Humodour

You're trying to hurt my feelings, aren't you? I've resigned myself to the fact that I'm not going to like this game until I play it.

The California SC cannot throw the amendment out because it is part of the Constitution of the State now. In other words, unless it conflicts with another aspect of the same it is the supreme law of the state and the SC is bound to enforce and uphold it. Hold your horses. Two significant lawsuits are in progress already on this matter. 1) Interpreting how rights are applied is up to the Judiciary branch (courts) not the Legislature branch (voters), as determined by the CA Constitution (and also the US Constitution) under separation of powers, 2) removing equal protection under law is a change to the fundamental nature of the Constitution and thus is a Revision, not an Amendment, which in turn requires a 66% majority, not a 50% majority. It sucks that government has any say over marriages in the first place, but until America adopts stronger civil unions things like this will be important.

There's very little wrong with my explanation except that it was oversimplified for lay people, taks. Um. You are aware that Newton's law of universal gravitation was proven false by Einstein about 100 years ago, right? It is correct only in platonic Newtonian/Euclidean mechanics, not real life. It's still used for many Earth-based physical calculations today because it's a decent approximation to the much more complex and time-consuming equations of relativity (an approximation made possible because space-time is a manifold). But for precise calculations, the theory of relativity is used (i.e. space-time curvature due to mass is considered, or at least approximated by geodesics). And we're not done revising the theory of gravity, yet. Relativity, stunning as it is, doesn't play well with quantum mechanics, so as Walsingham said, we'll hopefully learn something about gravity from the LHC.

South Korea is pretty decent. Except if you cheat on your partner, you go to jail. Not a good country for sex, IMHO.

Sort of. Except it's actually targeted for both reasons: it's the biggest and the least secure. Especially for IE6 and 7 (and 5 is a joke). It's like people say Macs and Linux can't get viruses. Well they can, but it's a heck of a lot more difficult even ignoring market share. Why? Because they're designed differently. Chrome's sandbox model is a simple example of how you can design something to be more secure by default. But security isn't the only reason you'd want to leave IE; it's also the slowest browser (the next slowest browser is twice as fast), and has the worst plugin support. In fact, IE's plugin system (if you could call it that) is one of those reasons it's insecure. And it's got the worst rendering and standards support... but hey, I could go on all day. Point is, IE isn't a wise choice. It's fine to try and defend it and all, but there's really nothing to defend, IMHO.

Actually, gravity is a theory. A law is an idealised mathematical construct (also known as an axiom) which is always 100% correct in some platonic mathematical space. We cannot say this about gravity (see below), and in fact there has been at least two different laws of gravity so far (the first Newtonian, the second relativity). To call gravity as observed in physical reality a law is a silly as calling evolution a law because there exists a mathematically idealised version of evolution (see mathematical optimisation techniques). There seems to be this fundamental misunderstanding among laypeople about what the term 'theory' means in science. It means a hypothesis which has been experimentally tested and never been falsified (i.e. always turns out correct). In science, since we cannot with certainty say "this theory is 100% correct" as we do in mathematics, the most powerful assertion we can make is "this theory has been correct in every case tested". Why, then, is science useful? Because our theories are based upon the 'idealised mathematical constructs' (a.k.a. laws) previously mentioned. When we discover these constructs to be an insufficient approximation of the real world (i.e. they are disproved for some specific case), we ditch them and formulate a new theory based on a new mathematical construct which accounts for the anomalous case. This is what has happened to both gravity and evolution in the past. So yes, evolution is, like gravity, 'just a theory'. Edit: if you want another take on the formulation of theories, wikipedia has a nice subsection on it: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Theory#Assump...mulate_a_theory

Oh, no. I understand what 'machine' means. But it's proper in a discussion to define what your terms are to avoid confusion. If you're unwilling to do that, I will: Two significant definitions exist: a physical process, and a mathematical one. Either way, you have no basis for your claims, since neural nets are rigorously defined mathematically (they are universal Turing machines), and have been proven to exist physically (in animal brains - both human and not). You tell any half-decent biologist that a 'human is not a machine' and watch them laugh at you. Ahhh. And I bet you believe evolution is just a 'theory' (like gravity?) too?

Always important.

a) I haven't even been on here in a week. b) Yes, I read scientific journals. Does that offend you? But let's get to the meat of your inanity: Define 'machine'. Define 'self-aware'. Define 'true' in this context. From a technical perspective, 'true' AI is metaheuristic, while 'false' AI is symbolic. I fully concede symbolic AI (i.e. generally pre-90's AI) has no capacity for true learning. I have one whooping big counter-example of a machine which is both self-aware and intelligent: humans. Other examples exist, though. Most of them in the mammal or dinosaur family (birds, specifically). Oh, and hey - let's keep religion out of this OK? Or at least tell me if you're approaching this from a religious perspective so I can ignore you.

Wals was being Wals. Kind of odd to assume Mac owners all own consoles, though, and thus can be ignored.

lol. I guess I should expect something like that from you.

