to someone else who treasures your grandpa's memory, they now have a strong connection to his memory from the chain.
The art world also has fake paintings that give immense pleasure and a connection to the historical artist to the owners of the pantings. But now there is a test that proves some of the paintings are not real. So, basically, the tests exist so that a few art snobs can invalidate the paintings owned by others.
If people feel an attachment to history through some item, is it really necessary to trash their belief? The more fakes, the more people who feel a personal attachment if they believe the item is genuine. These tests don't prove any particular painting is authentic, they exist to show which paintings are inauthentic so that the others become more rare and hence more expensive.
Let me be the first to offer my services to help develop a program for Louisiana's teachers and principles to improve students' critical thinking skills. I'll be more than happy to show how science is rigorously tested and reviewed and how much is required to have a hypothesis become a theory. Then I'll show how none of that applies to the mythology du jour of the various students. After a while maybe we can teach critical thinking and get rid of religion altogether. Personally, I think it oversteps the bounds of government to specifically teach children to reject their religion but I'll be glad to help them in this case anyway.
Sadly, most manages only recognize a defect if it i something likely to be noticed by their customers. Unless your customers are hackers, they'll never discover the problem so there's no need to test for them.
The biggest problem, in my opinion, is that management as a whole is generally "success based" which means failures a swept under the carpet or otherwise ignored. This means the company as a whole never leans from its mistakes or avoids them in the future. Everyone runs around talking about how great everything is and how wonderful they are at their jobs but no one ever analyzes anything to see if the project was successful by its original definition.
Instead, as the project grinds on the scope is limited, features removed, timelines extended, budgets exceeded, etc. However, every manager beams about the unbridled success of the finished product after the lowered success conditions are met.
Actually, the article says, "the pact would make clear that it is lawful for European governments and companies to transfer personal information to the United States, and vice versa." So, of course, this means the data will be streaming both ways. Apparently, there's no cause for concern that US data will be going to the EU as far as the New York Times is concerned.
I still remember when most users were using Netscape browsers and Microsoft had a pitiful browser they wanted everyone to use instead. Many technical users pointed out that Netscape was cross-platform and a better choice for a browser. So, Microsoft created Internet Explorer for Macs, Unix and Windows to show that Microsoft understood the importance of a cross-platform browser and would continue to make the browser for all platforms for free. Once they propagated their browser to the bulk of the users, these cross-platform versions stopped being updated. Of course, it was all just a ploy to gain market dominance by confusing the marketplace.
I wish people were smart enough to realize that this latest attempt to tie Ruby to Microsoft is simply the same tactic, used repeatedly by Microsoft, to confuse a marketplace while jamming more poorly conceived Microsoft software into businesses that are not clever enough to look further into the future than the current quarter. Sadly, past examples show that business managers will not learn that Microsoft does not have the best of intentions when they announce any new technology.
Slow and error prone seems, to me, to be a large part of the human condition. Especially when you start sharing the information between and among various people. The human mind has fairly simple mechanisms (though they're difficult to study empirically) which mainly consist of networks of neurons. So you end up with a lot of data that is interconnected in very precise networks from which meaning is created. Often, these connections are not consistent in every individual (or perhaps never consistent for any two individuals) and this leads to all kinds of aberrant psychology.
So while the basic methodology employed by the brain is simple its final output or observable behavior is very complex. This is also the case with computers, a micro-controller has only a very few simple commands that when combined together in very specific ways leads to very complex behavior.
The way I often think of the human mind, as a programmer, is to think of an object-oriented framework or set of APIs. Imagine if you had a conscious program implementing these various methods and I think you'd have a very similar concept to our own minds. The program would be self-writing and adding new handlers based upon past experiences: don't touch the stove, what's the meaning of the word "crocodile," etc. This is similar to what we do in our minds. The program, like us, would have no understanding of the internal workings of the various APIs it implements much in the same way that we do not know how our brain interprets movement from visual data but it would interpret its inputs and react accordingly. Even though we don't know how our minds interpret visual data, we are absolutely certain (often erroneously) that it's always correct. This is one of the reasons we are so fascinated by optical illusions. They expose the bugs of the underlying code by making us see something that we can verify is not true.
