Because the post that the GP was replying to ended (if you ignore the smiley face) in an ellipsis followed by a full stop / period, not the four periods suggested by the GP.

Ever heard of an ellipsis?

TBH I knew that such sensors exist. They're even fitted as standard in my car, albeit with a somewhat different purpose, and will happily bitch that someone hasn't got their seatbelt on if it detects enough weight without the corresponding belt being fastened. Bugs the crap out of me when I have the car relatively loaded and whatever I've put on the seat is heavy enough to trip the sensor. At least it only beeps at me, rather than cutting the engine!

... Should have guessed that would happen...

My comment was something of a play on words, not so much a suggested fix to the problem in TFA. I, personally, haven't RTFA yet (crappy mobile internet connection).

Here in the UK, bum is almost always used as a colloquialism for what Americans call their butt/ass/fanny/whatever...

The humour intended in my comment appears to have been lost in translation.

Ermm... Possibly because the Turing test is a test of INTELLIGENCE, not KNOWLEDGE. They are the different, but related, concepts. A person who can reliably parrot a whole host of facts is often considered knowledgeable, but not necessarily intelligent.

By your example, an encyclopaedia would be considered knowledgeable... Would you also say that the encyclopaedia itself was intelligent?

Assuming he means a sensor to detect whether the driver is sat and the seat, surely a heavy enough bag ought to do the job?!?

But then again, you're comparing the processing capabilities of a computer to what I (as someone who hasn't studied this field in great depth, so I may screw up the terminology somewhat) would refer to as the human brain's ability to consciously process information. You seem to be forgetting that the human brain is also sub-consciously processing immense data-sets of information that we probably aren't even fully aware of, just to keep us alive, create out emotions, sensations and a whole host of other things that are part of sentience. Some of this sub-conscious processing may even spill over into our conscious processing, affecting the conclusions and decisions that we come to. This may be where at least part of our creativity comes from and could partly explain why computers are, thus far, particularly suited to raw analytical tasks, while humans are seemingly better suited to more creative endeavors.

A key question at this point would be, assuming the above to be correct, will a computer ever be capable of truly creative tasks, and without such, can it ever be considered truly sentient, or merely a simulation of sentience?

It's an image from an article in a newspaper that, if there was any real justice in the world, would be relegated to serve only for wrapping my dinner when I pick it up from the local chippie.

I think that this is part of the problem, and why people are so scared of the idea of AI.

We don't know enough about what makes US sentient/intelligent. Because of this:

1) If we ever do create an AI, we won't be able to control it

2) If our means of avoiding (1) is to stop any research/development just short of the steps that would grant it sentience/intelligence, how can we do this if we don't know just what it is that grants US our sentience/intelligence. Bearing this in mind, we could create an AI construct by accident and, in our panic to control it, turn it against us.

OK... first thing's first... I'm not in the field of AI.

That being said, my understanding is that, for something to be classified as a true AI, it needs to develop at least a rudimentary form of sentience. In other words, it needs to "think for itself". A lot of the fears and pop-culture around the dangers of AI surrounds what would happen if the AI were to "think" in ways we don't want it to.

So what's the solution? Restrict its ability to think for itself? Then it fails the sentience test and cannot be considered as qualifying as a "true" AI.

Alternatively, we could try to encourage it to think the way we want it to. A couple of things to bear in mind here:

1) We don't even fully understand how WE think for ourselves yet.

2) We have tried to encourage the way people think in particular directions in the past (organised religion, brainwashing, politics, advertising, etc) and look where it's brought us!

What worries me (OK... worries is a strong word. It doesn't keep me up at night or anything like that!) isn't so much that we might, somehow, create a true AI, more that when we do, we will be so worried about it thinking thoughts that we don't want it to that we'll screw it up.

Erm... Did someone get kicked out of college for misunderstanding the meaning of the term "animal husbandry"???

At least things aren't as bad as when the "Scunthorpe Problem" was rife! Those are days I'm glad to have behind me.

Running a school network and suddenly finding that you are unable to email colleagues or browse websites with Essex, Sussex, Wessex or Scunthorpe in their addresses was annoying... but having to explain this to the ISP who implemented the block was a challenge. Techs there just didn't seem to be able to get their heads around the concept of a SUB-string being a problem (they thought their filter was only parsing whole addresses for comparison against the "think of the children" list.

That being said... Chrome's spell-check remains convinced that Scunthorpe isn't a word!

WRONG! The ruling is that such articles should not be returned as results when specified search terms are entered. This allows for the article to be returned in response to other search terms. Such an approach is largely in the public interest, as it means that should an article no longer be a relevant result for one person, but is still relevant for others, you can still find the article by searching for the any of the others. Take for example the following:

An article is published stating that Mr A, Mrs A, Mr B and Mr C were all arrested in connection with crime X, committed against victim Miss D.
Mr B subsequently has charges against him dropped when it became apparent that he was not involved.
The media continue to report on the case as it proceeds through the courts without mentioning Mr B.
There is no media report about the charges against Mr B being dropped.

