No, I've not done any mod work with Valve engines, as mentioned in my previous post it was for a competing engine.
I've not really had much to do with Valve engines at all other than playing through their games without really playing with available mods or their mod tools bar a little bit of mapping for the original Half-Life many years ago.
"There is a very big difference between AI - which is based on guesses about how "intelligence" works, and studies of brain function."
Yes, there most certainly is. AI is a far broader topic than study of the brain for starters, it extends to the study of swarm intelligence and emergent properties in evolution for example. The field of AI generally uses nature as inspiration and builds useful techniques from there. The human brain is but one of these items that has been studied for inspiration and has led to the idea of neural networks which in no way aim to recreate the brain, but simply mimic parts of it that we understand to perform certain tasks.
"I'm going to make a totally unjustified sweeping generalisation and suggest that one reason that AI has generally been a failure is because we have had quite wrong ideas about how the brain actually works."
It'd be a start if you even got as far as your generalisation before being rather wrong. The premise that AI has been a failure is a stumbling block in your argument before you even reach the reason why you believe it's been a failure. Suggesting AI has been a failure is akin to suggesting physics has been a failure because they haven't yet nailed down that elusive grand unified theory of everything. The fruits of AI research are used in everything from search engines to spelling/grammar checks, to voice recognition, to expert systems for medical and mechanical fault diagnosis, to optimisation of vehicle design, to convincing computer game opponents, to intelligent and fault tolerant network and telecomms routing. The results of AI research are far reaching and extend throughout nearly all areas of computing and are used by us daily without us even realising it. To me that is far from a failure, unless again you define failure as not reaching your absolute end goal as per my physics example.
Again, the brain is only a small part of AI research and neural networks have been quite good for pattern recognition so it's hard to argue that the parts of AI that are relevant to study of the brain have been a failure, let alone the subject as a whole.
"So my feeling is that the first people really to get anywhere with AI will either work for Google or be the neurobiologists who finally crack what is actually going on in there."
Google already has many good AI practitioners because AI research covers so many areas as stated above, many of which are relevant to their business- AI is extremely useful in data mining for example. That said, I'm not sure why Google's AI practitioners would be anymore likely to produce strong intelligence, which is what I assume you're after, than any other AI practitioners. I'd say these guys will have a good head start for example:
"If I wasn't close to retirement, and wanted to build a career in AI, I'd be looking at how mapreduce works, and the work being done building on that, rather than robotics. I'd also be looking as seriously parallel processing."
Robotics huh? Where did that come from? Are you suggesting all of AI is related to robotics? Your starting points are not those that I would recommend to someone who is truly interested in advancing AI research and knowledge.
The future of AI is undoubtedly going to be in higher performance computers, modern systems simply can't process as efficiently as natural systems such as the brain so we certainly need advances there. Parallel processing is somewhat of an option but I'd argue it's only somewhat of a bandaid fix. Quantum computing and biological computers are the best bet, I'm personally placing my money on biological computers because I don't think we'll end up producing strong AI on the types of computers we have sat on our desks or even super computers- I think we'll likely just end up learning how to program physical perhaps man-made brains themselves.
Are they legally allowed to do this if Half-Life is still for sale and as Half-Life: Source exists?
When we built a port of the original Teamfortress Valve came to us and made it quite clear we can't use the same set of weapons, names for classes and so forth because that would infringe on their IP even though all our assets and code were built by us from scratch. This was admittedly for a different, competing engine to Valve so I suppose it's slightly different and looking back I can imagine thus Valve probably weren't completely honest about what we could legally do.
I'm suprised Valve are willing to allow this if it will risk the admittedly small sales of Half-Life they may still get or do they feel this will instead increase sales of newer source engine games?
Of course the other question is how is this any different from Half-Life source?
Still I don't want to detract too much from the achievement this is. Releasing a mod of this scale can truly be a time consuming task that requires a lot of effort and discipline and I have to congratulate them on reaching this point. I truly hope Valve don't waste their time with a last minute cease and desist!
I was going to point out how ignorant it was of you to just suggest anyone that anyone who disagrees with you is "vicious and ignorant" but it's undoubtedly pointless if your attitude is to rather ignorantly pre-emptively label and dismiss anyone who has a different viewpoint to you in this manner.
I do however have a question, you seem to accept climate change exists, but is instead something that exists as part of a natural cycle. My question is therefore if you believe it occurs why do you feel it's not possible that climate change is relevant to this discussion? How can you be so sure that a change in climate isn't a cause in this? Do you have some evidence we don't? Why is it that you seem to feel that this couldn't be a result of natural (as opposed to man-made) climate change?
Certainly at least to dismiss something perfectly within the realm of possibility without exploring it is absolutely not a valid scientific approach. That way of thinking belongs much more strongly in the mindset of the very creationists talked down in your quote.
What is it that you're so afraid of that you don't even want this perfectly plausible idea to be considered?
I'm assuming by this country you mean the US in which case you may or may not be right, but living in England I thought it can't happen here too.
I was wrong. A recent case about a guy (Max Mosley) having an S&M orgy with 4 prostitutes was published by the Daily Mail, the Daily Mail also said the orgy had a nazi theme to it, this was demonstrated to be a false in court. Similarly, the court ruled that the Daily Mail had breached his privacy rights, all well and good, I thought great, common sense prevailed.
But then just the other week the editor of the Daily Mail was giving a speach at some conference and made the suggestion that the court ruling had effectively snuck in a privacy law via the back door and he then suggested that papers should have the right to invade people's privacy like this because they are the moral guardians of society (no really, he said it almost exactly in those words).
That bothered me greatly, the best selling paper in the UK iirc is run by someone who thinks he has the right to invade any part of anyones lives and expose it on the front page of his paper for millions of people to see if he feels the need.
That's why privacy is important, not just for the scenario you state- that of the religious right taking control of a country but because members of the press and no doubt people in many other influential positions seem to already believe that they have the right to be the moral guardians of a country. It would've perhaps been less of an issue if it weren't for the fact the daily mail even lied about the theme of the situation to try and make it look worse.
So to the person you respond to who doesn't care about privacy, perhaps we should be asking- how would you not only like photos of you in the bedroom exposed to millions of people, but exposed out of context with the suggestions for example that the person you're having sex with is underage for example? How would you feel about losing your job over it? How would you feel about being slagged off and shunned in public for it? As demonstrated by the Max Mosley case, it really can happen.
