"Besides, this is a class action lawsuit by lawyers hoping to hit the lawsuit lottery."
I guess I am getting a bit lost at the judgement of some of the lawyers in these various stories. So who in the Louisiana Sheriff's... Fund decided it was a good idea to sue... IBM?!
Isn't IBM going to do a lawyer version of a Tombstone Piledriver on their head for dragging them into MemeSpace?
Forget the Viral Cats. It's Viral News I can't understand properly these days!
To me this is a new wrinkle in the Linux discussion. We've been seeing uBuntu's "slide towards the Dark Side". A city running its own distro built at least partially from scratch (with German Engineers! Ha! Take that!) can potentially have a super clean codebase with none of the bloated and/or dangerous commercial cruft.
To my layman's eyes, Linux has been suffering from a bit of "X distro is/once was good and is slowly dying from lack of funds or internal politics". But a City has its own different motivation - it needs to Get Stuff Done with people mostly properly trained, vs the whole End User struggle for commercial distros.
So what if we can tap into their work and use it ourselves? Could they provide us with a distro with the full power of a city distro with (hopefully!) no hidden agendas, backed by their level of tech support they use themselves? That could be a new go-stone in the OS Wars.
Since the Germans are probably as upset as anyone else at the NSA, isn't that sorta "pitting them in a cage match vs the NSA spy-hackers"? If you had to put a bet on the NSA attacker vs the German Defender, which way would you go?
"Because what happens is a site says: either allow my cookies or I will not, or not fully, serve you. And because the average user..."
It's worse than that.
I'm somewhere in the middle of the pack. My "user side" skills are certainly a step above newbie. But when the "cookies and friends" are mashed into the loading process for a site from twelve component domains, you can't always just blindly turn them off either! Monster.com comes to mind... there are others.
So then if you're clever sometimes you can custom select which cookies to allow, but already that's losing the war. "I don't think I can stop them all..." - Magneto from X-Men movie 1.
The best I can hope to do is slow the tsunami down into a slow roar. : (
Hallo Ikanreed, I have to smash a couple of your notes together...
by i kan reed (749298) Alter Relationship on 10:11 AM November 21st, 2013 (#45481327) Homepage Journal
I really do hope we're past the point that any major governments are populated with people that view AIDS as a "gay plague", because otherwise, I can easily see petty local leaders using this research to arrest sick people and charge them with murder.... "Yeah, I know that. ((Editorial... To knowingly infect another person with HIV))... But unknowingly doing so can still be a target for the bigots out there."
Let's stop there.
I'll say this in my best PG-13 form. TSA has made us... terrified... that five ounces of baby milk are a hazard risk. But... millions of people... can (slowly!) end your life... in thirty minutes.
This is one of the best examples that "divisions are separated". "Someone" (who deserved their paycheck!?) managed to separate 5OunceApplejuiceBearing terrorists, from the EndYourLifeIn30Min... non-tracked entities.
So now this... is... news. Oh to be sure, parts of it were lingering. But because it's now News, it's Official.
"But is there really any difference between having free will and appearing to have free will? Or, put another way, is there really any difference between the illusion of free will and free will? Is "free will" even a clearly defined concept? Some philosophers think not."
I think I am in the camp of something like "Whether anyone has free will or not for religious reasons, let's assume free will, then does an AI have free will? Yes."
In the many millions of funds I don't have, I believe that all thoughts are model-able. You might not get the original creative spark, but once the thought is known, it is model-able.
What we think of "free will" is some mix of heuristics "plus a beer". I'll repeat my private mini theory that we're racially terrified of true AI because that will forever change what we do with ourselves vs machines.
Taking a simple act that can work for both people and AI, "Do I GetData or Do I Get IntangibleHealingBenefit"? For that second one, the human goes to sleep and the AI DeFrags/Prunes/Optimizes its KnowledgeBase. Both "Feel/CanBeMadeToSimulateFeeling" the struggle between data and systems management.
Whatever the heuristics are between the "beings", the act of decision is the same. And that's why it's not a magical "human right of free will". AI Free Will is a snap. We're just desperately afraid of it. See T2, "If the wrong heuristic gets in there..." - well that's what sociopathic killers are. Humans running a badly flawed HumanOS.
