ambler0

Just focus on the first two sentences. Take the notion of causality. It underlies all of empirical science, yet it is not something that can be proved empirically. It is a given, a built in part of how we perceive things. You can read more about this if you check out the work of David Hume or Immanuel Kant.

There is nothing naive about recognizing that human knowledge is limited by our knowing apparatus. What is truly naive is to mistake the models of science with "reality itself" (a nebulous term)

I would never say that I support Russia in any of this, but it's important to put the hypocritical Western pearl-clutching in context:

The near-universal Western condemnation of Putin includes citing the "emotional address" in which he complained bitterly that the U.S. and its allies had "cheated us again and again, made decisions behind our back, presenting us with completed facts with the expansion of NATO in the East, with the deployment of military infrastructure at our borders. They always told us the same thing: 'Well, this doesn't involve you.' "

Putin's complaints are factually accurate. When President Gorbachev accepted the unification of Germany as part of NATO -- an astonishing concession in the light of history -- there was a quid pro quo. Washington agreed that NATO would not move "one inch eastward," referring to East Germany.

The promise was immediately broken, and when Gorbachev complained, he was instructed that it was only a verbal promise, so without force.

President Clinton proceeded to expand NATO much farther to the east, to Russia's borders. Today there are calls to extend NATO even to Ukraine, deep into the historic Russian "neighborhood." But it "doesn't involve" the Russians, because its responsibility to "uphold peace and stability" requires that American red lines are at Russia's borders.

http://www.chomsky.info/articles/20140501.htm

Looks like it's alive and well to me. The "Old Friends" hypothesis by Rook mentioned in the article appears to be from 2003.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hygiene_hypothesis

Discounting the future self is only one of many possible reasons for procrastination, which is a complex subject. If you want to listen to a podcast that reviews the many different lines of inquiry into the subject, including several branches of science and also philosophy, check out the iProcrastinate podcast with Dr. Tim Pychyl.

http://iprocrastinate.libsyn.com/

I was wondering the same thing. From that section, somewhat incoherently and with typo:

"You're [sic] parents and grandparents knew it was true. This is a, Christan-based, truism that is fundamental to our society."

To the people saying this is not a problem, it is. In particular, iMessage seems to often get confused when trying to send a picture. The progress bar will get to half or even mostly full, and then just pause ...forever.

It's not a connection issue. On several occasions after running into this iMessage issue, I have emailed the picture full-res without problems.

That said, I don't think iMessage is terrible. I love it when it works as expected.

I took him to mean that everyone at Harvard who doesn't come from wealth gets a huge amount of financial aid.

Isn't the latest Xcode beta available to anyone, developer account or no?

https://developer.apple.com/swift/resources/

I've never heard of this. Do you have an actual source?

Exactly what I was thinking. Hipmunk does something like this for minimizing the pain of flying, which I always thought was a great idea.

There was a very good one for the Wii that came out not long after that system's launch:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zack_%26_Wiki:_Quest_for_Barbar...

I have always wondered what the probability of being struck by lightning is, given that you are actually outside during a thunderstorm. We always use the phrase "chances of getting struck by lightning" as a stand-in for a very low probability, but I think that probability includes everyone, whether they actually venture out into storms or not.

I have to agree with inscrutablemike here. Seems to me that all forms of human knowledge have both an empirical and a rational component.

From the article: "Social-media competitors Twitter and Pinterest do honor the setting."

From the last paragraph:

"The Machine isn’t on HP’s official roadmap. Fink says it could arrive as early as 2017 or take until the end of the decade. Any delivery date has to be taken with some skepticism given that HP has been hyping the memristor technology for years and failed to meet earlier self-imposed deadlines."

So, does anyone actually know whether significant new progress is being made on this project, or is this article just a win for HP's PR department and nothing more?

I think we agree. And I think Turing's point in choosing a conversation as the test was to pick something that would indicate the vast range of human experience. If a computer could pass a strong version of the test as you describe, then I would agree that we would have say, as you do, "if it looks like a duck, .... then it is a duck."

But I don't agree that it renders the concept of conciousness meaningless (or at least any more meangingless, depending on what you think about the concept now). On the contrary, I think we might have to say, "this computer is probably concious", and afford it all of the rights that we do for humans.

BTW I don't think either Turing or Chomsky would say that >Things like free will, love, or consciousness are apparently outside of the natural world

I obviously don't speak for either of them, but I'm pretty sure they both subscribe to the theory of causal determinism and computational theory of mind.

I think most people misunderstand the intent of Turing's paper in which he describes his eponymous test. I agree with Chomsky's reading, which he laid out in "Language & Thought":

"There is a great deal of often heated debate about these matters in the literature of the cognitive sciences, artificial intelligence, and philosophy of mind, but it is hard to see that any serious question has been posed. The question of whether a computer is playing chess, or doing long division, or translating Chinese, is like the question of whether robots can murder or airplanes can fly -- or people; after all, the "flight" of the Olympic long jump champion is only an order of magnitude short of that of the chicken champion (so I'm told). These are questions of decision, not fact; decision as to whether to adopt a certain metaphoric extension of common usage.

