Small advances in programmable AI are usually pretty big steps. Those "children's toys" you're talking about were nothing more than pipe dreams 20 years ago. Anybody who has ever had to calculate an integral of a sum can tell you that little pieces add up to big things.
How many more beads do I have to string on my abacus before it becomes self-aware? Wikipedia has an interesting article about this.
Anyone who understands how computers work (at the subcomponent level; NAND gates and so forth) who posits that someday these binary abacuses will ever "think" or be "self-aware" is a fraud.
The description sounds like only a notch above children's toys today.
I wish someone would define "intelligent" here, because this thing doesn't fit the dictionary definition... oh wait, here it is: "4. Computers. pertaining to the ability to do data processing locally; smart: An intelligent terminal can edit input before transmission to a host computer."
I always heard them referred to "smart" terminals and "dumb" terminals, but whatever. Fram TFA (which differred remarkably from the slashdot summary) this thing can't even take, let alone pass, a turing test. One of these days I'll have to get Artificial Insanity back online; that program was good enough at passing the Turing Test it caused eqiopment failure in a friend's computer once - its attitude pissed him off so much he broke his keyboard. And that program was written in 1983 and originally ran on a 20k 1mz Timex.
Let's see your turing machine do that!
But indeed, this stupid toy is "intelligent" only in the sense that it isn't a dumb terminal. Can't say the same about the slashdot summary.
-mcgrew
PS- the download link is bad; I had Art stored at rusies.us, a site I registered for my ska-loving daughter, bt let it lapse. But the text is still there, an argument against "artificial intelligence". It is as offtopic as the fucking summary...
Actually, instead of wasting my vote on a Republicrat candidate who had the corporation's interests in mind, rather than my diameterically opposed interests, I split my vote between the Greens and teh Libertarians.
No point wasting your vote on someone who wants your favorite pastime to be illegal.
But I had no illusions that any of these candidates had a snowball in hell's chance; it is a protest vote plain and simple.
In March 2006 We got hit by two tornados in one night. They went right through my neighborhood; the big tree behind my apartment looked like Godzilla had stomped on it. Half the utility poles were gone (as were a lot of buildings). My power was out for a week, my cable and internet were out for a month, and the landlines were all out as well.
My cell phone worked, however. It also was a very handy flashlight, as there was no power AT ALL anywhere near my apartment and boy, was it dark there at night! It's been years since I've had a landline.
The rotary dial was a pain in the ass, but we never knew that until they invented pushbutton phones. And you had to look up your police/fire/ambulance in the phone book as there was no 9-1-1 service. Although most people just dialed "O" and when the lady answered (a real live human being, we didn't have voice mail either) you said "MY HOUSE IS ON FIRE" and she'd plug some plug on her switchbopard in and the fire department would come out.
But the Western Electric 500s were hackable! Some of them had no dials; businesses used the dial-less phones for where they wanted a low level employee, like the teenaged me at the ticket booth at the drive in theater, to be able to answer them but not make outgoing calls.
You could, however, "dial" them by repeatedly hitting the hangup buttons. So I was hacking your "unhackable" phone when I was 16. Actually I was cracking not hacking; I was hacking when I made guitar fuzzboxes out of $10 transistor radios and selling them for $50 each to other teenaged guitar players.
-mcgrew
PS- I've almost forgotten this, but in the Metro East St Louis area you could dial Bridge 1300 and a spooky noise cane out of the phone. The other kids said it was a ghost, I never had the heart to educate them about the reality.
And how exactly are we to police the intent of the donor?
You can't, but at least you can keep him/her/it from the bribery of "contributing" to more than one of them. And you can keep corporations and unions and the AARP from donating to ANYBODY if you have to be eligible to vote to contribute.
I don't, however, agree that limitations on the flow of money into a campaign are the be-all and end-all of solutions.
Hear hear! Douglas Adams parodied this in The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy with Marvin, the terminally depressed robot ("terminhally depressed", Adams was a fucking genius) with the pain down all the diodes in his left leg, and the doors (who have been shamelessly copied by voice mail programmers), and Eddie the shipboard computer ("Where's a pencil? I'll work it out myself").
Asimov's laws only pertain to positronic robots. As yet we still haven't discovered or invented positronics. You'll have to wait a while for Asimov's safe, obedient robot and instead make do with unsafe, obedient robots.