The loss of privacy is a slippery slope, if we give it up and lose it we're all f*cked. It's one of the pillars of freedom- lose privacy and freedom will shortly fall too, again, many events in history exist as evidence of this.
To be fair, it's not like when the US reports these attacks to China/Russia they do anything about them to suggest you might be right though.
It's the same with the whole Litvinenko thing here in the UK, we know where the Polonium came from (a Russian lab) we even pretty much know Lugovoi did it but as they wont help whatsoever to put him to trial and have instead put him into their parliament in a position of power it's kind of hard to give them the benefit of the doubt.
Maybe if they actually helped bring these perpetrators to justice we could give them the benefit of the doubt as you suggest, but when they instead protect the almost certainly guilt with no real trial or investigation then it only adds to the idea that the governments of these nations themselves are in fact responsible.
If a bunch of Canadians crossed the US border and attacked the US and then made it back to Canada safely and the Canadian government did nothing about it or even went as far as giving these people places in government as per the Luogovoi/Litvinenko affair then yeah I think most people would still say the Canadian government deserves a lot of the blame.
Don't get me wrong however, I do feel these "cyber attacks" are a little overstated, I hate to say it but it's becoming so common when I read about them I can't help but think "Who cares, stop moaning and either return the favour or learn from it and stop it happening again". As is pointed out here on Slashdot often though, they don't seem to learn from their mistakes and instead simply repeat them over and over. I'm not sure what the US government is trying to achieve with these cries? Trying to make us hate Russia/China? Don't worry their human rights record means a lot of us already do. Trying to get sympathy? Well what for? You're the military, you're the ones who are meant to be dealing with it and so on.
Or in other words, to put it simply- they're all just as bad as each other.
That makes sense, it did seem a bit odd to me that he'd move full time.
The amount of research materials he must have at Cambridge and the relationship with other physicists and mathematicians there is a lot to throw away as well as being so close to CERN over in Switzerland. To throw all that away would undoubtedly set his research back a few years and I'm sure he's aware at his age and in his condition he probably realises he doesn't have even a single year to just throw away wastefully.
Sure stuff like his research materials could be moved over, he could visit CERN and his colleagues but it's still going to be nowhere near as productive as sticking with the environment he knows and has managed to work in so well all these years.
"Essentially, Bridges explained, he thinks that the dominance of giant publishers like EA and their general reliance on physical, in-the-box, units, can't hold up. Instead, he said, new tools, ubiquitous broadband and hungry independent developers are going to all combine to eat away at the continued supremacy of the $60 big-name title. And that could spell big trouble for the industry."
That doesn't make any sense, independent game developers are still part of the industry, so if there is simply a rebalancing of cash flow from the big companies to the indies the industry hasn't been harmed in the slightest, it's dynamic has simply changed.
EA and co. could completely die and the industry wouldn't be harmed if more games were being sold by indies at lower prices to make up the same level of profits.
Yes, unfortunately those places aren't the other half of the country where our connections outright suck and BT refuses to do anything about it.
Inner city slums full of chavs wanting to browse the latest video of their mates beating up some granny in the street get far better connections for doing this than better off, semi-rural to rural locations with people who are better off because they work hard or have done well for themselves through entrepeneurial spirit, people who actually contribute to the economy.
I'm not generalising here and saying everyone with good connections all live in slums or anything, nor am I saying all people in nice rural areas have necessarily worked hard. I'm also not saying people who just want to use YouTube shouldn't have better connections than those who do things that benefit the country. What I am saying however is that the broadband disparity does actually lower the country's potential and it's a problem the government wont solve because as with their ideas for intrusive surveillance, their threatened legislation against file sharing they simply don't understand technology and the internet specifically.
Of course, even if it's not a problem for you now, can you be sure you wont move house some day and find out the location can't get more than 1mbps or perhaps can't even get broadband at all? I think everyone accepts some areas get great broadband connections- most of London, central Birmingham, Manchester and places like that. The problem is the crappy connections exist everywhere else and something needs to be done about it, just as Britain was slow about adopting broadband in the first placing leaving it years behind we're finding ourselves in the same situation with next generation broadband. The UKs internet infrastructure is an abysmal joke.
Ask them for more data. Say you're willing to help track down the offender but need more information to do so such as logs of how much data was transferred from their honeypot and between what times to help you search logs. Ask for a full list of filenames that were being shared, the username they were connected with, the ports they were communicating via etc. etc.
Put the ball in their court, put the burden on them to demonstrate that such an event occured. Call their bluff by offering to be helpful but requesting more information.
Some have pointed out here that companies are responsible for what users do on their network, but the flip side of it is companies can also stand up to legal bullying better than individuals and thus far the cases put forward by the RIAA etc. aren't holding up well in court. The ESA will have to have a pretty strong case to stand any chance in court and if they can't/wont provide the above information they wont win in court either.
An IP address and a time is not suitable evidence of copyright infringement. If they don't have any more evidence then they don't have a case, if they can provide it then you simply need to comply. Using a company network for P2P is stupid anyway so whilst I'd love to see the ESA lose for these kind of tactics, if they have taken the effort to get suitable evidence and if a user really is using P2P at work then I'm a little more sympathetic to them. Don't be like the RIAA yourself however and assume guilt on behalf of your users based on worthless evidence- get more from them.
One thing I've not understood so far is why aircraft aren't involved more. Wouldn't a carrier with jets be enough to respond to distress calls before the pirates can get too close? According to BBC articles, ships passing through the area know the pirates are coming as they keep constant lookout it's just that the world's navies can't sail to them fast enough by the time pirates are in sight but again, surely jets could? I would think Harriers would be perfect for this task.
Is it the cost of flying constant air sorties that's the problem? I'd have thought even some helicopter carriers with gunships on board would be a better bet than trying to do it all with boats.
Alternatively perhaps a nuclear submarine or two off the major ports sinking the odd one or two out the blue would act as a nice deterrent:)
Far from it, from what I've seen in the news at least Australia has unfortunately largely been down the same path as the US since 9/11.