There is no answer to the question whether airplanes really fly (though perhaps not space shuttles). Fooling people into mistaking a submarine for a whale doesn't show that submarines really swim; nor does it fail to establish the fact. There is no fact, no meaningful question to be answered, as all agree, in this case. The same is true of computer programs, as Turing took pains to make clear in the 1950 paper that is regularly invoked in these discussions. Here he pointed out that the question whether machines think "may be too meaningless to deserve discussion," being a question of decision, not fact, though he speculated that in 50 years, usage may have "altered so much that one will be able to speak of machines thinking without expecting to be contradicted" -- as in the case of airplanes flying (in English, at least), but not submarines swimming. Such alteration of usage amounts to the replacement of one lexical item by another one with somewhat different properties. There is no empirical question as to whether this is the right or wrong decision.

In this regard, there has been serious regression since the first cognitive revolution, in my opinion. Superficially, reliance on the Turing test is reminiscent of the Cartesian approach to the existence of other minds. But the comparison is misleading. The Cartesian experiments were something like a litmus test for acidity: they sought to determine whether an object has a certain property, in this case, possession of mind, one aspect of the world. But that is not true of the artificial intelligence debate.

Another superficial similarity is the interest in simulation of behavior, again only apparent, I think. As I mentioned earlier, the first cognitive revolution was stimulated by the achievements of automata, much as today, and complex devices were constructed to simulate real objects and their functioning: the digestion of a duck, a flying bird, and so on. But the purpose was not to determine whether machines can digest or fly. Jacques de Vaucanson, the great artificer of the period, was concerned to understand the animate systems he was modeling; he constructed mechanical devices in order to formulate and validate theories of his animate models, not to satisfy some performance criterion."

http://www.chomsky.info/books/prospects01.htm

"I’m also letting go of second chances. One strike and you’re out."

This is the part that I came to criticize as well. To me, it doesn't sound like letting go at all; it sounds like holding on to a grudge.

I excommunicated a family member from my life a while ago. I thought I was protecting myself and my family, but I was really just prolonging my own pain. I have since forgiven him and cautiously started letting him back into my life in limited ways. To me, that's an example of really letting go.

Does anyone have a link to a screen shot of the new "dark mode"? If I've seen it, I didn't notice it.

By what measure is Google poorer than Microsoft? They have less free cash flow, but a greater market cap.

http://ycharts.com/companies/MSFT http://ycharts.com/companies/GOOG

In any case, the spirit of my original comment was just to say that it's a notable omission from the article. I think that ansimionescu was right to point out the (perhaps subtle) difference between the author's actual explanation and my misquotation.

That's fair. He's saying that he doesn't want to take the time to read the terms and therefore cannot in good conscience agree to them. A rare breed, to be sure, as commenter Dmitry Minkovsky points out.

Notably absent from the article, but spelled out in the comments, is that the author doesn't have an AppleID because he doesn't want to agree to Apple's terms, and therefore cannot acquire a kernel debug kit.

My understanding is that the importance of the indica-sativa dichotomy has been vastly exaggerated and that whatever differences exist between strains are more complicated. Think of something like a fingerprint that specifies the levels of various cannabinoids.

It can cause both of those response in the same person. Even within the same session

I fully support legalization and find marijuana to be relatively harmless compared to other recreational drugs, but comparing it to coffee is ludicrous!

Fun fact: Paul Simon lifted the basic harmony and melody for his song "American Tune" from that piece, which itself lifted them from an earlier piece. Remixing is not a new phenomenon!

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/American_Tune

Well I think Gruber himself actually summed it up quite well:

"There’s almost never a good reason to use a different word to describe a woman’s job than the words you’d choose if the position were held by a man."

I don't think it really matters what specific connotations you personally have for the word "queen". What matters is how the conversation subtly becomes about the person's gender instead of their job in these articles.

I'm confused about this part: "While Tuesday’s rulings appear to be good news for patent reform advocates, they also raise the question of whether they might undercut a major patent bill that is slated to be debated in the Senate on Thursday."

Anyone with knowledge of this care to explain?

The only part I would disagree with is the assertion that learning a second language "isn't really different" than learning a native language. My wife, who has a masters degree in theoretical linguistics and teaches English as a foreign language, has spoken to me several times about the differences between first and second language acquisition.

(Many ESL teachers are simply English speakers living in another country, but many of them are also like my wife, doing what is essentially applied linguistics.)

Other than that, I completely agree. The notion that you are simply doomed to only have one language after the crucial period is exaggerated, and the key to learning another language is immersion.