"Wouldn't the presence of self-awareness be a prerequisite, so just about every device should fail, before even getting to the actual test?"
I'll reply to you.
I think I just decided that Siri is what a Loebner Prize contest bot would look like "if it was developed for real with some money behind it." http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Loebner_contest
In that contest, they "waste time" trying to trick the bots with edge case questions. For Siri, you know it's a bot, but you ask "is this answer useful". To me that is the spirit/next-gen spirit of the Turing Test. "Is this answer as useful as a person? Better?"
Now, to Self Awareness. It's not all that hard to put in a meta module where the machine "knows" about itself. It could have its specs, but also more general statements like "I'm not so good on long sentences."
Sometimes those kinds of statements "aren't as hard as we pretend they are to feel superior". As a college kid will tell you if you give him a beer for his time, about the same 100 questions show up in intermixing sets of 12. But once you know "who you are" (and what you "don't know"), then it kinda reduces down until new experience changes some of the answers.
For this reason, I considered the old Pentium I chip an extremely important tool for "AI" that I have never seen used in a special way. Because as far as I know, it was the only chip commercially famous (not a limited edition or knockoff) that had provable logic errors.
Crunch. Logic Errors are the "unfortunate hallmark of being human". So we developed all these "social skills" to maneuver around the errors. Systems design, to just getting sleep.
So if you used a P1 chip for AI, then gave it a module to "be aware that it was flawed", when it "tried to do its duty" it could do checks and inform the user "I am sorry, but that requested process will likely trigger my logic failed circuit. Do you still want to do that or find some other solution?"
Hallo. I'll reply to you because you're far enough on the discussion.
"Never attribute to Malice..." is a really great concept because it gets you out of a *lot* of nasty jams!
1. There *is* malice, but you find an awesome fix, then you avoid million-dollar malice-audits. 2. There really is *incompetence*, so you just fix that before *anyone else* "pretends" it's malice! 3. In the realm of social affairs with co-workers, a "mistake" is tons easier to fix than an accusation of "malice", which threatens a firing and then you for calling it out!
This is of course a subset of the big overall AI problem.
So I think (without spending hours on the Articles!) that somewhere either in this research or the next few sets past it, is a key clue. I think the algorithm is (making up a slightly silly sounding word) "Quadratically modular". In other words, nothing says the comp can only use one algorithm to start working on its meaning. Studies like to chop things down because researchers get nervous at Emergent Complexity in old style science results. But using a brutal bit of humor, "people are not that smart all the time".
So if we decide we are "talking about cats", then just load the "Cat Module"!
Algorithm 1 is a simple nested tree like Animal/Mammal/Pet/Cat/. Colors Behaviors Names Owner Tips Pictures (!) Other
Cats themselves keep the "conversational complexity" down (most of the time!) You don't *normally* describe Java Exploits in a cat-lovers discussion! So the types of topics converge not unlike basic limits in Calculus 1. With a little smart programming the comp can tell when the topic is changing. As long as it doesn't, it can shuffle between cat pictures and cat toys and cat food and so on all day. A "relatively few" "meta modules" just do error check loops and then go back to cats.
So if you get enough expert modules built, at some stage the program begins to become fun to chat with. The unfortunate thing is that all this was ridiculed for 20 years until it became useful for Siri type programs, and then they wouldn't let us in the public have it anymore!
There are some other good comments but I like yours.
Turns out "Sign into Epic"... means NOTHING!!
Because wanna see what happens when you actually click it? (I sacrificed my click for the good of Slashdot!)
Wait for it...
"Sign in to Epic with your Google Account to save your personalized browser features to the web and access them from Epic on any computer. You'll also be automatically signed in to your favorite Google services." AND "Sign in to ******Chrome****** Sign in to get your bookmarks, history, and settings on all your devices. Learn more" (Emphasis mine)
So they didn't even bother finishing their copy and paste of junk??!
Even Bruce Schneier struggled to begin the discussion of what we can do to unroll the big bad security machine. But now I'm really pretty sad that the founder of Slashdot, back when it had chops, presents such a bad browser that they didn't even bake it... and label it as a "Security Browser"?!