In your interpretation of the ruling (let's call this scenario 1), searching for Mr A, Mrs A, Mr C or Miss D won't bring up the article either, despite its relevance to them.

If it is implemented according to the spirit of the ruling (and, based on my cursory and untrained reading of it, the letter of the ruling), a search for any keyword or name in the article EXCEPT for Mr B's name will bring it up, but a search for Mr B will not (we'll call this scenario 2).

And why would Mr B necessarily care if someone searching for information on Mr A turns up this article. They aren't interested in him, so for it to turn up will have no impact on him one way or another. If someone was going to be researching Mr B (for a potential employment opportunity or whatever), why would they be entering search terms like Mr A, Mrs A, Mr C, Miss D or Crime X unless they already knew enough about him that they knew about the event (and therefore are likely to know that he wasn't mentioned in later reports, or may even know that the charges were dropped.). If they do know enough about Mr Bs past to know he was tangentially involved with (for example) Mrs A, a search on Mrs A will bring up both the article where Mr B is mentioned as being arrested, and the results for the rest of the case where Mr B is NOT mentioned, allowing the searcher to infer that the charges were dropped (and if they're not able to draw such inferences, are they really the sort of people you want to be working for).

If the status quo prior to this ruling remained in place (scenario 3), you would have the situation that a search on Mr B would bring up the article linking him to the crime, but because there was no mention about the charges being dropped, additional searches would need to be made to bring up other articles pertaining to the case that omit his name, thereby providing an implication of sorts that the charges were dropped. Would most potential employers search on other terms in the article to see if the proceedings continued without Mr B's involvement?

If you put yourself in the position of Mr A, Mrs A or Mr C, you are likely to prefer scenario 1. Mr B also benefits from this scenario, but what about Miss D (or the courts, police, media or society at large), who would want to ensure that no-one else become the victims of Mr A, Mrs A or Mr C? Mr B certainly won't be a big fan of scenario 3, as it is a pretty raw deal for him and him alone. In scenario 2, Mr B is afforded a proportionate degree of protection from the ill effects of the persistence of accurate, but no longer relevant, reporting, Mr A, Mrs A and Mr C remain easily linked to a report that remains both accurate and relevant with regard to them and Miss D gets the reassurance that, whilst she remains a victim, at least the chances of others falling victim to the same perpetrators is reduced with only minimal persistent risk of harm to the reputation of Mr B. If you put yourself in the position of Miss D, the police, the courts, society at large or the media themselves, which scenario would you rather be the reality?

OK... so the last group may not really be a valid test, especially with the current ad-supported media. To them any hit is a potential source of income, so they'd rather have as many search terms hit the article as possible. If you take ad revenue/ brand recognition out of the equation, however, and look at it from a pure fairness point of view, would you not agree that the courts' decision was the fairest outcome?

The above notwithstanding, the implementation does leave something to be desired. Having the search engines handle such requests themselves is, IMHO, wrong. Each of the EU member states has, I believe, an (often independent) government department whose role is to protect the personal data of its citizens. Surely it would have made more sense to make this a responsibility of such departments, so that they can collate and vet such requests, then farm them out simultaneously to ALL search engines simultaneously, negating the need for the applicant to apply to each search engine individually, with the potential that some will accept the request, while others will not. This would ensure uniformity, and potentially negate the potential for search engines to compete on the basis of how they comply with such requests. I am not sure, however, whether the courts have such authority. It may be necessary for the EU Parliament to pass legislation to add this responsibility to those already held by these departments. If this were to happen, it would hopefully bring the added benefit of eliminating within the legislation any of the potential for misinterpretation that has resulted form this ruling (although there will always be those who, either through ignorance or deliberately being troublesome, will misinterpret it).

Quick point to note... You don't get the "quote parent" button if you're using the mobile view of /. It's also a royal PITA to manually type those tags in using a mobile interface. Personally, I would like to see the "quote parent" button implemented on the mobile interface, and I'm sure that there are a sizable number of others who would concur. At least until they do implement this, cut posters like aepervius some slack.

Either I have completely misunderstood the OP's question, or, it would appear, everyone else has.

The way I read it is as follows:

I get a lot of SPAM in my spam folder, and I also get the odd (very) occasional false-positive dumped in there along with it. My inbox is almost SPAM-free. Other mail providers can block SPAM from even being received, so not only does it not appear in my inbox, it doesn't even make it into my SPAM-folder. Why can't Google do this too, as it would make hunting through the SPAM-folder for false-positives much easier?

If this is the question that the OP meant to ask, the only reason I can think of, off the top of my head, is that if they did reject, rather than receive and sideline, suspected SPAM, and they hit a false-positive with that approach, they are worried that their user-base would be up in arms about it. Better to let everything through and sideline (i.e. Dump it into a separate folder) anything that they think is SPAM, than to completely prevent the receipt of any legitimate email that they misidentify.

Whether this approach is better or worse than the alternative is obviously somewhat of a subjective question.

This all being said, I may have completely misunderstood the OP's question, in which case, I would agree that Gmail is working as intended and the OP is simply holding it wrong!