There are enough people on the fringe (wanting to mod but perhaps not understanding the implications) for this to at least be a concern. And what happens if an out of warranty update accidentally kills everyone's phone - they can't fix it with a simple software patch. It is most certainly a bad idea to let companies add software kill switches that nuke the hardware - it's bad enough that they want to stop us messing with the software but breaking the hardware as a consequence is insane.
They'll listen so long as you don't start your explanation "If the eFuse failes to verify [the firmware information (what we call ROMS), the kernel information, and the bootloader version], then the eFuse receives a command to 'blow the fuse' or 'trip the fuse'..."
It's Jammie (which I insist on pronouncing "Jammy") and it's a she, unless you really meant the former pro-skateboarder Jamie Thomas, I'm sure he'd appreciate the unexpected windfall but I'm not sure what point it would make:)
To answer your own question, go buy a sixpack of eggs. Are they labelled as unfertilised eggs or chicken eggs? If it's the latter, then the semantic argument is resolved, a chicken egg must be one that comes from a chicken, not one that gives birth to a chicken. In either event, the whole question ignores the fact that time is not linear and that therefore chickens and eggs came into existence at the same time:)
A chicken egg must be an egg which a chicken lays and not an egg from which a chicken hatches, or we wouldn't refer to unfertilised eggs as chicken eggs, we'd need a new description to indicate that no chicken would ever hatch from said egg.
Immense leaps of faith I can understand, but it must take a gargantuan amount of optimism to look at your fellow man and think he was designed as the ultimate creation by an all powerful god as opposed to him being a few steps removed from a monkey. Has the internet not swayed your opinion at all?
Even if they did specify "chicken egg" (and you could argue it's implied by the question), the very fact that chickens (we believe) evolved from dinosaurs means that the very first animal we would recognise as a chicken hatched from an egg, albeit the egg of some animal part way on the evolutionary scale between the two.
I was thinking about how MS can use this to "lock you in" to their system. They have your email address if you have a Live account, so they could collect data about how you interact with Milo and use that to emotionally blackmail you (i.e. you get an email "from" Miloe asking why you've not visited for a while, that he's missing his frisbee buddy or something), but they could go even further - if they have your billing details they probably have a phone number, and since Milo's voice is totally automated and theoretically can respond to what you're saying, imagine if he started calling you up to ask why you don't play with him any more and really playing the guilt card about how he's lonely. Now that would be creepy, but probably quite effective.
I can see the benefit in having something that behaves exactly like a human but isn't human for study purposes. Far easier to eliminate outside influences, to have a control version, to speed up development, etc. However, as you've alluded to, in order to create something realistic enough to simulate the whole gamut of human emotion and to accurately predict how it would behave in every situation, how it would respond to environment and to interaction we'd need to already have all that data about humans, in which case we'd no longer need a virtual one.
Well I'm not sure giving the chat bot a human-looking avatar and making it follow you via the camera is the tricky part. If anything, maybe the intention is to detract from how poorly the chat part works - most people will assume the face recognition and tracking is the hard part and they'll be wowed even if the chat bot isn't up to scratch. Perhaps that's the intention, we're not yet at a point where we can have a reasonably close to human AI, but we are at the point where technological smoke and mirrors can mask the gap.
You're taking a lot for granted when you say they won't depart the skinking ship. This VI is specifically meant to react to how you treat it, I would think that alone might indicate that it would be more pro-active in departing said ship than the average human, rather than less.
I didn't get far enough into B&W to really see anything interesting. I just remember struggling with the "innovative" and "intuitive" control system and thinking it was actually just "fiddly" and "incredibly frustrating". I remember trying to get a peon to go up a mountain to do... something or other at the beginning of the game, and failing for some arbitrary reason and being forced to do the whole thing again right from the beginning. As usual, big promises with some serious flaws in implementation. I honestly think the guy has some good ideas if he could just reign in the ambition and deliver a solid gaming experience instead of reaching too far and not spending enough time on the fundamentals. I played most of the way through Fable, it was a pretty average game really, a lot of ideas were crammed in there but just didn't go anywhere. The ageing of the character, for instance, didn't seem to have any real impact, and the fact that it was tied to major story points just made it feel unrealistic.
