Here on Chiron Beta Prime I think they made me a pie.

Ok, so I see this a lot but what never seem to be mentioned is what percentage of total income is make by the people in those upper brackets.

If the to 1% make 50% of all earned income and only pay 30% of income taxes then it seems that they might be under taxed. The problem I have is that I don't really know how much the top 1%, 5%, or 10% make compared to the rest of the income earning population. Maybe someone with better than my poor Google skills can find an uncontroversial source for those numbers.

It's not that this necessarily invalidates your point, just that without the missing information I have no way to judge and yet I keep seeing similar posts to yours which kind of bothers me.

David

HTML 5 video allows specifying several video files, in different formats, inside the same HTML object. This means, like happened for PNG vs GIF, a server can host both file formats, say Theora and H.264, and the client decides which one it wants to play back.

I see your joking and sarcasm comprehension is at a 4th grade level.

I'll simplify it for you.

(ahem)

I... WAS... FUCKING... JOKING!!!

The city I moved from last year upgraded all their meters to electronic ones. When you arrive you punch the spot number into a machine that takes coins or credit. You can also add money from your phone, so you don't need to return to fill up the meter. Enforcement is by a Google Streets-style car that drives around and records license plate numbers. There's no discretion. If your car is there when they go past and you haven't paid, you get a ticket.

I've never heard of a meter maid covering up a parking signs. I'm not American though. Perhaps you have more corruption than we do.

I find it quite rare that every student is interested in the topic, regardless of the professors teaching skills. The next time you teach a class ask your students "Where would you rather be than here" and see if anyone says "nowhere". The difference is some people choose to act on that, even if you are an incredibly interesting and engaging teacher.

Accuracy will suck, even with a trained human.

Hence a running joke in the Deaf community about the saleswoman peddling beauty aids with "Olive Juice". (it lipreads as "I love you" ) I believe it was a "sunshine II" skit. Yeah, I was an interpreter for like 10 years.

Purple and orange go together sublimely, like crème brulée and gravel.

Doubtful because Apple isn't as large as Microsoft and therefor not considered a threat of a monopoly. Even in the smart phone business. So while there is competition, there can't be a forcing like this.

Well I guess they could. They could go down to SC and register and then, when the government tried to bust them for being subversives point out that having a law that requires you to testify against yourself is in violation of the Fifth Amendment much like Tim Leary did when this country passed the Marihuana Tax Act I mean, making the government and law makers look like a bunch of uneducated douches is kinda subversive act.

I think the stupidity lies within the selective readers who have no problem reading, analyzing, and interpreting what you quoted, but gloss right over the last several words requiring it be in a VIOLENT MANNER.

I am, and have been, aware of all this.

Please show me how any of these represent major advances in AI, as opposed to just more processing power and some programming trickery. A clever program still does not represent artificial intelligence.

I am a software engineer by trade, and hardware is something of a hobby of mine. I have been keeping up. And while computing has done some awesome things in the last decade or so, I still have not seen anything that qualifies as a "breakthrough" in AI.

The only way the advances that have been made will lead to AI is if, as I stated, intelligence is more a matter of quantity over quality. And I am not convinced that it is.

The examples you gave, with the possible exception of Robinson's Conjecture, are all special-purpose software or tasks that can reasonably be expected to improve by throwing mere brute force and (human-written) programming behind them. But they will never pass a Turing test or make you a good martini. For the most part the AI question is really more about how a task is being accomplished, than what is being accomplished.

Some of the early computer proofs were seriously questioned because they made use of iterative methods that processed much more data than the verifiers could reasonably be expected to examine any other way. (And iterative methods are what computers have always been good at; they seem to have little in common with AI.) It came close to a situation where it would take one or more other computer programs to verify the validity of the software used, which could literally lead to an endless regression. Not because of any "intelligence" involved, but simply because of the sheer amount of computation.

(I should note that no endless regression should be necessary unless the problem under consideration is NP-complete, in which case there is no way to know in advance.)

In any case, in that context, I would not pretend to make a judgment about how Robinson's Conjecture was proven without knowing more about how it was proven. I know what it is, but I know nothing about the proof.

I also tried to put myself into the shoes of an Iranian fundamentalist,but I got frustrated and decided to throw those shoes at someone.

Uh no, it's to demonstrate that the code "works". The problem here is what it means "to work". Part of the usefulness of TDD is that you might not fully understand what it means "to work" yet, and the tests help you flesh that out.

Let me clarify, so you don't think I'm 100% ditching what you're saying versus stating it a different way. A test suite will tend to have BOTH tests for what the correct behavior *is* and also tests for what the correct behavior *is not*. In other words, what you're doing is defining the BOUNDARIES between correct and incorrect behavior. You're right in the sense that if your *strategy* is to write only *optimistic* tests (i.e. "proving that it works"), you'll miss subtle areas where the behavior isn't fully clarified (i.e. corner cases).

But here's the problem: for absolutely anything in the universe, there is an INFINITE number of things something *is not*, but only a finite amount of things something *is*. I've seen people go too crazy with using tests as a way of type-checking everything where smarter data types would have been a better choice, or performing a hundred "this isn't what I want" tests that could have been handled with a single "this IS what I want" test. My point is that you're supposed to program for the correct case, not design as if you always expect everything to go wrong. Write for the correct case, test for the correct cases FIRST, test for the EXCEPTIONAL cases, and write handling code for the things that are exceptional. Don't write an infinite test suite of what something is not.

CONCLUSION: Write the most EFFECTIVE tests you can that covers the most ground. Don't write *pointless* tests you have to maintain later if there was a better test. If a test covers a lot of logical ground by defining the boundaries of what something *is not*, then write the test for that. If it covers a lot of ground by defining what something *is*, write the test for that.

I'd suggest it's a cost-benefit analysis. Having to label the same switch 100 different ways for appropriate localization would add a few dollars to the cost of the car. It's not just the printing, but the planning and QA, too. Using an icon may put the burden on the buyer to figure out the meaning of that icon, but once the buyer has been in the car a few times, he or she will know where the switches are and will operate them by feel.

The labels could wear off at that point, and it won't matter what language they're in. So on a car, while the incremental cost may not seem to be much, the long-term benefit is tiny.

It may be a bigger help on other things...like an air conditioner unit or some such...but then the added cost of label localization becomes a much bigger percentage of the cost of the item, and as such, sales and profits would take a much bigger hit.

I'm sure that for every person who has complained about crappy labeling, there is a group who has done the testing, surveyed their client base, calculated the ROI and determined that improvements are not worthwhile from a bottom-line perspective.