I have robots. My car has robotics (cruise control, temperature control), my VCR has robotics, my former boss has a robot vaccuum cleaner and a robot lawnmower. Hell, I built a robot from my erector set when I was in 6th grade (yes, I'm a nerd and no apologies for it).
The fact that South Korea has an "ethical treatment of robots" mentality and the Japanese build robots to look like us and be our pals shows me that they, not we, are the ones who "don't deserve robots."
AFAIC those who see robots for what they are - unfeeling, unthinking tools - are the ones who deserve robots. Those who anthropomorphise these creations of human diligence are the ones who don't deserve them.
-mcgrew
No animals were harmed in the creation of this comment. Except for lunch, of course.
My 4th amendment rights have been violated not once but TWICE this year alone. And I'm a 55 year old white guy, I can only imagine if I were young, black, or Hispanic!
The first one was ironically on Memorial day. I'd run across an old girlfriend, and gave her my phone number and told her where I'd moved, but asked her to wait before visiting as my daughter was in town that weekend. I got home and went to bed, daughter still out with her friends.
My daughter woke me up - "dad, there's some strange woman on the porch swing and she says she knows you." It was Chris, the old girlfriend. Her live-in BF had seen her with me and locked her out of the house (I guess he has very good reason to hate my guts).
A knock came at the back door - it was the police. Chris had scared teh elderly neighbors, banging on their door. She must have really looked the witch carrying that broom (no I am NOT making this up). I told the cops I was glad they were there and told them about Chris' being locked out. They called teh BF and gave her a ride home, but before they did they informed me that they had opened my garage and had a look around inside - on the day we commemmorate those who died defending the Constitution.
The second time I gave the wrong two ladies a ride to the wrong house. A big black SUV cut us off as we were leaving, and several very large men wearing vests with FBI, DEA and POLICE on them (the DEA guy was wearing a ski mask - in July!) accosted us, searched me, my car, and the ladies' purses before sending us on our way. No arrest, no warrant, nothing but guns and tasers. No Constitutional rights either, I guess. In the War On (some) Drugs (and the prostitutes who use them I guess), the first casualty was the Constitution.
There's plenty of room for the fairness doctrine, but that's pretty well dead, too. In the last election (or was it the one before?), the Green Party with Nader as its candidate could not possibly have won the Presidential election as it wasn't on th eballot in enough states, while the Libertarian candidate was on the ballot in 49 states.
Nader got the press, the Libertarian got nada. But that's to be expected, as the media are all corporate owned and have nothing to gain and everything to lose by us getting more than 2 "viable" parties.
No, that's not what I said at all. What I said was that cash donations are the norm NOW; bribery. You should only be able to donate to a candidate whose causes you believe in, not to entice him to change his views.
Your cash donation from another state should NOT trump my vote in my own state.
Who here wants to see a large entity with deep pockets legally infringing upon a smaller independent entity's work by blatantly stealing it and giving it away for free in order to drive them out of business?
BZZT! In my country (the US) there is no such thing as "intellectual property"; see Article 1 section 8 of the US Constitution. You are granted a limited time monopoly to distribution, NOT ownership. Copyright infringement is not stealing. I have to own something before you can steal it from me.
And another reform I'd add would be that a work has to be "affixed in tangible form" as it used to be, and "tangible form" should NOT include a hard drive.
And a business competetitor giving your works away in order to run you out of business is hardly "noncommercial".
Slashdot Mirror
Small advances in programmable AI are usually pretty big steps. Those "children's toys" you're talking about were nothing more than pipe dreams 20 years ago. Anybody who has ever had to calculate an integral of a sum can tell you that little pieces add up to big things.
How many more beads do I have to string on my abacus before it becomes self-aware? Wikipedia has an interesting article about this.
Anyone who understands how computers work (at the subcomponent level; NAND gates and so forth) who posits that someday these binary abacuses will ever "think" or be "self-aware" is a fraud.
-mcgrew
The description sounds like only a notch above children's toys today.
I wish someone would define "intelligent" here, because this thing doesn't fit the dictionary definition... oh wait, here it is: "4. Computers. pertaining to the ability to do data processing locally; smart: An intelligent terminal can edit input before transmission to a host computer."