It's a shame because for many of us Brits it's the dream place to visit and migrate to. Beautiful weather and scenery, lovely people with a shared history. Even their national heroes are better, we have neanderthalic retards like David Beckham and they had the awesomeness that was Steve Irwin. Unfortunately though until it's political parties sort their game out I wont even visit let alone consider moving.
No doubt their government will continue to whine and moan about shortages of people specialised in various professions though and sit wondering why people aren't filling them, one of them being IT professionals. Have a look here to see how desperate they are for IT pros:
Maybe if their government was planing a forward thinking nation technologically and that was hence attractive to IT professionals they'd actually be able to fill some of these shortages. Unfortunately they seem to have taken a leaf from the US and British book where it's all about over the top government control.
I can think of few scenarios where 3D isn't going to be better but the issue is a lot of 3D games simply have bad implementations.
Whilst some games are far better in 3D as the summary suggests- FPS, RTS again as the summary mentions, some not so. For me platformers spring to mind here, a lot of platformers that went 3D absolutely suck- Sonic the hedgehog in 3D was never any good imo for example. There are however some that work well, there are those that went third person succesfully such as Mario 64 and franchises that started in 3D such as Tomb Raider also. Here's my point however, I'm not saying we get rid of 2D style perspectives such as your side platformers, your top down games and so forth but I am saying that even these are better in 3D- games like Cloning Clyde, Little Big Planet for example.
Again going back to RTS, it's much easier to have tanks flip over when they're blown up or helicopters fall out the sky reasonably in a 3D engine. My favourite RTS ever, Command and Conquer wasn't 3D and I liked it's sequels less but I believe it was poor game design not a question of 2D vs. 3D as one of my other favourites, Warcraft, only got better when it went 3D.
It's simply down to fluidity of animation, primarily, you can have things turn as you see fit without having to draw a sprite for every angle. You could have things look good in 2D by spending many many hours drawing millions of frames, but then you almost certainly wouldn't have convincing shadows or lighting still for things such as RTS.
3D in itself is much better and has much more potential than 2D, the question is whether game designers can adapt to it and use it to it's potential. We already know the answer to that somewhat- some can and some can't but just as we had good and bad 2D games we have good and bad 3D games. There is no fundamental reason why 3D has to be worse, only poor implementation- again something that can happen with 2D but that we often forget because we only remember the good 2D games as the bad fall from our memories and this is why so many people have such a rose tinted view of 2D.
"I don't understand why someone would wish to draw a line between animal and human for ethical reasons, when it would be treated the same due to it being mentally incapable of anything else."
Is that fact though? Do we really know what their mental capabilities were? is there any reason they most definitely wouldn't be able to learn an awful lot of the things a normal Homo sapien child does?
What if we cloned the DNA of our own species from a body from the same era? Have humans really changed that much? I was under the impression the outright majority of whats changed between then and now is simply what is inherited, not physically at conception but socially as we're brought up by our parents and at school.
That's an illogical statement. Microsoft effectively funded the creation of the content. This is no different to Sony using their large share in Square Enix to hold back the release of FFXIII on the 360. Square only changed their mind on this as the gap between the PS3 and 360 stopped shrinking (that gap is stuck at around 8mill atm, it was closing until Microsoft did their most recent price drop and is now widening again) and it became obvious the 360 sells that many more games (around 2 - 3 times as many per user compared to the PS3). Similarly it makes business sense to release MGS4 on the 360 too because so many people would buy it so there's clearly pressure or an incentive from Sony of some kind there to prevent it.
Nintendo probably engages in it least because games for the Wii controllers aren't usually easily adaptable and they have a massively successful 1st party lineup anyway. To suggest it's something only Microsoft is guilty of however simply stinks of nothing but jealousy, particularly as the practice of pressuring exclusive games and content clearly isn't unique to Microsoft.
Not to overload you with the level of idiocy these types of places can bring through fear of union action but you'll probably appreciate the story I'm about to tell you or simply lose the will to live once you find out how bad some people actually are at managing.
I used to work in local government over here in the UK. We had one guy who simply didn't turn up to work for 6months claiming he was ill yet never managing to provide a doctors note for anything other than the first month of sickness abscence. Sickness benefits are rather good in UK public sector in that you get up to 6 months sick leave on full pay followed by upto 6months on half pay and nothing after that.
Still, management in the UK public sector hates to let you down with the levels of idiocy it can reach to and one might think simply letting him get away with it for 6 months was bad enough. But no, that level of incompetence just wasn't quite enough for them, they had to go an impressive step further, at the end of his 6 months on full pay they decided to launch and investigation into his sickness abscence and in doing so suspend him on full pay for the length of the investigation. Unfortunately management weren't quite content that they'd yet reached a level of incompetence whereby you just have to laugh it off because there is no explanation for it and so just to top it all off they managed to make the investigation last a year.
So yeah, this guy basically got paid his full wage (£35k a year, or around $70,000 US at the time) for 18 whole months without doing even a minute of work.
In a way I'm not sure whether to look up to this guy because that's a pretty impressive feat to be fair on him or whether to simply cry at the level of hopelessness public sector management runs at.
Oh and did I mention at the end of the investigation rather than sacking him they managed to convince him to resign so he could go find some other schmuck that didn't check sickness abscence records and where he wouldn't have to explain that he was sacked from his previous role? Did I also mention that during his period of "sickness" he was seen shopping with family on numerous occasions and bumped into whilst he was enjoying a holiday in Spain by a colleague?
By the end of my time in local government there was only one word in which I could think to describe the UK public sector and that word is "special".
Even the effects you mention can be used to distort reality though. What about a slight change to bring the colours out a little more in a photo of somewhere trying to get more tourism? What about improving the image of say, Sarah Palin resulting in her perhaps looking a little more attractive and blemish free than she really is- there are people silly enough to vote for a candidate based on how attractive they are.
Even the slightest changes can have real knock on effects as irrelevant yet still as tangible as the more obvious yet still relatively pointless changes in this photo.
Whoever submitted the photo probably didn't even realise it was doctored or simply didn't think it mattered because it wasn't something that'd really affect anything. They probably thought it simply looked better than the one you linked to and just submitted that one. Certainly I think it'd be hard to suggest there was any underlying plan in submitting this photo over any other. A more sensible action would probably have been to pull the photo, get another and get the DoD to issue an apology or simply issue a letter themselves letting people know why they pulled the earlier photo. Suspending them just stinkks of attention seeking behaviour, trying to make a story where there isn't one.