There's the old joke about comp engineers being lazy and preferring pizza and boffo sword fights to actually working (xkcd joke!), but when you guys really get a bit riled and sit down to crunch stuff, there's a few heavy hitters out there. So to see such a ridiculously sloppy item, is just more upsetting because this is THE hot button topic of the age, so if we're gonna try to fix it, these bogus attempts are a mess.
Let's look a little more. Their main site is https://www.epicsearch.in/ I'm running three browsers here to do all this! (This one while I'm typing) So if we take their lead site and drop it into vanilla Firefox with Ghostery, Ghostery reports... wait for it... "Blocked Google Analystics"!
Whois says: Domain Name:EPICSEARCH.IN Created On:05-Oct-2011 11:34:48 UTC Last Updated On:01-Oct-2012 14:02:48 UTC Expiration Date:05-Oct-2013 11:34:48 UTC... Registrant Name:Alok Bhardwaj Registrant Organization:Hidden Reflex
So the domain expires... *next month*??!
I'll stop there because I'm a humanities fella and don't know anything even more telling. But let's try the long shot: Did 'Taco even endorse this for real? Or... is his name being co-opted for street cred beyond his better judgement!?
You're funny, but that stopped being true about say 5 years ago - with the rise of social media came even better crowdsourcing, so we'd have that stuff split open in under a month.
I think you didn't quite catch the point I was trying to make. It turns out that the address to links has been visible for years, but *to this day* there's someone with a weird bot that produces total nonsense tied to a goat.cx link. Not even a good troll... stuff like "anaconda why? that is it is? flamingo car racing is suxxor teh best".
Make you a deal. Reply to this with a quick note, it will log into my slashdot mail notification replies with the new subject, and the next one I see, I'll try to dig you up and do a copy&paste of it.
I'd argue that just maybe Marketing is a weak spot.
Here's a couple of angles:
1. Check out the Windows names: 3, 3.11, 95, 98, 2000, Me, XP, Vista, 7, 8, 8.1 and/or Blue.
2. They insist on putting Microsoft & Windows _____ jammed into all their marketing stuff. And they like "cluttered" ad copy. Here's one spoof: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EUXnJraKM3k
3. Only they know what they think they are doing with Metro/New-UI. The Windows 7 codebase was fair enough, aka the cleaned up Vista. So the Metro UI decision is in many ways "Marketing", because they are trying to convince people to do... something.
Yeah, the selection gets really tricky, but there really is a -2 level, but we gotta watch out for people meta-trolling and getting themselves nuke powers.
But I'll bring up one of my favorite ones:
Y'all see the "nonsense spam" goat.cx bots?
Someone is being some kind of idiot, because *any one of you* can write a better spam post than "elephant hax00r because the suk in the fruit of coconut fps" (goat.cx). And someone else mentioned the Tub or the toilet stories.
Maybe make it a White list system, start conservatively with the 10 worst junk posts qualifying for -2, *and prevent other things from going that low*.
"You really should stop trying to talk to people if you're just going to ignore what they say."
Hallo.
You didn't really mean for this to be taken as a "legit" comment, but actually I believe this comment suddenly loops back to the very top of the article! *People* get upset, then post "non-rational" comments like that! So then the Loebner prize is a subset of the Turing test - a good entrant program needs some "verbal defense" routines that help stop the person from dragging the whole conversation into a mess!
Instead, huge swaths of the types of questions typically used to defeat Turing Tests might deserve a good verbal slap. To the typical question of "Queen Anne was greener than a volkswagen", it's an implicit insult to the program. A person would say "cut it out. Treat me for real and let's chat".
The recorded lectures are a backup, not a substitute. You'll still go to the main class. But then for example the official recording is available later as a file you can play over 3 times a month later because of that hard section in the middle you just didn't get. It takes away the fear of "get it now or forever hold your peace".
Meanwhile, the Tree program is not quite a wiki, though that's not a bad model either. The main difference is the Tree program creates ordered nodes that explicitly shows the structure, so you automatically create your outline like the three items I listed, then you could chop up your reply and mine here as sub info per section. Then what happens is that each section grows on its own. It's not unlike what happens here at Slashdot, except it keeps an index pane on the left summarizing things.