Given this analogy, each person is a sort of ongoing alpha version of a single program they're writing over their entire lifetime. Computers, once they meet the processing power necessary, have exactly one advantage over humans: the ability to make exact copies of the data on another computer. Imagine the benefits of that. Not just hearing tales of someone's experiences but to actually transfer the very experiences themselves. Nothing lost in translation, nothing exaggerated or understated, no politicizing of the data, just the actual experience as it occurred transfered directly into your memory.
With that advantage, I posit that computers will not need to have as much processing power as a human to be better than we are. As time marches on and the experiences of the many "thinking computers" are stored in repositories, they will be functionally more capable at any decision than humans are. They'll be able to apply the experiences of their ancestors and contemporaries alike to shape the decisions they make. The best we can do is compare a crude description through the veil of political motivation or otherwise inaccurate depictions of what other people experienced.
In the end, these computers will be capable of making much better decisions than we are. Of course, our emotional mammalian brains and our aggressive, territorial lizard brains will disagree with the logic of these decisions. But that's always been true of people.
I've tried to watch the video but the article links to an MSN SoapBox video and Microsoft's servers never seem to be able to load the video. Maybe they should have used YouTube?
Knowing Microsoft's penchant for smoke and mirrors, though I wouldn't be surprised if the demonstration was just timed pantomime to a non-interactive video.
The TV company web sites are the absolute worst. Often I want to know something simple, like when new episodes of Heroes will start. I go NBC's site and wade through page after page of useless crap and Flash animation that has no use whatsoever and there is not one word about when new episodes start.
Their sites are always Flash-infested design disasters with absolutely no useful content linking to a schedule that has no information. I'm really not sure who goes to these sites.
My kitchen mixer has never needed to interpret my hand gestures nor register the pain on my face to be able to mix soup or anything else. If I'm still involved in the soup-making process, why do I need a robot?
I would agree completely with what you've posted. I'm not certain how your comments relate to mine though.
Someone quoted: "Never attribute to malice that which can be adequately explained by stupidity."
To which I responded: ""Just because someone appears to be stupid does not mean they're not malevolent.""
I'm not sure how you interpreted my comments as a call for more laws nor do I know how it became intertwined with the court system in any case. We were discussing the possibe motives of WikiNews. To me, assuming that the management at the Wikimedia Foundation Board might be stupid is not a valid reason stop discussing other possible motives. Certainly, if I was discussing the legal system, the bar of "guilty until proven innocent" is absolutely necessary. But then the punishment is much greater than that of a forum discussion and likewise should have a greater level of proof.
To which I've always said: "Just because someone appears to be stupid does not mean they're not malevolent."
In fact, pretending to be ignorant is usually one of the primary defenses used by those who cause the most harm. From the common proclamations: "I never went to their house and I don't know how he fell three times onto a knife with my fingerprints" to the common practice of creating "plausible deniability" to protect corporate or governmental leaders before illegal activity takes place. I'm not saying I know the solution, just that looking the other way because someone might be stupid is not it.
As for the whole child-porn motive that's bandied about so much lately, it's a very effective tool used by politicians to get any disgusting regulations passed in congress. No one wants to look like they are pro-child porn and will always vote to pass any bill that clams it's needed to combat child porn. Thus politicians need to keep a healthy fear that child porn is everywhere in the public eye so that people demand that something be done.
Slashdot Mirror
The truth is that the more famous an artist the more likely there are fakes. Add to this that artists are survived by many of their own works in various private collections and may not be discovered until after their death and you see that it's difficult to know how many works an artist created and which were actually created by him. This thread has argued that the authenticity matters because of the emotional connection of owning something created by the artist but the reality is that if there was no financial gain to be made these tests would serve o real purpose.
Ok, now consider that someone came into your house in the middle of the night and replaced the pocketwatch chain with an identical copy that you can't tell is a different chain. You'd never know the difference and your memories would be jut as strong. Let's say the original chain is given to someone else who treasures your grandpa's memory, they now have a strong connection to his memory from the chain.