Simple: speed. Developing AI is actually about developing two separate technologies: software and hardware. Now, as you know, we've got the software already - we've had some version of it for decades (metaheuristic search) and we can't go much further here without the hardware to back it up. Which is where memristors come in. While you don't need memristors for AI, they look like they'll be a powerful enabling technology because they offer the capability to increase speed by orders of magnitude at a time when conventional transistors have all but hit the 'brick wall'. Taks listed all the reasons. My materials science is rusty, but I believe the most important of them is that they increase speed by taking up far less area than transistors (in all dimensions). "Williams adds that memristors could be used to speed up microprocessors by synchronizing circuits that tend to drift in frequency relative to one another or by doing the work of many transistors at once." http://www.sciam.com/article.cfm?id=missin...-of-electronics Besides that, though, memristors appear to exhibit quirky 'learning'/adaptive abilities which resemble those seen in biological life: http://lanl.arxiv.org/abs/0810.4179v2 I'd say that's just the tip of the iceberg. Somewhat loosely on topic: genetic algorithms are about a programme breeding competing solutions, right? Well what about a programme that breeds competing programmes to solve a problem? Or a programme that does that, but on ITSELF (i.e. to evolve itself to be better at evolving other solutions - this is what evolution itself does.) Or what about genetic algorithms that don't evolve programmes, but hardware? http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Genetic_programming http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Evolvable_hardware AI by itself is fairly tame. It can learn, but it can't change it's own coding. It's no more than a human mind in a computer instead of a body. Humans can't (easily) change how their code (both DNA and neural net) works, and nor can your average AI. So the fears about AI's getting out of control and taking over the world are naive. But not impossible. If somebody coded not just an AI, but an AI that could change it's own code (which seems possible given the above, but an order of magnitude harder than creating an AI again), that would be something else.

Shhh, taks. It's alright - there aren't any scarecrows on the Internet. Now sit back and relax with this soothing story about Hewlett-Packard's plans to begin manufacturing prototype memristor RAM in 2009.

Yeah, Islamic charities in Iran are bent as all hell. I read a decent article on it a while ago, but I can't find it, so the wikipedia run-down will have to do: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bonyad

Go on taks, tell us how you're going to solve 2^x = 4097 without logs. Don't let me down, man. I'm counting on you to come up with some madcap scheme of guesswork so you can claim some sort of vague intellectual superiority.

*smacks karka upside the head* Stop trolling.

You're stupid. If you don't know the exact value of 2^18 without a calculator, you should be a garbage collector. /taks

Man, I love the Internet. Judging by the tone of customers, online retailers, news articles, forum threads, and even various game company heads, DRM has about as much of a future as the Australian Internet censorship scheme. And, interestingly, the case against DRM is for many of the same seasons people oppose the Internet filter.

It's like for every flash of brilliance about this game, there's equally something that makes he facepalm. Which could still mean in the end that the game is totally awesome and perhaps even revolutionary, but it makes it hard for me to get excited or stay interested.

I used to be a skeptic about AI, but in light of the fact that Moore's law has held steady, and all the new software and hardware advances we've made this decade alone, I'm finding it very hard to be skeptical these days. We're definitely less than a century away. How 'less' is the question. Supercomputing still has a little while to go before we can model the human brain: But 'a little while' in electronic speak isn't much under Moore's law (and that's at current pace - things like graphene transistors or memristors will probably violate Moore's law in a very good way). IBM is currently working on brain simulation right now. Interestingly, while it might take a few more decades to emulate/simulate the human brain, something like a mouse or fruit fly is something altogether less complex (but still complex), and I expect the first real artifical intelligence to be something akin to those.

Either you're not coming across well in English or you're fairly ignorant about neural networks. Neural networks are about exactly the opposite of understanding how one node fits into the grand scheme. They're about holistic details and pattern emergence. You say we can't empirically understand neural networks, but I think you are mistaken. Neural networks are exactly the type of thing best suited for the scientific method. Trial and error. It's actually very similar to what some biologists do with things like E. coli because evolution is also an optimisation process (heck, genetic algorithms, anybody?). What you perhaps mean is that we can't know (or it's orders of magnitude harder to know) the exact details of the system as we could with GOFAI (good old fashion AI - symbolic manipulation, mostly) - we can't be 100% certain that our input will produce some desired output. But if you think that's a flaw than you don't understand AI. It's this deviation away from perfect knowledge of the system that is exactly what AI researchers are after because they are sacrificing consistency and reliability for fluidity and a degree randomness; the beauty of neural networks (and other optimisation techniques such as genetic algorithms) are that they learn, adapt. Ahh, I'm not going to go into a big huge rant about it, but I really hope you take a closer look at the worth of metaheuristic optimisation, because it's not about to leave us any time soon (for good reason!). I will leave you with this little teaser of the potential behind metaheuristic optimisation techniques, though: http://www.physorg.com/news82910066.html taks: Yeah it's pretty neat. I'm quite looking forward to it, but what's probably more awesome is that memristors are just one of many breakthroughs in electronics recently. There's been a huge amount of noise about graphene transistors, for example. Although, admittedly, graphene transistors don't offer the sort of paradigm shift of variable resistance.

Eh, you're not making your case terribly well. An overrated game is something like Oblivion or NWN1. It sells a few million copies in the first 2 or 3 years then you never hear from it again. This, on the other hand, is a couple of people who found the game boring and assuming that because it didn't meat their tastes that means it's overrated (read: think they're a better judge of a game than most everybody else who played it). Half-Life 1 wasn't even hyped up. It had to contend with a bunch of far more well-known FPS's at release, and it didn't start out with a bang. The years preceding its release sold far more copies than its initial pitch. That doesn't happen with an over-hyped piece of mediocrity. So I know this is really a trivial non-issue, but it's rather bemusing to see somebody try and retroactively reclassify HL1 as 'overrated' (or more hilarious still, equate it with Doom - you might manage that with Quake 2, though).

Heck, you know what kirottu? You're damn right. I don't trust myself to express how I feel for you with words. Let this suffice: B==========D~~~~~~~~~~

Well Turkey will pave roads and America will build bridges.