I work at a large engineering company where nearly everyone is a Windows user and about 1/3 are also *nix users. I don't know about how well informed my Windows admins are. I do know that the first thing out of their mouth no matter what my problem is: "Have you tried rebooting?" If you answer "no", either they will ask you to reboot or they will reboot for you remotely.

You will never, ever hear this question (or the corresponding recommendation if you answer in the negative) from one of our *nix admins. Rebooting is always the last option in the *nix world.

I don't think that the issue is the intelligence of the admins. I think the issue is the amount of variability in the Windows environment. Despite the company's attempts to moderate it, many users have a lot of crap on their Windows machines. Rebooting probably evolved to be the default action when Windows machines misbehave... which is quite frequently, relative to *nix machines. Also, rebooting a Windows box rarely affects anyone except the user that is having the problem - it's a relatively benign strategy.

I caught your subtlety, but I failed to convey mine. I'm not merely saying that I think differently than a computer because I can generalize concepts. I'm saying that I think differently because I do (constantly) generalize concepts. Sure, I might come up with the trivially correct response to a challenge, but my mind doesn't stop there. I don't know about you, but I'm not a very effective fact machine. I'm not very good at pulling out the correct response to some challenge without dredging up a lot of other related information. My mind will continue to consider the nuances of the issue, explore the conceptual space, possibly to the point of distraction... so much so that I might miss the next challenge, or at least be slow on the buzzer...

The machine, on the other hand would recognize that the required response had been given and that the play was over and it would be ready with a blank slate, waiting for the next challenge.

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Or "that a computer understands something"...

Oh yeah? Then I challenge you to tell me how it would be possible to represent "everything in the entire universe" in binary. Let's take the smallest known informational representation - the qubit. It takes more than one binary bit to represent one qubit. However, a binary bit has no meaning without some substrate. That substrate would necessarily be made up of the very quantum particles that it was trying to represent. Therefore it would take more binary bits of information to represent "everything in the universe" than there is universe to represent it.

Incidentally, this is merely a variation on Godel's Incompleteness Theorem.

No. Quite the opposite. The reason I know I'm different in the way I grasp the birth date of John of Gaunt is because I can generalize the concept of birth date in ways that a machine cannot. Your example is a perfect one to demonstrate my point. I can look up on Google and find out that the man known as John of Gaunt was born March 6th, 1340. That seems like a reasonably well established factoid. However, is this the birth date of John of Gaunt? I subject to you that it is not. It may well be the birth date of the person who came to be known as John of Gaunt, but I'm reasonably certain that he was not known by that name on that date. It would have been many years later that he would come to be known as John of Gaunt. So I would argue that this is the birth date of John of Gaunt.

Would a machine understand this distinction? Could a machine even parse this distinction?

I can consider the birth date of other things that a machine would not comprehend - the birth date of the universe; or the birth date of my car; or the birth date of manned space flight. There are an infinite number of things I can consider the birth date of. Things that were neither born nor have a specific date to associate.

I can also consider of the birth date of an idea. I can even consider the birth date of the specific idea that I can consider the birth date of an idea.

While it may be possible to train a machine to make similar generalizations, it is not possible to train a machine to generalize any arbitrary concept. That's how I know there's something different going on in my brain.

That's the way modern machine learning works - by pattern matching and training. Incidentally, how do you think learning works in wet-ware? We learned decades ago that rule-based learning has severe limitations. It would be impractical to use a rule-based approach even for a single, specific Jeopardy category.

In the Nova episode you mention, they make it clear that this is in no way comparable to "understanding". It is still merely numerical manipulation.

They had a special on Nova a few nights ago. Had you watched this, you would know that Watson combines several artificial intelligence and machine learning technologies to achieve it's level of proficiency. However, it still does not "understand" the problems it is solving.

Thanks for that. You made me smile...

Like I said, we've not been able to do it on my daughter's iPhone. We get crappy reception at my house and there are rooms where calls will get dropped in a heartbeat... on my Samsung. Still, with the iPhone, we get crystal clear reception... even when we cup the phone with the so-called death grip and bridge the antennas.

Furthermore, I have a lot of friends who have iPhone 4s. None of them have been able to duplicate the death grip phenomenon except in extreme environments where no other phone brands are getting any signal at all. So, for something that's so "easy to do"...

Believe me, I'm no fan of the iPhone. I tried to talk my daughter out of it. I tried to convince her that the antenna issue might be a problem... however, the damn thing is solid - more solid than any other phone in the family. I still wouldn't have one, but I'm convinced that the antenna issue is overblown.

My Samsung Mythic is also 'haunted' by a death grip...

My Blackberry Pearl (before that) - 'haunted' by a death grip...

Ironically... daughter's iPhone 4 - no death grip...

Somewhere, though already long since dead, a horse is continuously beaten... but the rest of the world moves on...

OK. I guess that's one way of defining invisible.

So I can't see the pink material... I can still see the wedge of reflective material covering it. By this definition, I could throw a blanket over it and - 'poof' - it's invisible...

If you read the actual complaint there are three claims. One of them is that data services were charged for were data not requested and that seems to be the one that everyone is focused on. Maybe there's background services, maybe not. However, a better explanation is actually that there is only one issue - the last one in the complaint. This complaint is that charges are not always applied at the same time that the usage occurs. I know that this one is true - I've witnessed it myself, was penalized for it, then AT&T forgave the penalty (more on that in a second).

This billing lag could easily explain why data charges were incurred during a period of time when the phone was supposedly inactive.

My daughter recently got an iPhone with the 200MB plan. We were monitoring her data usage regularly and towards the end of the billing cycle we saw that she would go over if she continued with the same consumption. So she stopped using the data apps... she went over anyway and we were billed for $30 instead of the $15 we had budgeted for. After my daughter swore that she had not used the web in the last week, I called AT&T to find out what the deal was. I was finally able to confirm with a tech that indeed, some data activity might not be billed for days after the usage. He told me that he could confirm that my daughter had actually exceeded her limit a day or so before she ceased activity. AT&T was kind enough to drop the extra $15 since their tool had misguided us. I checked and as far as I can tell, AT&T makes no claims as to whether billing for services rendered occurs at the time of rendering.