Okay, I'll reply to you, representative of the other comments because I think everyone is missing the mark.
Here we go!
1. The Paradigm is wrong. It's like asking if a car is better than a plane because the plane is "clunkier" to use proportional to training. But no one seriously wants to drive time-efficiency-wise if they really have a big goal. Same here. Computers are the greatest informational processing system ever designed, yet it seems many people are having trouble matching the "old school" pencil&pen on paper. (I use both - Blue Pen = AutoBold, pencil prevents scribbles.)
Paper is indeed powerful. But then the problem seems to be how to *match or exceed* the power of paper, on a computer.
2. The format is wrong. Lectures should be provided pre-recorded as Audio-Visual files *for reference*. I'll leave for another day whether before the class or after, etc. But the point is to take out the whole silly pressure/fear of missing info, so indeed you can then sit there and concentrate, and/or have already prepped the lecture the day before if that's your thing. So then notes quit being desperate attempts to catch it all once, and you can process it. Play the pre-recorded version four times! Then go to class and ask why you don't get equation five.
This touches into silly issues like copyright, but also professor laziness. Give the Hacker Club two months and $3000 of materials and you'll have an auto-recording whiteboard, even maybe if a little grainy.
3. Software I completely agree a million text/rtf files are a mess trying to take notes. But I am now an advocate of a Tree database note program. You take structured notes in your hierarchical tree, and you can move each note all around as you learn more you just go back and update the note.
THAT is the game changer for me. It's the only software that for me has exceeded pen and paper, maybe coupled with spreadsheets for the math side of notes & data crunching.
The huge case is when the software is cheap and it's all in the support!
Typical examples are OEM/self bought Windows and Quickbooks. The raw software is pretty cheap - but the consulting could be thousands. So suddenly they want a *sales* tax on it? I already bought my software a month ago (for example). Now I have to pay a *sales tax* on a *service*?!
Plus there are really evil clauses in accounting theory that kick in here. If these are "sales" and not "services", that's gonna have a colossal impact on the IRS Schedule C as someone else hinted at elsewhere. I think it changes if you can use Cash Based Accounting vs Accrual, and if you have Sales, you have the Inventory clauses kicking in.
Let's suppose there are two types of "hoaxes". One is the type that is simply cotton candy with "almost absoutely" no evidence, such as the "Rapture Will Occur on X day" type. (Funny note - I just saw someone had posted a flyer on a windshield proclaiming the "Rapture will occur in 2011" ??! )
But let's say the other is the one based on "50% truth". So yes, Y2K was a deep multi decade legacy flaw dating from the dawn of computing. Put one way, "1975 computing had to deal with 1975's memory space concerns, so a 2 digit year made lots of sense." Then to pick a year arbitrarily, in 1995 (tied to when I consider MS's dominance of corp user space "complete" aka Windows 95), Y2K became close enough of a problem to worry about for real. So yes, massive outreaches worked across the industry, and apparently so well that when it happened I didn't see *any* significant problems of *any kind*.
But the histrionic types were shrilling that it would have been the end of civilization if not fixed, that entire service industries would collapse, etc. So in *that* sense, it was a hoax - those gross elaborations.
The interesting thing is that as a modestly observant tech news follower, I haven't seen anything pushed to that level of importance since!
Slashdot Mirror
"Besides, this is a class action lawsuit by lawyers hoping to hit the lawsuit lottery."
I guess I am getting a bit lost at the judgement of some of the lawyers in these various stories. So who in the Louisiana Sheriff's ... Fund decided it was a good idea to sue ... IBM?!
Isn't IBM going to do a lawyer version of a Tombstone Piledriver on their head for dragging them into MemeSpace?
Forget the Viral Cats. It's Viral News I can't understand properly these days!
What about motives for us?
To me this is a new wrinkle in the Linux discussion. We've been seeing uBuntu's "slide towards the Dark Side". A city running its own distro built at least partially from scratch (with German Engineers! Ha! Take that!) can potentially have a super clean codebase with none of the bloated and/or dangerous commercial cruft.
