downer

People LOVE those kinds of tests. Just look at all the ones on LiveJournal and OK Cupid. "Tell me about ME!!!"

At least Mac users tend to be attractive...

 ?

Just present all the material and they can skip ahead as warranted. But books tend to be better at reinforcement than introduction; e.g. go out in the field with a paleontology dig and you'll probably remember stuff you learn much better because of the associations with all your senses at once.

I often note important but subtle points in material when re-reading on a subject after personal experience, which I missed when reading the same thing previously. In the repeat case I now have references, and the written word causes those experiences to spring forth from whichever compartment of my mind contained them, whereupon I can hold up the new piece of information to see how it fits, compare it to what's already there, add it in, and then pack the whole thing back up.

The best way to teach someone is to get them as engaged as possible through as many avenues into their brain as possible. You can read about elephants all you want but there's no substitute for meeting one in person.

Obviously people say that all the time despite our lack of a definition for exactly what it is, so we apparently don't need an exact definition.

> and unless they are deterministic, you can't write code.

You might be interested to know that the behavior of your OS isn't deterministic once you add a second CPU.

In reality, with their millions, there's nothing stopping them from re-Lisping it. (Not even time considerations -- when they were in negotiations to be acquired, they didn't do any development for months [1]. If you can get away with spending that much time not developing before you have money, you can get away with doing a rewrite after money is no longer a concern.)

[1] "We must have stopped doing real work for six months." -- http://aaronsw.jottit.com/howtoget

I agree with the second part of this point; in regard to the particular subject, hopefulness that said subject will finance one's startup is an integral part of it.

 ProxyRequests Off

Which means people can joy-ride using your server as an open proxy.

I don't know what possessed them to make that an opt-OUT.

<Proxy *> -- news. yc markup bug, can't specify a single asterisk if italic markup follows.

Fail. IQ tests only measure how well you do on IQ tests.

> The problem here is that not every human being is intelligent

Unless they're in a vegetative state, they are more intelligent than any artificial system, so far.

> Is that the way you formulate tasks for software engineers?

The only way to make a specification so precise that it does exactly what you want is to implement it, and then the code itself becomes the specification.

If anything, the spies who stole U.S. secrets inadvertently did the world a favor. Countries with a nuclear arsenal don't get invaded.

If Iraq had had nukes, we might have made major strides to become energy independent by now, instead of thinking it was easier to go in there, beat them up, and steal their oil.

"Incidentally, the last straw, I've been told, was some bug in CMUCL threads that kept making the system crash."

http://groups.google.com/group/comp.lang.lisp/msg/574d19d5e7...

The process of discovery is hands-on, learning by doing. You don't know all the rules at the outset, or all the definitions, or even know what you don't know. You find out as you go along. Thus it has been for every great invention from sex to agriculture to post-it notes to landing a man on the Moon and back to on-demand porn.

The real requirement is that we have some way to test it; that we can do, e.g. by conversation. To cop an example from quantum mechanics (which I know nothing about), we don't have to understand why it is like that in order to make predictions with it.

We don't need a clear and unambiguous definition of intelligence in order to tell that other human beings are intelligent. Likewise, we don't need one in order to start trying to create an artifice that impresses us into thinking it also is intelligent.

This was quite impressive, and on the right track, seemingly: http://hci.stanford.edu/~winograd/shrdlu/

Begin at the beginning and go on till you come to the end: then stop.

You're darn well gonna wait -- and LIKE it!

Fortunately, it takes significantly less time than that -- no more than three and a half billion years. Haha, and you were worried!

Wow. Word to MY mother.

http://www.zdnetasia.com/news/security/0,39044215,62032221,0...

http://www.betanews.com/article/Experts_Astonished_to_Learn_...

Not to mention all the hidden metadata and undo information in your MS Word files. If you value privacy, using a proprietary OS (including OS X) is not the way to get it.

"Instead of rewriting its gambling laws, the U.S. rewrote its trade rules to remove the issue from the WTO's jurisdiction," writes Lorraine Woellert. "The prospect that other countries may take a similar tack if cases do not go their way has alarmed the international trade community."

Hey! No erasies!

Rewriting the rules after you already agreed to them... priceless.

I can't think of any phenomenon less likely area to have a simple algorithm than intelligence.

Cf. Evolution.

It might even be something simple, overlooked, done a little differently.

The rest of the world just says AI. It's like a million to one, we win. Don't make me have to call M.C. Hawking.