But I think it's AP that are being rather pathetic on this one.
Such a mountain is being made out of a molehill with this story. Certainly if it was like the most recent Israel/Lebanon war where Reuters and co. had been daft enough to fall for doctored photos of Lebanon to make it look like the damage was worse than it was it'd be one thing but here we're talking about a picture of a member of the US military having her picture changed from standing in front of her office wall, to standing in front of a US flag. That really has absolutely no propaganda value whatsoever, I can't imagine even the most over the top patriotic American shouting "OMG SHES IN FRONT OF A US FLAG FUCK YEAH!" at the excitement of seeing the picture in question.
I'm not sure if it's AP's fault for it being blown out of proportion or whether they simply followed protocol on a hardline rule of no doctored photos no matter how harmless (although that has implications of it's own, hardly any photo is a raw image now without at least automatic alterations by cameras) or whether the fault lies at the feet of other media organisations.
When I saw this originally on the BBC the other day I have to admit it's arguably the most pointless slow-news day excuse for a story I'd seen in a while.
Apparently go to your achievements from the dashboard and find a 0 achievement game and then you should have the option to delete. There was a description of it on www.majornelson.com
I agree with you as long as when you say experience, you mean real experience, not doing the same thing over and over for 20 years because that isn't 20 years experience, that's one years experience repeated 20 times.
I'd take a 25 year old with 2 - 3 years of diverse experience over a 40 year old who has been doing the same thing since he finished uni any day.
Actually iirc it only sold about 9mill copies. The best selling FPS of all time are apparently Halo 2 on the XBox and Goldeneye on the N64 sitting at about 11 - 12mill copies. Certainly not what one would expect seeing as both these consoles are often thought of as the losers of their generations due to the enormous sales of the PS1 and PS2. That seems to be key in a way however, if your console is the loser of the generation one good game means it'll probably stand right out and everyone with that console will buy it whilst the selection of good games on a more popular console leaves you with more competition perhaps.
For some perspective, the Sims, the PC's top selling game shifted 16mill copies, that doesn't include expansions however.
But I have to admit after 30mins or so of playing around, getting used to where everything had moved to and customising it it's growing on me.
The party system is a nice touch, being able to join a group voice chat with a bunch of friends then taking that group into whatever game you all decide to play is pretty cool. You can make parties private or public with the latter allowing you to jump into an existing party on your friends list, see what they're doing and join a game they may be playing.
Community games wasn't working right for me last night, but what I saw looked decent.
There's a few minor changes people have wanted for a while such as being able to remove zero achievement games such as trials you never went on to buy or games that turned out to be crap that would previously just clutter your achievements/played games list.
The avatar thing isn't bad, although it doesn't really seem to be overly useful yet, apparently the true extent of it's usefulness is still to come. Unfortunately my first attempt at creating an avatar ended up looking like Stalin, and the second like Hitler so I think we need more customization of them, I think this came down to there being a severe lack of shorter hairstyles, apparently Microsoft think 99% of the population have pony tails or just generally long hair whether male or female. Still I did come out with an avatar that looked fairly normal at the end of it but unfortunately as my friend pointed out you can't in fact have green skin.
It's certainly more responsive, some people complaining that now only one of the theme pics you bought gets used rather than one per blade and you can't choose which. I can see why this would be annoying for anyone that paid for a theme but also I can't help but snigger to myself that they were foolish enough to spend money on a theme in the first place.
Old gamerpics can still be used contrary to popular belief, you just have to change back to them after creating your avatar.
So right now to sum up, it's certainly not groundbreaking and it definitely doesn't do anything to make the experience worse. All the useful new features are nice, but nothing that couldn't have come in with the old dashboard whilst all the not-so useful new features such as avatar makes interesting fluff at least if nothing else. Effectively I think it's an attempt to reach out to female and casual gamers with this sort of stuff and the games that will use avatars which is fair enough and it doesn't really infringe on their hardcore gamer userbase either- they will at least appreciate the party system and just jump into game without ever really using the dashboard much. So yeah, good but not in any way groundbreaking, at least yet anyhow, maybe some of the up and coming avatar related stuff will be as cool as Microsoft are telling us or maybe it simply wont. As long as they don't try and make me run round with my avatar in Gears of War 2 or whatever I'll be happy!
Originally, 3D was actually much better in terms of time requirements. It was much easier to create a 3D model and animate it than it was to draw sprites and every single animation for them frame by frame, particularly if you dared to have your character/whatever "turn around". This problem was exagerated for games like desert strike and command and conquer where things weren't straight 2D but were on a slight angle so you couldn't get away with simply rotating sprites as you could if you were looking down, you had to redraw at different angles, something that took ages to get right.
Nowadays yes, 3D does take longer but there's a simple reason for that, graphics have moved on but 2D can't moved on, it's reached it's limit, you can draw just as beautiful sprites now as you could 15 years ago, it's reached it's peak. The only changes have been in resolution and colour depth here, but these are trivial to deal with in 2D still. 3D hasn't reached it's peak, it can still look better and better.
So you're right, 3D does take longer nowadays, but that doesn't mean 2D is superior, it just means 3D has higher bounds in terms of what it can do. To me it seems rather backwards to suggest we should stick to 2D because 3D takes longer.
Besides, I prefer recent games like Gears of War 2 that look jaw dropping over things like Megaman 9 anyway. There seems little point holding gaming back just because 2D is quicker and a few people like the nostalgic value of it. Companies don't make games in 3D because of "technolust", they do it because there's demand for it.
A good CSer will realise that math underpins most of CS anyway. A good CSer will himself have a solid grounding in math.
Perhaps the issue is that you're assuming anyone good at CS is a mathematician because they make use of math and assume that anyone whose a CSer is crap because you're only classing those who don't understand the mathematical underpinnings of their subject as CS guys?
Learning AI without combinatorics, networks and graphs, cryptography without number theory and database theory without set theory to give a few examples are always going to lead to someone who may be able to just about get by in these subjects but wont be overly great at them.
Slashdot Mirror
No, I've not done any mod work with Valve engines, as mentioned in my previous post it was for a competing engine.
I've not really had much to do with Valve engines at all other than playing through their games without really playing with available mods or their mod tools bar a little bit of mapping for the original Half-Life many years ago.