As for games which try and let you play as good or evil, and alter the story on that basis, they always fall into the trap of forcing you down a particular path. Having just played Mass Effect 2 and Red Dead Redemption, they both have exactly the same fundamentally flawed mission type, namely: fight through fifty guys (who are probably just employees of the main bad guy defending themselves from this lone lunatic storming their base) and happily kill them all with no ill effects, but then be pushed down the path of "evil" if you mete out the same justice to the main bad guy instead of sending him to trial, even though in other instances its fine to summarily execute people who you could just as easily take into custody.
Skynet became self-aware at 2:14am EDT August 29, 1997. On December 23, 2012, while browsing the internet, Skynet came across this page and became actively hostile to humanity...
I couldn't agree more - if there's one name more than MS that could be associated with this and instantly raise all kind of doubts in my mind, it's Molyneux. I've fallen for his promises too many times in the past to be so easily fooled any more (to be fair, I think he's genuinely enthusiastic about what he's trying to do, he just all too often overestimates the capabilities of the technology).
Maybe he needs to leverage some of the plugins that aren't currently available on other browsers, or maybe he needs to be reasonably sure his browser will be supported and the only way to do that and not support IE is to support the next biggest desktop browser by user volume. The likes of Chrome and Safari might be better, but that still doesn't mean they're the right choice for everyone just yet (for me the tools I need for web development are far better in FF right now, for instance - other browsers can replicate some of the functionality I need, but not all).
I guess the issues are removing tiny particles of widely distributed plastic from an area of the ocean twice the size of Texas while at the same time not removing everything living from said ocean. Apparently most of the particles are no bigger than a grain of rice, so any system to sieve them out of the ocean would likely scoop up anything larger than plankton. I've not heard any specifics about how they plan to perform the separation.
Well the article (and other articles on the subject) are all very counter productive. They all suggest massive mounds of floating trash because it's easier for human minds to picture those as evil. This downplays the fact that the real danger are the chemical-laden particles of plastic being eaten by wildlife and entering the food chain. In other words, in trying to build people up into some kind of frothing state of hysteria, the people behind these articles are detracting from the issue and giving sceptics an easy out at the same time.
It seems the problem with a lot of this particular type of plastic is that it's made to degrade quickly and it's literally disintegrating in the ocean, so a similar project (without heavy re-processing of the plastic) is not feasible. Still, with four million tons of it up for grabs I'm surprised people are dragging their feet over collecting it.
Wait, there's a chance the issue was caused by the floor mats, so Toyota recall the floor mats and then issue a statement saying that it must have been driver error (strangely after the reported accidents have fallen off - if it was wholly driver error it should still be happening at the same rate, right)? Is nobody else's FUD sense tingling, even a little?
It seems to me this should only be an issue if we didn't have anything to compare it to. In fact there are other car manufacturers, there are even other models manufactured by Toyota. If those cars don't suffer from similar claims (assuming the same percentage of stupid people buy them and there wasn't an unusually large number of new, stupid drives that immediately bought a Toyota) then it would be clearly evident that there is a design fault, even if the fault turns out to be user interface rather than engineering. I still smell a rat, of all the added complexity of motor vehicles over the last half a century, unless there is something radically different about the pedal configuration in this car, I would have thought a slight positional change would be the easiest thing for a driver to adjust to. If the failure rates are in line with other cars, it's clearly a user issue, if they're higher here, the issue is the car. I would think the fix would be as simple as keeping the pedal positions consitant with what they've tried and tested elsewhere.
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There are enough people on the fringe (wanting to mod but perhaps not understanding the implications) for this to at least be a concern. And what happens if an out of warranty update accidentally kills everyone's phone - they can't fix it with a simple software patch. It is most certainly a bad idea to let companies add software kill switches that nuke the hardware - it's bad enough that they want to stop us messing with the software but breaking the hardware as a consequence is insane.