I always heard them referred to "smart" terminals and "dumb" terminals, but whatever. Fram TFA (which differred remarkably from the slashdot summary) this thing can't even take, let alone pass, a turing test. One of these days I'll have to get Artificial Insanity back online; that program was good enough at passing the Turing Test it caused eqiopment failure in a friend's computer once - its attitude pissed him off so much he broke his keyboard. And that program was written in 1983 and originally ran on a 20k 1mz Timex.
Let's see your turing machine do that!
But indeed, this stupid toy is "intelligent" only in the sense that it isn't a dumb terminal. Can't say the same about the slashdot summary.
-mcgrew
PS- the download link is bad; I had Art stored at rusies.us, a site I registered for my ska-loving daughter, bt let it lapse. But the text is still there, an argument against "artificial intelligence". It is as offtopic as the fucking summary...
Oog? He's a youngster. I was a beta tester for DIRT.
They never did get all the bugs out...
-mcgrew
Actually, instead of wasting my vote on a Republicrat candidate who had the corporation's interests in mind, rather than my diameterically opposed interests, I split my vote between the Greens and teh Libertarians.
No point wasting your vote on someone who wants your favorite pastime to be illegal.
But I had no illusions that any of these candidates had a snowball in hell's chance; it is a protest vote plain and simple.
-mcgrew
In March 2006 We got hit by two tornados in one night. They went right through my neighborhood; the big tree behind my apartment looked like Godzilla had stomped on it. Half the utility poles were gone (as were a lot of buildings). My power was out for a week, my cable and internet were out for a month, and the landlines were all out as well.
My cell phone worked, however. It also was a very handy flashlight, as there was no power AT ALL anywhere near my apartment and boy, was it dark there at night! It's been years since I've had a landline.
-mcgrew
The rotary dial was a pain in the ass, but we never knew that until they invented pushbutton phones. And you had to look up your police/fire/ambulance in the phone book as there was no 9-1-1 service. Although most people just dialed "O" and when the lady answered (a real live human being, we didn't have voice mail either) you said "MY HOUSE IS ON FIRE" and she'd plug some plug on her switchbopard in and the fire department would come out.
But the Western Electric 500s were hackable! Some of them had no dials; businesses used the dial-less phones for where they wanted a low level employee, like the teenaged me at the ticket booth at the drive in theater, to be able to answer them but not make outgoing calls.
You could, however, "dial" them by repeatedly hitting the hangup buttons. So I was hacking your "unhackable" phone when I was 16. Actually I was cracking not hacking; I was hacking when I made guitar fuzzboxes out of $10 transistor radios and selling them for $50 each to other teenaged guitar players.
-mcgrew
PS- I've almost forgotten this, but in the Metro East St Louis area you could dial Bridge 1300 and a spooky noise cane out of the phone. The other kids said it was a ghost, I never had the heart to educate them about the reality.
Isn't Ann Droid Cowboy Neal's latest girlfriend?
Simple enough, let the IRS sort it out. If I contributed a million dollars to a candidate you can bet your farm the IRS would be after my ass!
Thanks for pointing that out, didn't realise I was doing it.
And how exactly are we to police the intent of the donor?
You can't, but at least you can keep him/her/it from the bribery of "contributing" to more than one of them. And you can keep corporations and unions and the AARP from donating to ANYBODY if you have to be eligible to vote to contribute.
I don't, however, agree that limitations on the flow of money into a campaign are the be-all and end-all of solutions.
Neither do I, it's a start though.
Hear hear! Douglas Adams parodied this in The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy with Marvin, the terminally depressed robot ("terminhally depressed", Adams was a fucking genius) with the pain down all the diodes in his left leg, and the doors (who have been shamelessly copied by voice mail programmers), and Eddie the shipboard computer ("Where's a pencil? I'll work it out myself").
News for who? Stuff that does what? IHBT?
-mcgrew
(I'm having a hard time taking this story seriously, and am wondering why I'm even trying to take it seriously. It's total bullshit.)
But do the robotic overlords run Li... OW! OW OK!
In soviet OW STOP IT
Imagine a beowoURK GURGLE
*thump*
Would you rather have your house cleaned by some cold, metal machine, or by some sexy, 20 year old, Russian girl?
I would rather have my house cleaned by a humanoid robot with the visage of a sexy 30 year old woman, who being a robot would do what I told it to do.
I want a female Jander Pannell. No more having to cook, no more having to clean, no more crack whores ripping me off...