"There is a very big difference between AI - which is based on guesses about how "intelligence" works, and studies of brain function."
Yes, there most certainly is. AI is a far broader topic than study of the brain for starters, it extends to the study of swarm intelligence and emergent properties in evolution for example. The field of AI generally uses nature as inspiration and builds useful techniques from there. The human brain is but one of these items that has been studied for inspiration and has led to the idea of neural networks which in no way aim to recreate the brain, but simply mimic parts of it that we understand to perform certain tasks.
"I'm going to make a totally unjustified sweeping generalisation and suggest that one reason that AI has generally been a failure is because we have had quite wrong ideas about how the brain actually works."
It'd be a start if you even got as far as your generalisation before being rather wrong. The premise that AI has been a failure is a stumbling block in your argument before you even reach the reason why you believe it's been a failure. Suggesting AI has been a failure is akin to suggesting physics has been a failure because they haven't yet nailed down that elusive grand unified theory of everything. The fruits of AI research are used in everything from search engines to spelling/grammar checks, to voice recognition, to expert systems for medical and mechanical fault diagnosis, to optimisation of vehicle design, to convincing computer game opponents, to intelligent and fault tolerant network and telecomms routing. The results of AI research are far reaching and extend throughout nearly all areas of computing and are used by us daily without us even realising it. To me that is far from a failure, unless again you define failure as not reaching your absolute end goal as per my physics example.
Again, the brain is only a small part of AI research and neural networks have been quite good for pattern recognition so it's hard to argue that the parts of AI that are relevant to study of the brain have been a failure, let alone the subject as a whole.
"So my feeling is that the first people really to get anywhere with AI will either work for Google or be the neurobiologists who finally crack what is actually going on in there."
Google already has many good AI practitioners because AI research covers so many areas as stated above, many of which are relevant to their business- AI is extremely useful in data mining for example. That said, I'm not sure why Google's AI practitioners would be anymore likely to produce strong intelligence, which is what I assume you're after, than any other AI practitioners. I'd say these guys will have a good head start for example:
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/science/nature/7740484.stm
"If I wasn't close to retirement, and wanted to build a career in AI, I'd be looking at how mapreduce works, and the work being done building on that, rather than robotics. I'd also be looking as seriously parallel processing."
Robotics huh? Where did that come from? Are you suggesting all of AI is related to robotics? Your starting points are not those that I would recommend to someone who is truly interested in advancing AI research and knowledge.
The future of AI is undoubtedly going to be in higher performance computers, modern systems simply can't process as efficiently as natural systems such as the brain so we certainly need advances there. Parallel processing is somewhat of an option but I'd argue it's only somewhat of a bandaid fix. Quantum computing and biological computers are the best bet, I'm personally placing my money on biological computers because I don't think we'll end up producing strong AI on the types of computers we have sat on our desks or even super computers- I think we'll likely just end up learning how to program physical perhaps man-made brains themselves.
Are they legally allowed to do this if Half-Life is still for sale and as Half-Life: Source exists?
When we built a port of the original Teamfortress Valve came to us and made it quite clear we can't use the same set of weapons, names for classes and so forth because that would infringe on their IP even though all our assets and code were built by us from scratch. This was admittedly for a different, competing engine to Valve so I suppose it's slightly different and looking back I can imagine thus Valve probably weren't completely honest about what we could legally do.
I'm suprised Valve are willing to allow this if it will risk the admittedly small sales of Half-Life they may still get or do they feel this will instead increase sales of newer source engine games?
Of course the other question is how is this any different from Half-Life source?
Still I don't want to detract too much from the achievement this is. Releasing a mod of this scale can truly be a time consuming task that requires a lot of effort and discipline and I have to congratulate them on reaching this point. I truly hope Valve don't waste their time with a last minute cease and desist!
I was going to point out how ignorant it was of you to just suggest anyone that anyone who disagrees with you is "vicious and ignorant" but it's undoubtedly pointless if your attitude is to rather ignorantly pre-emptively label and dismiss anyone who has a different viewpoint to you in this manner.
I do however have a question, you seem to accept climate change exists, but is instead something that exists as part of a natural cycle. My question is therefore if you believe it occurs why do you feel it's not possible that climate change is relevant to this discussion? How can you be so sure that a change in climate isn't a cause in this? Do you have some evidence we don't? Why is it that you seem to feel that this couldn't be a result of natural (as opposed to man-made) climate change?
Certainly at least to dismiss something perfectly within the realm of possibility without exploring it is absolutely not a valid scientific approach. That way of thinking belongs much more strongly in the mindset of the very creationists talked down in your quote.
What is it that you're so afraid of that you don't even want this perfectly plausible idea to be considered?
I'm assuming by this country you mean the US in which case you may or may not be right, but living in England I thought it can't happen here too.
I was wrong. A recent case about a guy (Max Mosley) having an S&M orgy with 4 prostitutes was published by the Daily Mail, the Daily Mail also said the orgy had a nazi theme to it, this was demonstrated to be a false in court. Similarly, the court ruled that the Daily Mail had breached his privacy rights, all well and good, I thought great, common sense prevailed.
But then just the other week the editor of the Daily Mail was giving a speach at some conference and made the suggestion that the court ruling had effectively snuck in a privacy law via the back door and he then suggested that papers should have the right to invade people's privacy like this because they are the moral guardians of society (no really, he said it almost exactly in those words).
That bothered me greatly, the best selling paper in the UK iirc is run by someone who thinks he has the right to invade any part of anyones lives and expose it on the front page of his paper for millions of people to see if he feels the need.
That's why privacy is important, not just for the scenario you state- that of the religious right taking control of a country but because members of the press and no doubt people in many other influential positions seem to already believe that they have the right to be the moral guardians of a country. It would've perhaps been less of an issue if it weren't for the fact the daily mail even lied about the theme of the situation to try and make it look worse.
So to the person you respond to who doesn't care about privacy, perhaps we should be asking- how would you not only like photos of you in the bedroom exposed to millions of people, but exposed out of context with the suggestions for example that the person you're having sex with is underage for example? How would you feel about losing your job over it? How would you feel about being slagged off and shunned in public for it? As demonstrated by the Max Mosley case, it really can happen.