They'll listen so long as you don't start your explanation "If the eFuse failes to verify [the firmware information (what we call ROMS), the kernel information, and the bootloader version], then the eFuse receives a command to 'blow the fuse' or 'trip the fuse'..."
It's Jammie (which I insist on pronouncing "Jammy") and it's a she, unless you really meant the former pro-skateboarder Jamie Thomas, I'm sure he'd appreciate the unexpected windfall but I'm not sure what point it would make :)
To answer your own question, go buy a sixpack of eggs. Are they labelled as unfertilised eggs or chicken eggs? If it's the latter, then the semantic argument is resolved, a chicken egg must be one that comes from a chicken, not one that gives birth to a chicken. In either event, the whole question ignores the fact that time is not linear and that therefore chickens and eggs came into existence at the same time :)
A chicken egg must be an egg which a chicken lays and not an egg from which a chicken hatches, or we wouldn't refer to unfertilised eggs as chicken eggs, we'd need a new description to indicate that no chicken would ever hatch from said egg.
Immense leaps of faith I can understand, but it must take a gargantuan amount of optimism to look at your fellow man and think he was designed as the ultimate creation by an all powerful god as opposed to him being a few steps removed from a monkey. Has the internet not swayed your opinion at all?
Even if they did specify "chicken egg" (and you could argue it's implied by the question), the very fact that chickens (we believe) evolved from dinosaurs means that the very first animal we would recognise as a chicken hatched from an egg, albeit the egg of some animal part way on the evolutionary scale between the two.
I was thinking about how MS can use this to "lock you in" to their system. They have your email address if you have a Live account, so they could collect data about how you interact with Milo and use that to emotionally blackmail you (i.e. you get an email "from" Miloe asking why you've not visited for a while, that he's missing his frisbee buddy or something), but they could go even further - if they have your billing details they probably have a phone number, and since Milo's voice is totally automated and theoretically can respond to what you're saying, imagine if he started calling you up to ask why you don't play with him any more and really playing the guilt card about how he's lonely. Now that would be creepy, but probably quite effective.
So long as they're not just given a script to read, otherwise we're back to square one.
I can see the benefit in having something that behaves exactly like a human but isn't human for study purposes. Far easier to eliminate outside influences, to have a control version, to speed up development, etc. However, as you've alluded to, in order to create something realistic enough to simulate the whole gamut of human emotion and to accurately predict how it would behave in every situation, how it would respond to environment and to interaction we'd need to already have all that data about humans, in which case we'd no longer need a virtual one.
Well I'm not sure giving the chat bot a human-looking avatar and making it follow you via the camera is the tricky part. If anything, maybe the intention is to detract from how poorly the chat part works - most people will assume the face recognition and tracking is the hard part and they'll be wowed even if the chat bot isn't up to scratch. Perhaps that's the intention, we're not yet at a point where we can have a reasonably close to human AI, but we are at the point where technological smoke and mirrors can mask the gap.
You're taking a lot for granted when you say they won't depart the skinking ship. This VI is specifically meant to react to how you treat it, I would think that alone might indicate that it would be more pro-active in departing said ship than the average human, rather than less.
Oh good lord, I think you just opened up the market for everyone to have a personal copy of their favourite celebrity to "interact" with.
I didn't get far enough into B&W to really see anything interesting. I just remember struggling with the "innovative" and "intuitive" control system and thinking it was actually just "fiddly" and "incredibly frustrating". I remember trying to get a peon to go up a mountain to do... something or other at the beginning of the game, and failing for some arbitrary reason and being forced to do the whole thing again right from the beginning. As usual, big promises with some serious flaws in implementation. I honestly think the guy has some good ideas if he could just reign in the ambition and deliver a solid gaming experience instead of reaching too far and not spending enough time on the fundamentals. I played most of the way through Fable, it was a pretty average game really, a lot of ideas were crammed in there but just didn't go anywhere. The ageing of the character, for instance, didn't seem to have any real impact, and the fact that it was tied to major story points just made it feel unrealistic.