To my layman's eyes, Linux has been suffering from a bit of "X distro is/once was good and is slowly dying from lack of funds or internal politics". But a City has its own different motivation - it needs to Get Stuff Done with people mostly properly trained, vs the whole End User struggle for commercial distros.
So what if we can tap into their work and use it ourselves? Could they provide us with a distro with the full power of a city distro with (hopefully!) no hidden agendas, backed by their level of tech support they use themselves? That could be a new go-stone in the OS Wars.
Since the Germans are probably as upset as anyone else at the NSA, isn't that sorta "pitting them in a cage match vs the NSA spy-hackers"? If you had to put a bet on the NSA attacker vs the German Defender, which way would you go?
"Because what happens is a site says: either allow my cookies or I will not, or not fully, serve you. And because the average user..."
It's worse than that.
I'm somewhere in the middle of the pack. My "user side" skills are certainly a step above newbie. But when the "cookies and friends" are mashed into the loading process for a site from twelve component domains, you can't always just blindly turn them off either! Monster.com comes to mind... there are others.
So then if you're clever sometimes you can custom select which cookies to allow, but already that's losing the war. "I don't think I can stop them all..." - Magneto from X-Men movie 1.
The best I can hope to do is slow the tsunami down into a slow roar. : (
Hallo Ikanreed, I have to smash a couple of your notes together...
by i kan reed (749298) Alter Relationship on 10:11 AM November 21st, 2013 (#45481327) Homepage Journal
I really do hope we're past the point that any major governments are populated with people that view AIDS as a "gay plague", because otherwise, I can easily see petty local leaders using this research to arrest sick people and charge them with murder. ... ... To knowingly infect another person with HIV)) ... But unknowingly doing so can still be a target for the bigots out there."
"Yeah, I know that. ((Editorial
Let's stop there.
I'll say this in my best PG-13 form. TSA has made us ... terrified... that five ounces of baby milk are a hazard risk. But ... millions of people ... can (slowly!) end your life... in thirty minutes.
This is one of the best examples that "divisions are separated". "Someone" (who deserved their paycheck!?) managed to separate 5OunceApplejuiceBearing terrorists, from the EndYourLifeIn30Min ... non-tracked entities.
So now this ... is ... news. Oh to be sure, parts of it were lingering. But because it's now News, it's Official.
So here we go! Are we "socially ready for this"!?
Not enough to actually bother replying in the thread!
Go on, try it!
Control-F Find for RichDiesal ... no comments!
So no, he doesn't have an axe to grind because he put it away four minutes after he turned the grinder on!
Unless he's lurking. Whatever.
I just have less respect for submitters who don't actively respond to the threads.
"But is there really any difference between having free will and appearing to have free will? Or, put another way, is there really any difference between the illusion of free will and free will? Is "free will" even a clearly defined concept? Some philosophers think not."
I think I am in the camp of something like "Whether anyone has free will or not for religious reasons, let's assume free will, then does an AI have free will? Yes."
In the many millions of funds I don't have, I believe that all thoughts are model-able. You might not get the original creative spark, but once the thought is known, it is model-able.
What we think of "free will" is some mix of heuristics "plus a beer". I'll repeat my private mini theory that we're racially terrified of true AI because that will forever change what we do with ourselves vs machines.
Taking a simple act that can work for both people and AI, "Do I GetData or Do I Get IntangibleHealingBenefit"? For that second one, the human goes to sleep and the AI DeFrags/Prunes/Optimizes its KnowledgeBase. Both "Feel/CanBeMadeToSimulateFeeling" the struggle between data and systems management.
Whatever the heuristics are between the "beings", the act of decision is the same. And that's why it's not a magical "human right of free will". AI Free Will is a snap. We're just desperately afraid of it. See T2, "If the wrong heuristic gets in there..." - well that's what sociopathic killers are. Humans running a badly flawed HumanOS.
"Wouldn't the presence of self-awareness be a prerequisite, so just about every device should fail, before even getting to the actual test?"
I'll reply to you.
I think I just decided that Siri is what a Loebner Prize contest bot would look like "if it was developed for real with some money behind it."
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Loebner_contest
In that contest, they "waste time" trying to trick the bots with edge case questions. For Siri, you know it's a bot, but you ask "is this answer useful". To me that is the spirit/next-gen spirit of the Turing Test. "Is this answer as useful as a person? Better?"