The loss of privacy is a slippery slope, if we give it up and lose it we're all f*cked. It's one of the pillars of freedom- lose privacy and freedom will shortly fall too, again, many events in history exist as evidence of this.
To be fair, it's not like when the US reports these attacks to China/Russia they do anything about them to suggest you might be right though.
It's the same with the whole Litvinenko thing here in the UK, we know where the Polonium came from (a Russian lab) we even pretty much know Lugovoi did it but as they wont help whatsoever to put him to trial and have instead put him into their parliament in a position of power it's kind of hard to give them the benefit of the doubt.
Maybe if they actually helped bring these perpetrators to justice we could give them the benefit of the doubt as you suggest, but when they instead protect the almost certainly guilt with no real trial or investigation then it only adds to the idea that the governments of these nations themselves are in fact responsible.
If a bunch of Canadians crossed the US border and attacked the US and then made it back to Canada safely and the Canadian government did nothing about it or even went as far as giving these people places in government as per the Luogovoi/Litvinenko affair then yeah I think most people would still say the Canadian government deserves a lot of the blame.
Don't get me wrong however, I do feel these "cyber attacks" are a little overstated, I hate to say it but it's becoming so common when I read about them I can't help but think "Who cares, stop moaning and either return the favour or learn from it and stop it happening again". As is pointed out here on Slashdot often though, they don't seem to learn from their mistakes and instead simply repeat them over and over. I'm not sure what the US government is trying to achieve with these cries? Trying to make us hate Russia/China? Don't worry their human rights record means a lot of us already do. Trying to get sympathy? Well what for? You're the military, you're the ones who are meant to be dealing with it and so on.
Or in other words, to put it simply- they're all just as bad as each other.
That makes sense, it did seem a bit odd to me that he'd move full time.
The amount of research materials he must have at Cambridge and the relationship with other physicists and mathematicians there is a lot to throw away as well as being so close to CERN over in Switzerland. To throw all that away would undoubtedly set his research back a few years and I'm sure he's aware at his age and in his condition he probably realises he doesn't have even a single year to just throw away wastefully.
Sure stuff like his research materials could be moved over, he could visit CERN and his colleagues but it's still going to be nowhere near as productive as sticking with the environment he knows and has managed to work in so well all these years.
"Essentially, Bridges explained, he thinks that the dominance of giant publishers like EA and their general reliance on physical, in-the-box, units, can't hold up. Instead, he said, new tools, ubiquitous broadband and hungry independent developers are going to all combine to eat away at the continued supremacy of the $60 big-name title. And that could spell big trouble for the industry."
That doesn't make any sense, independent game developers are still part of the industry, so if there is simply a rebalancing of cash flow from the big companies to the indies the industry hasn't been harmed in the slightest, it's dynamic has simply changed.
EA and co. could completely die and the industry wouldn't be harmed if more games were being sold by indies at lower prices to make up the same level of profits.
Yes, unfortunately those places aren't the other half of the country where our connections outright suck and BT refuses to do anything about it.
Inner city slums full of chavs wanting to browse the latest video of their mates beating up some granny in the street get far better connections for doing this than better off, semi-rural to rural locations with people who are better off because they work hard or have done well for themselves through entrepeneurial spirit, people who actually contribute to the economy.
I'm not generalising here and saying everyone with good connections all live in slums or anything, nor am I saying all people in nice rural areas have necessarily worked hard. I'm also not saying people who just want to use YouTube shouldn't have better connections than those who do things that benefit the country. What I am saying however is that the broadband disparity does actually lower the country's potential and it's a problem the government wont solve because as with their ideas for intrusive surveillance, their threatened legislation against file sharing they simply don't understand technology and the internet specifically.
Of course, even if it's not a problem for you now, can you be sure you wont move house some day and find out the location can't get more than 1mbps or perhaps can't even get broadband at all? I think everyone accepts some areas get great broadband connections- most of London, central Birmingham, Manchester and places like that. The problem is the crappy connections exist everywhere else and something needs to be done about it, just as Britain was slow about adopting broadband in the first placing leaving it years behind we're finding ourselves in the same situation with next generation broadband. The UKs internet infrastructure is an abysmal joke.
Ask them for more data. Say you're willing to help track down the offender but need more information to do so such as logs of how much data was transferred from their honeypot and between what times to help you search logs. Ask for a full list of filenames that were being shared, the username they were connected with, the ports they were communicating via etc. etc.
Put the ball in their court, put the burden on them to demonstrate that such an event occured. Call their bluff by offering to be helpful but requesting more information.
Some have pointed out here that companies are responsible for what users do on their network, but the flip side of it is companies can also stand up to legal bullying better than individuals and thus far the cases put forward by the RIAA etc. aren't holding up well in court. The ESA will have to have a pretty strong case to stand any chance in court and if they can't/wont provide the above information they wont win in court either.
An IP address and a time is not suitable evidence of copyright infringement. If they don't have any more evidence then they don't have a case, if they can provide it then you simply need to comply. Using a company network for P2P is stupid anyway so whilst I'd love to see the ESA lose for these kind of tactics, if they have taken the effort to get suitable evidence and if a user really is using P2P at work then I'm a little more sympathetic to them. Don't be like the RIAA yourself however and assume guilt on behalf of your users based on worthless evidence- get more from them.
One thing I've not understood so far is why aircraft aren't involved more. Wouldn't a carrier with jets be enough to respond to distress calls before the pirates can get too close? According to BBC articles, ships passing through the area know the pirates are coming as they keep constant lookout it's just that the world's navies can't sail to them fast enough by the time pirates are in sight but again, surely jets could? I would think Harriers would be perfect for this task.
Is it the cost of flying constant air sorties that's the problem? I'd have thought even some helicopter carriers with gunships on board would be a better bet than trying to do it all with boats.
Alternatively perhaps a nuclear submarine or two off the major ports sinking the odd one or two out the blue would act as a nice deterrent :)
Far from it, from what I've seen in the news at least Australia has unfortunately largely been down the same path as the US since 9/11.
It's a shame because for many of us Brits it's the dream place to visit and migrate to. Beautiful weather and scenery, lovely people with a shared history. Even their national heroes are better, we have neanderthalic retards like David Beckham and they had the awesomeness that was Steve Irwin. Unfortunately though until it's political parties sort their game out I wont even visit let alone consider moving.