The art world also has fake paintings that give immense pleasure and a connection to the historical artist to the owners of the pantings. But now there is a test that proves some of the paintings are not real. So, basically, the tests exist so that a few art snobs can invalidate the paintings owned by others.
If people feel an attachment to history through some item, is it really necessary to trash their belief? The more fakes, the more people who feel a personal attachment if they believe the item is genuine. These tests don't prove any particular painting is authentic, they exist to show which paintings are inauthentic so that the others become more rare and hence more expensive.
Cool!
Let me be the first to offer my services to help develop a program for Louisiana's teachers and principles to improve students' critical thinking skills. I'll be more than happy to show how science is rigorously tested and reviewed and how much is required to have a hypothesis become a theory. Then I'll show how none of that applies to the mythology du jour of the various students. After a while maybe we can teach critical thinking and get rid of religion altogether. Personally, I think it oversteps the bounds of government to specifically teach children to reject their religion but I'll be glad to help them in this case anyway.
Sadly, most manages only recognize a defect if it i something likely to be noticed by their customers. Unless your customers are hackers, they'll never discover the problem so there's no need to test for them.
The biggest problem, in my opinion, is that management as a whole is generally "success based" which means failures a swept under the carpet or otherwise ignored. This means the company as a whole never leans from its mistakes or avoids them in the future. Everyone runs around talking about how great everything is and how wonderful they are at their jobs but no one ever analyzes anything to see if the project was successful by its original definition.
Instead, as the project grinds on the scope is limited, features removed, timelines extended, budgets exceeded, etc. However, every manager beams about the unbridled success of the finished product after the lowered success conditions are met.
Actually, the article says, "the pact would make clear that it is lawful for European governments and companies to transfer personal information to the United States, and vice versa." So, of course, this means the data will be streaming both ways. Apparently, there's no cause for concern that US data will be going to the EU as far as the New York Times is concerned.
Nah, Microsoft users write regular expressions like this:
string s = Regex.Replace("abracadabra", "abra", "zzzz");WILL-SPAM
Wait a second. I have to show an ID to be thrown in prison?
There is no stranger marriage.
Ruby on Rails
Well, the insurance companies have become huge with this business model.
I still remember when most users were using Netscape browsers and Microsoft had a pitiful browser they wanted everyone to use instead. Many technical users pointed out that Netscape was cross-platform and a better choice for a browser. So, Microsoft created Internet Explorer for Macs, Unix and Windows to show that Microsoft understood the importance of a cross-platform browser and would continue to make the browser for all platforms for free. Once they propagated their browser to the bulk of the users, these cross-platform versions stopped being updated. Of course, it was all just a ploy to gain market dominance by confusing the marketplace.
I wish people were smart enough to realize that this latest attempt to tie Ruby to Microsoft is simply the same tactic, used repeatedly by Microsoft, to confuse a marketplace while jamming more poorly conceived Microsoft software into businesses that are not clever enough to look further into the future than the current quarter. Sadly, past examples show that business managers will not learn that Microsoft does not have the best of intentions when they announce any new technology.
That's certainly more thinking than I've come to expect from the employees in my cable company.
Until you wanted to connect a modem. Am I the only one who remembers the horrible process necessary to connect the early Windows 95 to a modem?
Slow and error prone seems, to me, to be a large part of the human condition. Especially when you start sharing the information between and among various people. The human mind has fairly simple mechanisms (though they're difficult to study empirically) which mainly consist of networks of neurons. So you end up with a lot of data that is interconnected in very precise networks from which meaning is created. Often, these connections are not consistent in every individual (or perhaps never consistent for any two individuals) and this leads to all kinds of aberrant psychology.
So while the basic methodology employed by the brain is simple its final output or observable behavior is very complex. This is also the case with computers, a micro-controller has only a very few simple commands that when combined together in very specific ways leads to very complex behavior.