Now, to Self Awareness. It's not all that hard to put in a meta module where the machine "knows" about itself. It could have its specs, but also more general statements like "I'm not so good on long sentences."
Sometimes those kinds of statements "aren't as hard as we pretend they are to feel superior". As a college kid will tell you if you give him a beer for his time, about the same 100 questions show up in intermixing sets of 12. But once you know "who you are" (and what you "don't know"), then it kinda reduces down until new experience changes some of the answers.
For this reason, I considered the old Pentium I chip an extremely important tool for "AI" that I have never seen used in a special way. Because as far as I know, it was the only chip commercially famous (not a limited edition or knockoff) that had provable logic errors.
Crunch. Logic Errors are the "unfortunate hallmark of being human". So we developed all these "social skills" to maneuver around the errors. Systems design, to just getting sleep.
So if you used a P1 chip for AI, then gave it a module to "be aware that it was flawed", when it "tried to do its duty" it could do checks and inform the user "I am sorry, but that requested process will likely trigger my logic failed circuit. Do you still want to do that or find some other solution?"
Yes, Hi "gapagos".
"Anonymous transactions do not benefit anyone", hmm? Give me your name and address right now. I will drive over and say hello.
Unless you decide that "anonymous" has its uses.
Hallo. I'll reply to you because you're far enough on the discussion.
"Never attribute to Malice ..." is a really great concept because it gets you out of a *lot* of nasty jams!
1. There *is* malice, but you find an awesome fix, then you avoid million-dollar malice-audits.
2. There really is *incompetence*, so you just fix that before *anyone else* "pretends" it's malice!
3. In the realm of social affairs with co-workers, a "mistake" is tons easier to fix than an accusation of "malice", which threatens a firing and then you for calling it out!
And more.
This is of course a subset of the big overall AI problem.
So I think (without spending hours on the Articles!) that somewhere either in this research or the next few sets past it, is a key clue. I think the algorithm is (making up a slightly silly sounding word) "Quadratically modular". In other words, nothing says the comp can only use one algorithm to start working on its meaning. Studies like to chop things down because researchers get nervous at Emergent Complexity in old style science results. But using a brutal bit of humor, "people are not that smart all the time".
So if we decide we are "talking about cats", then just load the "Cat Module"!
Algorithm 1 is a simple nested tree like Animal/Mammal/Pet/Cat/.
Colors
Behaviors
Names
Owner Tips
Pictures (!)
Other
Cats themselves keep the "conversational complexity" down (most of the time!) You don't *normally* describe Java Exploits in a cat-lovers discussion! So the types of topics converge not unlike basic limits in Calculus 1. With a little smart programming the comp can tell when the topic is changing. As long as it doesn't, it can shuffle between cat pictures and cat toys and cat food and so on all day. A "relatively few" "meta modules" just do error check loops and then go back to cats.
So if you get enough expert modules built, at some stage the program begins to become fun to chat with. The unfortunate thing is that all this was ridiculed for 20 years until it became useful for Siri type programs, and then they wouldn't let us in the public have it anymore!
Actually, I am dismayed at the disastrous lack of quality in the app store, both apps and "apps".
Shareware from 2002 had better quality than 40% of the stuff there! When did mobile devs get the collective meme to be lazy in mobile apps?
Oh! I know this one!
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pO_tXzeiZAQ
Ray Stevens!
Bingo! You nailed it!
There are some other good comments but I like yours.
Turns out "Sign into Epic" ... means NOTHING!!
Because wanna see what happens when you actually click it? (I sacrificed my click for the good of Slashdot!)
Wait for it ...
"Sign in to Epic with your Google Account to save your personalized browser features to the web and access them from Epic on any computer. You'll also be automatically signed in to your favorite Google services."
AND
"Sign in to ******Chrome******
Sign in to get your bookmarks, history, and settings on all your devices. Learn more" (Emphasis mine)
So they didn't even bother finishing their copy and paste of junk??!
Even Bruce Schneier struggled to begin the discussion of what we can do to unroll the big bad security machine. But now I'm really pretty sad that the founder of Slashdot, back when it had chops, presents such a bad browser that they didn't even bake it ... and label it as a "Security Browser"?!
