"I maintain my stance that Windows 9.5 will be the version that changes everything, with Windows 9.8 mostly getting it right."

Nice joke, but I'm actually hoping for this. It would be poetic justice.

Microsoft's new CEO (with a tough to remember name!) Satya Nadella at least seems to be coming from an engineering perspective rather than Steve B's pure marketing. So after he gets settled, I in fact really am hoping he'll be the next Dave Cutler who pulls a stunning new revision to Windows that really makes *almost everyone* happy. Then maybe it will get a Win95-98-2000-2001-Win7 type cleanup but in record time and set the tech world abuzz.

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

Bravo. Truly a Mod-Limit buster.

I even saved a copy to my computer. : )

It's been in development for months, but some middle manager decided that the day that XP died was the day to push this out.

Offtopic: Does anyone know of a Day the Music Died song parody called something like "Day my XP Died"?

But you think you're being cute about "Internet Exploder", right?

But go visit the page yourself!

Did they get hacked? The blue link button ACTUALLY SAYS "Internet Exploder"!!?

So what kind of mixed message is that?!

P.S. I saved a copy of the page in case it's actually a hack that gets reverted later. Such reversions could be post-April-Fools...

Meta joke of the day: Imagine Kate Mulgrew reciting that post! : )

She was also a regent on Warehouse 13.

I swear I've learned more 4th hand about Aussie Law on Slashdot than any year in college!

So the way this site works, we get about *eleven* countries chipping in!

USA of course, Australia apparently, Germany, three Scandinavian countries, four people from China and Iran as AC, Britain, Ireland, and your choice of four more!

"I'd heard that it may literally have had to do with the handwriting: the man's handwriting was, shall we say, idiosyncratic, and it takes considerable effort to decipher. His son Christopher devoted a lifetime to it. John Rateliff, who did similar work for drafts of The Hobbit, consulted with a Tolkien graphologist in the process. (He was able to get a rough dating for one scrawl based on the details of the handwriting.) The fact that there even exists such a thing as a "Tolkien graphologist" is absurdly wonderful".

Given Tolkien's use of proper nouns every twelve words, this sounds fascinating!

"The fact that the Lord of the Rings has appendices with back stories, histories, evolution of languages, and sorts of other little interesting tidbits quite clearly show Tolkien was not only an author but a scholar as well."

I was of an odd age that fell between the right ages to truly appreciate Tolkien's efforts. But with a still-young appreciation for finesse, I *did* notice all those appendices. To this day High Fantasy hits a spot that I can't read, but I absolutely noticed the sixty pages (!) of appendices!

Well, the existentialism of this variant of it is rather tough!

http://garfieldminusgarfield.n...

I agree, but to abuse a concept from intelligence, (which I also call the No True Scotsman theme), the "Singularity" is when *everybody's* partial approaches "rise and must converge" (Flannery O'Connor).

So you stick a modded Watson on General Knowledge, a chess program, a med diagnostic program, *three* chatterbots with an arbiter meta-module to sync and/or tiebreak, some special custom "awareness" modules, and your pick of twelve skillsets, 14 "hobbies", some self-mod programming, and ... you're getting something interesting. Because then you *reverse search* someone with that set of skills and ask the person, "okay, what else makes you intelligent and interesting?"

It used to be called "God of the Gaps" in religious contexts. We're way closer to it all than 2029. Since I know that 70% of y'all are way smarter than lil' ol' me, I just need "someone" ... wait for it ... ("something"?) ... to talk to.

Still calling out to work with someone on a custom modded Chatterbot. "All" we need to do is give it a bunch more modules and then we have a nice experiment on our hands, at least as good as the stuff we've been seeing in the Articles.

Terrifyingly, "The Hate" might be one of the easier first things to simulate in AI!

The reason is that it's often demonstrated with a far lower level "skillset" than the smart comments.

See for example the (thinning?) pure troll posts here. Despite the rise in lots of other things, I'm noticing fewer pure troll posts of the worst vicious kind. I wondered idly why they got here so regularly. Anyone remember the ones that went:

"so you sukerz ya haterz loosers you take it and shove it?"

Any 1000 of you could write a 100 line program that can run circles around that!

I still do one day wish to work with any Chattterbot programmer who wants to try some custom mods.

This is one of the approaches I've been poking at off and on for a while as noted in my remarks over the years in these stories.

To me an instructive experiment is to go all the way to the top and give the program some initial values not unlike Asimovian ones, and then it builds a "like/dislike" matrix of people and things.

It's not that far off from college dorm discussions! : )

So then going back to basics, you feed it info about people doing things, it runs those against its "like/dislike" systems, and updates what it thinks about "people and stuff".

This is one of the areas where Stephen Wolfram's idea of "computational complexity" starts to show up. Feed Info, Evaluate, Update Opinions.

David Gerrold got closer than maybe we think with his SciFi book "When Harlie was one". It's easy for us to get bogged down in arrogance when we have all of experience to trick the machine with Loebner questions, but if we start simple enough, a Chatterbot armed with pre-processed 100 million articles on 100,000 topics and 100,000 people and some expert systems subroutine modules starts to come close enough for me as a "useful entity" to study!

Oh I know this one!

This is where that young boy becomes the youngest Seeker in school history, and then later sends messages via his Superb Owl! Then later Hermione studies hard because she wants to pass her Ordinary Wizard Levels!

Thank you for echoing the angle I have been concerned about for a while now!

We have almost been tricked into believing there are "different classes of copyrights"!

Not counting the cases the courts have specifically ruled on, there's no intrinsic difference between a photo and a song in the copyright sense. Flannery O'Connor had the right idea: "Everything that rises must converge".

So thanks to the Music Industry deciding that Copyrights are Big Biz, then ... a student's photos are too. Check out the key phrase from the Color Run suit:
"The lawsuit argues that Jackson "gave the Color Run an implied license" to use his pictures and that it "inadvertently" used them in print promotions."

Oh hello Soulskill, nice to see you in the comments.

Unfortunately "last few days are hectic" isn't remotely close to right. Last Few Years, if you wheeled out that excuse. But no, don't do that either. "Last Few X is Hectic" is a tired phrase now that Big Bad Dice owns you and you have lots of firepower to add!

Uh... oh. Wait. I just heard 3rd hand they just decided both you AND us are ... worth zero!

So what exactly are any of us here doing with a value of Zero? Can you buy them out with a Dollar? (Rhetoric, Wall Street Shenanigans may apply.)

I'll leave the extended comedy routines to others. X of us see a value in a quiet eddy current called Slashdot. Since your value is officially zero, why again exactly are you going with Beta?

Plus, I asked months/a year ago about exporting existing comments out of Slashdot but you/They made sure that was never close to a possibility... really now? Data Capture? I calculate I have almost 100 blog topics stored in raw material here. But no. You gang NEVER made ANY easy export tools under ANY management even BEFORE Dice.

So I'm not going all Swearword-Beta. I'm attacking different problems. But still unhappy.

Yours,
--Tao