No doubt their government will continue to whine and moan about shortages of people specialised in various professions though and sit wondering why people aren't filling them, one of them being IT professionals. Have a look here to see how desperate they are for IT pros:
http://www.immi.gov.au/skilled/general-skilled-migration/skilled-occupations/occupations-in-demand.htm
Maybe if their government was planing a forward thinking nation technologically and that was hence attractive to IT professionals they'd actually be able to fill some of these shortages. Unfortunately they seem to have taken a leaf from the US and British book where it's all about over the top government control.
I can think of few scenarios where 3D isn't going to be better but the issue is a lot of 3D games simply have bad implementations.
Whilst some games are far better in 3D as the summary suggests- FPS, RTS again as the summary mentions, some not so. For me platformers spring to mind here, a lot of platformers that went 3D absolutely suck- Sonic the hedgehog in 3D was never any good imo for example. There are however some that work well, there are those that went third person succesfully such as Mario 64 and franchises that started in 3D such as Tomb Raider also. Here's my point however, I'm not saying we get rid of 2D style perspectives such as your side platformers, your top down games and so forth but I am saying that even these are better in 3D- games like Cloning Clyde, Little Big Planet for example.
Again going back to RTS, it's much easier to have tanks flip over when they're blown up or helicopters fall out the sky reasonably in a 3D engine. My favourite RTS ever, Command and Conquer wasn't 3D and I liked it's sequels less but I believe it was poor game design not a question of 2D vs. 3D as one of my other favourites, Warcraft, only got better when it went 3D.
It's simply down to fluidity of animation, primarily, you can have things turn as you see fit without having to draw a sprite for every angle. You could have things look good in 2D by spending many many hours drawing millions of frames, but then you almost certainly wouldn't have convincing shadows or lighting still for things such as RTS.
3D in itself is much better and has much more potential than 2D, the question is whether game designers can adapt to it and use it to it's potential. We already know the answer to that somewhat- some can and some can't but just as we had good and bad 2D games we have good and bad 3D games. There is no fundamental reason why 3D has to be worse, only poor implementation- again something that can happen with 2D but that we often forget because we only remember the good 2D games as the bad fall from our memories and this is why so many people have such a rose tinted view of 2D.
"I don't understand why someone would wish to draw a line between animal and human for ethical reasons, when it would be treated the same due to it being mentally incapable of anything else."
Is that fact though? Do we really know what their mental capabilities were? is there any reason they most definitely wouldn't be able to learn an awful lot of the things a normal Homo sapien child does?
What if we cloned the DNA of our own species from a body from the same era? Have humans really changed that much? I was under the impression the outright majority of whats changed between then and now is simply what is inherited, not physically at conception but socially as we're brought up by our parents and at school.
That's an illogical statement. Microsoft effectively funded the creation of the content. This is no different to Sony using their large share in Square Enix to hold back the release of FFXIII on the 360. Square only changed their mind on this as the gap between the PS3 and 360 stopped shrinking (that gap is stuck at around 8mill atm, it was closing until Microsoft did their most recent price drop and is now widening again) and it became obvious the 360 sells that many more games (around 2 - 3 times as many per user compared to the PS3). Similarly it makes business sense to release MGS4 on the 360 too because so many people would buy it so there's clearly pressure or an incentive from Sony of some kind there to prevent it.
Nintendo probably engages in it least because games for the Wii controllers aren't usually easily adaptable and they have a massively successful 1st party lineup anyway. To suggest it's something only Microsoft is guilty of however simply stinks of nothing but jealousy, particularly as the practice of pressuring exclusive games and content clearly isn't unique to Microsoft.
I don't care about MGS4. It's pathedic that they made it only for the PS3 and not the 360.
Oh wait, I do care and I do want, that's why I made this post.
If you wanted the GTA4 DLC you should've got a 360, just as when the craving for MGS4 becomes too much I shall purchase a PS3.
Not to overload you with the level of idiocy these types of places can bring through fear of union action but you'll probably appreciate the story I'm about to tell you or simply lose the will to live once you find out how bad some people actually are at managing.
I used to work in local government over here in the UK. We had one guy who simply didn't turn up to work for 6months claiming he was ill yet never managing to provide a doctors note for anything other than the first month of sickness abscence. Sickness benefits are rather good in UK public sector in that you get up to 6 months sick leave on full pay followed by upto 6months on half pay and nothing after that.
Still, management in the UK public sector hates to let you down with the levels of idiocy it can reach to and one might think simply letting him get away with it for 6 months was bad enough. But no, that level of incompetence just wasn't quite enough for them, they had to go an impressive step further, at the end of his 6 months on full pay they decided to launch and investigation into his sickness abscence and in doing so suspend him on full pay for the length of the investigation. Unfortunately management weren't quite content that they'd yet reached a level of incompetence whereby you just have to laugh it off because there is no explanation for it and so just to top it all off they managed to make the investigation last a year.
So yeah, this guy basically got paid his full wage (£35k a year, or around $70,000 US at the time) for 18 whole months without doing even a minute of work.
In a way I'm not sure whether to look up to this guy because that's a pretty impressive feat to be fair on him or whether to simply cry at the level of hopelessness public sector management runs at.
Oh and did I mention at the end of the investigation rather than sacking him they managed to convince him to resign so he could go find some other schmuck that didn't check sickness abscence records and where he wouldn't have to explain that he was sacked from his previous role? Did I also mention that during his period of "sickness" he was seen shopping with family on numerous occasions and bumped into whilst he was enjoying a holiday in Spain by a colleague?
By the end of my time in local government there was only one word in which I could think to describe the UK public sector and that word is "special".
Even the effects you mention can be used to distort reality though. What about a slight change to bring the colours out a little more in a photo of somewhere trying to get more tourism? What about improving the image of say, Sarah Palin resulting in her perhaps looking a little more attractive and blemish free than she really is- there are people silly enough to vote for a candidate based on how attractive they are.
Even the slightest changes can have real knock on effects as irrelevant yet still as tangible as the more obvious yet still relatively pointless changes in this photo.