The way I often think of the human mind, as a programmer, is to think of an object-oriented framework or set of APIs. Imagine if you had a conscious program implementing these various methods and I think you'd have a very similar concept to our own minds. The program would be self-writing and adding new handlers based upon past experiences: don't touch the stove, what's the meaning of the word "crocodile," etc. This is similar to what we do in our minds. The program, like us, would have no understanding of the internal workings of the various APIs it implements much in the same way that we do not know how our brain interprets movement from visual data but it would interpret its inputs and react accordingly. Even though we don't know how our minds interpret visual data, we are absolutely certain (often erroneously) that it's always correct. This is one of the reasons we are so fascinated by optical illusions. They expose the bugs of the underlying code by making us see something that we can verify is not true.
Given this analogy, each person is a sort of ongoing alpha version of a single program they're writing over their entire lifetime. Computers, once they meet the processing power necessary, have exactly one advantage over humans: the ability to make exact copies of the data on another computer. Imagine the benefits of that. Not just hearing tales of someone's experiences but to actually transfer the very experiences themselves. Nothing lost in translation, nothing exaggerated or understated, no politicizing of the data, just the actual experience as it occurred transfered directly into your memory.
With that advantage, I posit that computers will not need to have as much processing power as a human to be better than we are. As time marches on and the experiences of the many "thinking computers" are stored in repositories, they will be functionally more capable at any decision than humans are. They'll be able to apply the experiences of their ancestors and contemporaries alike to shape the decisions they make. The best we can do is compare a crude description through the veil of political motivation or otherwise inaccurate depictions of what other people experienced.
In the end, these computers will be capable of making much better decisions than we are. Of course, our emotional mammalian brains and our aggressive, territorial lizard brains will disagree with the logic of these decisions. But that's always been true of people.
I've tried to watch the video but the article links to an MSN SoapBox video and Microsoft's servers never seem to be able to load the video. Maybe they should have used YouTube?
Knowing Microsoft's penchant for smoke and mirrors, though I wouldn't be surprised if the demonstration was just timed pantomime to a non-interactive video.
Exactly, my first thought was:
Well, what Microsoft announces and what they deliver have never been exactly similar.
The TV company web sites are the absolute worst. Often I want to know something simple, like when new episodes of Heroes will start. I go NBC's site and wade through page after page of useless crap and Flash animation that has no use whatsoever and there is not one word about when new episodes start.
Their sites are always Flash-infested design disasters with absolutely no useful content linking to a schedule that has no information. I'm really not sure who goes to these sites.
My kitchen mixer has never needed to interpret my hand gestures nor register the pain on my face to be able to mix soup or anything else. If I'm still involved in the soup-making process, why do I need a robot?
To configure directories, go to User Preferences:Spotlight and add any directories to be excluded under the Privacy tab.
I agree! It's those damn breeders and their children that really consume resources. ;)
Really! It's those damn breeders and their children that really consume resources. ;)
Well, now that we've settled this, maybe we can just agree to agree? ;)
I would agree completely with what you've posted. I'm not certain how your comments relate to mine though.
Someone quoted: "Never attribute to malice that which can be adequately explained by stupidity."
To which I responded: ""Just because someone appears to be stupid does not mean they're not malevolent.""
I'm not sure how you interpreted my comments as a call for more laws nor do I know how it became intertwined with the court system in any case. We were discussing the possibe motives of WikiNews. To me, assuming that the management at the Wikimedia Foundation Board might be stupid is not a valid reason stop discussing other possible motives. Certainly, if I was discussing the legal system, the bar of "guilty until proven innocent" is absolutely necessary. But then the punishment is much greater than that of a forum discussion and likewise should have a greater level of proof.
To which I've always said: "Just because someone appears to be stupid does not mean they're not malevolent."
In fact, pretending to be ignorant is usually one of the primary defenses used by those who cause the most harm. From the common proclamations: "I never went to their house and I don't know how he fell three times onto a knife with my fingerprints" to the common practice of creating "plausible deniability" to protect corporate or governmental leaders before illegal activity takes place. I'm not saying I know the solution, just that looking the other way because someone might be stupid is not it.
As for the whole child-porn motive that's bandied about so much lately, it's a very effective tool used by politicians to get any disgusting regulations passed in congress. No one wants to look like they are pro-child porn and will always vote to pass any bill that clams it's needed to combat child porn. Thus politicians need to keep a healthy fear that child porn is everywhere in the public eye so that people demand that something be done.