-mcgrew
Asimov's laws only pertain to positronic robots. As yet we still haven't discovered or invented positronics. You'll have to wait a while for Asimov's safe, obedient robot and instead make do with unsafe, obedient robots.
Gore's not a robot. Whoever heard of a stiff, nonmoveabile robot? he's a statue!
Deserve?
I have robots. My car has robotics (cruise control, temperature control), my VCR has robotics, my former boss has a robot vaccuum cleaner and a robot lawnmower. Hell, I built a robot from my erector set when I was in 6th grade (yes, I'm a nerd and no apologies for it).
The fact that South Korea has an "ethical treatment of robots" mentality and the Japanese build robots to look like us and be our pals shows me that they, not we, are the ones who "don't deserve robots."
AFAIC those who see robots for what they are - unfeeling, unthinking tools - are the ones who deserve robots. Those who anthropomorphise these creations of human diligence are the ones who don't deserve them.
-mcgrew
No animals were harmed in the creation of this comment. Except for lunch, of course.
constitutional ban on unreasonable searches
My 4th amendment rights have been violated not once but TWICE this year alone. And I'm a 55 year old white guy, I can only imagine if I were young, black, or Hispanic!
The first one was ironically on Memorial day. I'd run across an old girlfriend, and gave her my phone number and told her where I'd moved, but asked her to wait before visiting as my daughter was in town that weekend. I got home and went to bed, daughter still out with her friends.
My daughter woke me up - "dad, there's some strange woman on the porch swing and she says she knows you." It was Chris, the old girlfriend. Her live-in BF had seen her with me and locked her out of the house (I guess he has very good reason to hate my guts).
A knock came at the back door - it was the police. Chris had scared teh elderly neighbors, banging on their door. She must have really looked the witch carrying that broom (no I am NOT making this up). I told the cops I was glad they were there and told them about Chris' being locked out. They called teh BF and gave her a ride home, but before they did they informed me that they had opened my garage and had a look around inside - on the day we commemmorate those who died defending the Constitution.
The second time I gave the wrong two ladies a ride to the wrong house. A big black SUV cut us off as we were leaving, and several very large men wearing vests with FBI, DEA and POLICE on them (the DEA guy was wearing a ski mask - in July!) accosted us, searched me, my car, and the ladies' purses before sending us on our way. No arrest, no warrant, nothing but guns and tasers. No Constitutional rights either, I guess. In the War On (some) Drugs (and the prostitutes who use them I guess), the first casualty was the Constitution.
Liberty? What liberty?
-mcgrew
I wouldn't argue against that, but it's even less likely than my impossible reforms to ever happen.
Dude... YHBT. As a recovering biter I would like to invite you to join Biters Anonymous.
You don't HAVE to bite the trolls' trolls.
-mcgrew
Last time I checked
You checked? I call bullshit.
SENATOR John McCain can make laws that _I_ have to live under, no matter what state I reside in. Why am I not allowed to vote for him?
Because he is supposed to represent ARIZONA, not Illinois.
There's plenty of room for the fairness doctrine, but that's pretty well dead, too. In the last election (or was it the one before?), the Green Party with Nader as its candidate could not possibly have won the Presidential election as it wasn't on th eballot in enough states, while the Libertarian candidate was on the ballot in 49 states.
Nader got the press, the Libertarian got nada. But that's to be expected, as the media are all corporate owned and have nothing to gain and everything to lose by us getting more than 2 "viable" parties.
We have the best government money can buy.
No, that's not what I said at all. What I said was that cash donations are the norm NOW; bribery. You should only be able to donate to a candidate whose causes you believe in, not to entice him to change his views.
Your cash donation from another state should NOT trump my vote in my own state.
Who here wants to see a large entity with deep pockets legally infringing upon a smaller independent entity's work by blatantly stealing it and giving it away for free in order to drive them out of business?
BZZT! In my country (the US) there is no such thing as "intellectual property"; see Article 1 section 8 of the US Constitution. You are granted a limited time monopoly to distribution, NOT ownership. Copyright infringement is not stealing. I have to own something before you can steal it from me.
And another reform I'd add would be that a work has to be "affixed in tangible form" as it used to be, and "tangible form" should NOT include a hard drive.
And a business competetitor giving your works away in order to run you out of business is hardly "noncommercial".
In the US, that's codified by statute. A recording is, by law, a "work for hire".