There's the old joke about comp engineers being lazy and preferring pizza and boffo sword fights to actually working (xkcd joke!), but when you guys really get a bit riled and sit down to crunch stuff, there's a few heavy hitters out there. So to see such a ridiculously sloppy item, is just more upsetting because this is THE hot button topic of the age, so if we're gonna try to fix it, these bogus attempts are a mess.
Let's look a little more. ... wait for it ... "Blocked Google Analystics"!
Their main site is https://www.epicsearch.in/
I'm running three browsers here to do all this! (This one while I'm typing)
So if we take their lead site and drop it into vanilla Firefox with Ghostery, Ghostery reports
Whois says: ...
Domain Name:EPICSEARCH.IN
Created On:05-Oct-2011 11:34:48 UTC
Last Updated On:01-Oct-2012 14:02:48 UTC
Expiration Date:05-Oct-2013 11:34:48 UTC
Registrant Name:Alok Bhardwaj
Registrant Organization:Hidden Reflex
So the domain expires ... *next month*??!
I'll stop there because I'm a humanities fella and don't know anything even more telling. But let's try the long shot: Did 'Taco even endorse this for real? Or ... is his name being co-opted for street cred beyond his better judgement!?
You're funny, but that stopped being true about say 5 years ago - with the rise of social media came even better crowdsourcing, so we'd have that stuff split open in under a month.
If you do switch those up you might get arrested!
Put the first and second parts of each one on index cards and switch them for endless fun!
Hallo.
I think you didn't quite catch the point I was trying to make. It turns out that the address to links has been visible for years, but *to this day* there's someone with a weird bot that produces total nonsense tied to a goat.cx link. Not even a good troll ... stuff like "anaconda why? that is it is? flamingo car racing is suxxor teh best".
Make you a deal. Reply to this with a quick note, it will log into my slashdot mail notification replies with the new subject, and the next one I see, I'll try to dig you up and do a copy&paste of it.
I'd argue that just maybe Marketing is a weak spot.
Here's a couple of angles:
1. Check out the Windows names: 3, 3.11, 95, 98, 2000, Me, XP, Vista, 7, 8, 8.1 and/or Blue.
2. They insist on putting Microsoft & Windows _____ jammed into all their marketing stuff. And they like "cluttered" ad copy. Here's one spoof:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EUXnJraKM3k
3. Only they know what they think they are doing with Metro/New-UI. The Windows 7 codebase was fair enough, aka the cleaned up Vista. So the Metro UI decision is in many ways "Marketing", because they are trying to convince people to do ... something.
Yeah, the selection gets really tricky, but there really is a -2 level, but we gotta watch out for people meta-trolling and getting themselves nuke powers.
But I'll bring up one of my favorite ones:
Y'all see the "nonsense spam" goat.cx bots?
Someone is being some kind of idiot, because *any one of you* can write a better spam post than "elephant hax00r because the suk in the fruit of coconut fps" (goat.cx). And someone else mentioned the Tub or the toilet stories.
Maybe make it a White list system, start conservatively with the 10 worst junk posts qualifying for -2, *and prevent other things from going that low*.
"You really should stop trying to talk to people if you're just going to ignore what they say."
Hallo.
You didn't really mean for this to be taken as a "legit" comment, but actually I believe this comment suddenly loops back to the very top of the article! *People* get upset, then post "non-rational" comments like that! So then the Loebner prize is a subset of the Turing test - a good entrant program needs some "verbal defense" routines that help stop the person from dragging the whole conversation into a mess!
Instead, huge swaths of the types of questions typically used to defeat Turing Tests might deserve a good verbal slap. To the typical question of "Queen Anne was greener than a volkswagen", it's an implicit insult to the program. A person would say "cut it out. Treat me for real and let's chat".
Hi there.
Thanks for the reply.
The recorded lectures are a backup, not a substitute. You'll still go to the main class. But then for example the official recording is available later as a file you can play over 3 times a month later because of that hard section in the middle you just didn't get. It takes away the fear of "get it now or forever hold your peace".