Whoever submitted the photo probably didn't even realise it was doctored or simply didn't think it mattered because it wasn't something that'd really affect anything. They probably thought it simply looked better than the one you linked to and just submitted that one. Certainly I think it'd be hard to suggest there was any underlying plan in submitting this photo over any other. A more sensible action would probably have been to pull the photo, get another and get the DoD to issue an apology or simply issue a letter themselves letting people know why they pulled the earlier photo. Suspending them just stinkks of attention seeking behaviour, trying to make a story where there isn't one.
But I think it's AP that are being rather pathetic on this one.
Such a mountain is being made out of a molehill with this story. Certainly if it was like the most recent Israel/Lebanon war where Reuters and co. had been daft enough to fall for doctored photos of Lebanon to make it look like the damage was worse than it was it'd be one thing but here we're talking about a picture of a member of the US military having her picture changed from standing in front of her office wall, to standing in front of a US flag. That really has absolutely no propaganda value whatsoever, I can't imagine even the most over the top patriotic American shouting "OMG SHES IN FRONT OF A US FLAG FUCK YEAH!" at the excitement of seeing the picture in question.
I'm not sure if it's AP's fault for it being blown out of proportion or whether they simply followed protocol on a hardline rule of no doctored photos no matter how harmless (although that has implications of it's own, hardly any photo is a raw image now without at least automatic alterations by cameras) or whether the fault lies at the feet of other media organisations.
When I saw this originally on the BBC the other day I have to admit it's arguably the most pointless slow-news day excuse for a story I'd seen in a while.
Apparently go to your achievements from the dashboard and find a 0 achievement game and then you should have the option to delete. There was a description of it on www.majornelson.com
I agree with you as long as when you say experience, you mean real experience, not doing the same thing over and over for 20 years because that isn't 20 years experience, that's one years experience repeated 20 times.
I'd take a 25 year old with 2 - 3 years of diverse experience over a 40 year old who has been doing the same thing since he finished uni any day.
Actually iirc it only sold about 9mill copies. The best selling FPS of all time are apparently Halo 2 on the XBox and Goldeneye on the N64 sitting at about 11 - 12mill copies. Certainly not what one would expect seeing as both these consoles are often thought of as the losers of their generations due to the enormous sales of the PS1 and PS2. That seems to be key in a way however, if your console is the loser of the generation one good game means it'll probably stand right out and everyone with that console will buy it whilst the selection of good games on a more popular console leaves you with more competition perhaps.
For some perspective, the Sims, the PC's top selling game shifted 16mill copies, that doesn't include expansions however.
But I have to admit after 30mins or so of playing around, getting used to where everything had moved to and customising it it's growing on me.
The party system is a nice touch, being able to join a group voice chat with a bunch of friends then taking that group into whatever game you all decide to play is pretty cool. You can make parties private or public with the latter allowing you to jump into an existing party on your friends list, see what they're doing and join a game they may be playing.
Community games wasn't working right for me last night, but what I saw looked decent.
There's a few minor changes people have wanted for a while such as being able to remove zero achievement games such as trials you never went on to buy or games that turned out to be crap that would previously just clutter your achievements/played games list.
The avatar thing isn't bad, although it doesn't really seem to be overly useful yet, apparently the true extent of it's usefulness is still to come. Unfortunately my first attempt at creating an avatar ended up looking like Stalin, and the second like Hitler so I think we need more customization of them, I think this came down to there being a severe lack of shorter hairstyles, apparently Microsoft think 99% of the population have pony tails or just generally long hair whether male or female. Still I did come out with an avatar that looked fairly normal at the end of it but unfortunately as my friend pointed out you can't in fact have green skin.
It's certainly more responsive, some people complaining that now only one of the theme pics you bought gets used rather than one per blade and you can't choose which. I can see why this would be annoying for anyone that paid for a theme but also I can't help but snigger to myself that they were foolish enough to spend money on a theme in the first place.
Old gamerpics can still be used contrary to popular belief, you just have to change back to them after creating your avatar.
So right now to sum up, it's certainly not groundbreaking and it definitely doesn't do anything to make the experience worse. All the useful new features are nice, but nothing that couldn't have come in with the old dashboard whilst all the not-so useful new features such as avatar makes interesting fluff at least if nothing else. Effectively I think it's an attempt to reach out to female and casual gamers with this sort of stuff and the games that will use avatars which is fair enough and it doesn't really infringe on their hardcore gamer userbase either- they will at least appreciate the party system and just jump into game without ever really using the dashboard much. So yeah, good but not in any way groundbreaking, at least yet anyhow, maybe some of the up and coming avatar related stuff will be as cool as Microsoft are telling us or maybe it simply wont. As long as they don't try and make me run round with my avatar in Gears of War 2 or whatever I'll be happy!
You're partly right and partly wrong.
Originally, 3D was actually much better in terms of time requirements. It was much easier to create a 3D model and animate it than it was to draw sprites and every single animation for them frame by frame, particularly if you dared to have your character/whatever "turn around". This problem was exagerated for games like desert strike and command and conquer where things weren't straight 2D but were on a slight angle so you couldn't get away with simply rotating sprites as you could if you were looking down, you had to redraw at different angles, something that took ages to get right.
Nowadays yes, 3D does take longer but there's a simple reason for that, graphics have moved on but 2D can't moved on, it's reached it's limit, you can draw just as beautiful sprites now as you could 15 years ago, it's reached it's peak. The only changes have been in resolution and colour depth here, but these are trivial to deal with in 2D still. 3D hasn't reached it's peak, it can still look better and better.
So you're right, 3D does take longer nowadays, but that doesn't mean 2D is superior, it just means 3D has higher bounds in terms of what it can do. To me it seems rather backwards to suggest we should stick to 2D because 3D takes longer.
Besides, I prefer recent games like Gears of War 2 that look jaw dropping over things like Megaman 9 anyway. There seems little point holding gaming back just because 2D is quicker and a few people like the nostalgic value of it. Companies don't make games in 3D because of "technolust", they do it because there's demand for it.
A good CSer will realise that math underpins most of CS anyway. A good CSer will himself have a solid grounding in math.
Perhaps the issue is that you're assuming anyone good at CS is a mathematician because they make use of math and assume that anyone whose a CSer is crap because you're only classing those who don't understand the mathematical underpinnings of their subject as CS guys?
Learning AI without combinatorics, networks and graphs, cryptography without number theory and database theory without set theory to give a few examples are always going to lead to someone who may be able to just about get by in these subjects but wont be overly great at them.