As for games which try and let you play as good or evil, and alter the story on that basis, they always fall into the trap of forcing you down a particular path. Having just played Mass Effect 2 and Red Dead Redemption, they both have exactly the same fundamentally flawed mission type, namely: fight through fifty guys (who are probably just employees of the main bad guy defending themselves from this lone lunatic storming their base) and happily kill them all with no ill effects, but then be pushed down the path of "evil" if you mete out the same justice to the main bad guy instead of sending him to trial, even though in other instances its fine to summarily execute people who you could just as easily take into custody.
Skynet became self-aware at 2:14am EDT August 29, 1997. On December 23, 2012, while browsing the internet, Skynet came across this page and became actively hostile to humanity...
I couldn't agree more - if there's one name more than MS that could be associated with this and instantly raise all kind of doubts in my mind, it's Molyneux. I've fallen for his promises too many times in the past to be so easily fooled any more (to be fair, I think he's genuinely enthusiastic about what he's trying to do, he just all too often overestimates the capabilities of the technology).
I love the irony of your comment and your sig:
If Milo can't think for himself then he's nothing close to a virtual human.
--
You can lead a man with reason but you can't make him think.
Plenty of actual humans can't/don't think for themselves, so why is it a necessary requirement for a virtual human?
Maybe he needs to leverage some of the plugins that aren't currently available on other browsers, or maybe he needs to be reasonably sure his browser will be supported and the only way to do that and not support IE is to support the next biggest desktop browser by user volume. The likes of Chrome and Safari might be better, but that still doesn't mean they're the right choice for everyone just yet (for me the tools I need for web development are far better in FF right now, for instance - other browsers can replicate some of the functionality I need, but not all).
I guess the issues are removing tiny particles of widely distributed plastic from an area of the ocean twice the size of Texas while at the same time not removing everything living from said ocean. Apparently most of the particles are no bigger than a grain of rice, so any system to sieve them out of the ocean would likely scoop up anything larger than plankton. I've not heard any specifics about how they plan to perform the separation.
Twice the size of Texas.
Well the article (and other articles on the subject) are all very counter productive. They all suggest massive mounds of floating trash because it's easier for human minds to picture those as evil. This downplays the fact that the real danger are the chemical-laden particles of plastic being eaten by wildlife and entering the food chain. In other words, in trying to build people up into some kind of frothing state of hysteria, the people behind these articles are detracting from the issue and giving sceptics an easy out at the same time.
I just assumed the European countries were used as a metric equivalent to the US measurement...
It seems the problem with a lot of this particular type of plastic is that it's made to degrade quickly and it's literally disintegrating in the ocean, so a similar project (without heavy re-processing of the plastic) is not feasible. Still, with four million tons of it up for grabs I'm surprised people are dragging their feet over collecting it.
Wait, there's a chance the issue was caused by the floor mats, so Toyota recall the floor mats and then issue a statement saying that it must have been driver error (strangely after the reported accidents have fallen off - if it was wholly driver error it should still be happening at the same rate, right)? Is nobody else's FUD sense tingling, even a little?
It seems to me this should only be an issue if we didn't have anything to compare it to. In fact there are other car manufacturers, there are even other models manufactured by Toyota. If those cars don't suffer from similar claims (assuming the same percentage of stupid people buy them and there wasn't an unusually large number of new, stupid drives that immediately bought a Toyota) then it would be clearly evident that there is a design fault, even if the fault turns out to be user interface rather than engineering. I still smell a rat, of all the added complexity of motor vehicles over the last half a century, unless there is something radically different about the pedal configuration in this car, I would have thought a slight positional change would be the easiest thing for a driver to adjust to. If the failure rates are in line with other cars, it's clearly a user issue, if they're higher here, the issue is the car. I would think the fix would be as simple as keeping the pedal positions consitant with what they've tried and tested elsewhere.