Meanwhile, the Tree program is not quite a wiki, though that's not a bad model either. The main difference is the Tree program creates ordered nodes that explicitly shows the structure, so you automatically create your outline like the three items I listed, then you could chop up your reply and mine here as sub info per section. Then what happens is that each section grows on its own. It's not unlike what happens here at Slashdot, except it keeps an index pane on the left summarizing things.
Okay, I'll reply to you, representative of the other comments because I think everyone is missing the mark.
Here we go!
1. The Paradigm is wrong. It's like asking if a car is better than a plane because the plane is "clunkier" to use proportional to training. But no one seriously wants to drive time-efficiency-wise if they really have a big goal. Same here. Computers are the greatest informational processing system ever designed, yet it seems many people are having trouble matching the "old school" pencil&pen on paper. (I use both - Blue Pen = AutoBold, pencil prevents scribbles.)
Paper is indeed powerful. But then the problem seems to be how to *match or exceed* the power of paper, on a computer.
2. The format is wrong. Lectures should be provided pre-recorded as Audio-Visual files *for reference*. I'll leave for another day whether before the class or after, etc. But the point is to take out the whole silly pressure/fear of missing info, so indeed you can then sit there and concentrate, and/or have already prepped the lecture the day before if that's your thing. So then notes quit being desperate attempts to catch it all once, and you can process it. Play the pre-recorded version four times! Then go to class and ask why you don't get equation five.
This touches into silly issues like copyright, but also professor laziness. Give the Hacker Club two months and $3000 of materials and you'll have an auto-recording whiteboard, even maybe if a little grainy.
3. Software
I completely agree a million text/rtf files are a mess trying to take notes. But I am now an advocate of a Tree database note program. You take structured notes in your hierarchical tree, and you can move each note all around as you learn more you just go back and update the note.
THAT is the game changer for me. It's the only software that for me has exceeded pen and paper, maybe coupled with spreadsheets for the math side of notes & data crunching.
Yep.
Most other activities, you can "give them up". But get involved for real with a program like AA? "Forever is a long time"!
"Sober 37 years"?! So let's say he started the program at 30, and now he's 67? Do some math people then re-apply the context!
"Oh yeah, I did some stuff back in 1973..." So? Didn't everyone? But a program like AA makes sure you can never forget it and move on!
And that's without even getting started on the Christian angle!
No, this is a NASTY new tax.
The huge case is when the software is cheap and it's all in the support!
Typical examples are OEM/self bought Windows and Quickbooks. The raw software is pretty cheap - but the consulting could be thousands. So suddenly they want a *sales* tax on it? I already bought my software a month ago (for example). Now I have to pay a *sales tax* on a *service*?!
Plus there are really evil clauses in accounting theory that kick in here. If these are "sales" and not "services", that's gonna have a colossal impact on the IRS Schedule C as someone else hinted at elsewhere. I think it changes if you can use Cash Based Accounting vs Accrual, and if you have Sales, you have the Inventory clauses kicking in.
Go read up on New Hampshire, where exactly this happens.
They have a heavily modified income tax and no sales tax, and then indeed they do smash it into property taxes.
Draw your own conclusions - it's far from problem-free.
Let's suppose there are two types of "hoaxes". One is the type that is simply cotton candy with "almost absoutely" no evidence, such as the "Rapture Will Occur on X day" type. (Funny note - I just saw someone had posted a flyer on a windshield proclaiming the "Rapture will occur in 2011" ??! )
But let's say the other is the one based on "50% truth". So yes, Y2K was a deep multi decade legacy flaw dating from the dawn of computing. Put one way, "1975 computing had to deal with 1975's memory space concerns, so a 2 digit year made lots of sense." Then to pick a year arbitrarily, in 1995 (tied to when I consider MS's dominance of corp user space "complete" aka Windows 95), Y2K became close enough of a problem to worry about for real. So yes, massive outreaches worked across the industry, and apparently so well that when it happened I didn't see *any* significant problems of *any kind*.
But the histrionic types were shrilling that it would have been the end of civilization if not fixed, that entire service industries would collapse, etc. So in *that* sense, it was a hoax - those gross elaborations.
The interesting thing is that as a modestly observant tech news follower, I haven't seen anything pushed to that level of importance since!