The old, big content publishers may be stagnant and evil, but that doesn't mean Amazon will be any better. I for one do not welcome our new hipster overlords.

We have a lot of subconscious mental faculties that are beyond even our most complex computers. One big one is still the ability to make intelligent conversation.

This no matter what some marketers at the University of Reading have thrown together at the last minute. It's a shame we still have such a gullible population when it comes to computers. Oh well. Time to go program a GUI in Visual Basic to track some IP addresses...

Today we have computer navigation, plain-language database queries, and speech processing such as Siri. AI? No. Table lookup, elaborate.

You've got the beginnings of a well known thought experiment called the Chinese Room:

Searle then supposes that he is in a closed room and has a book with an English version of the computer program, along with sufficient paper, pencils, erasers, and filing cabinets. Searle could receive Chinese characters through a slot in the door, process them according to the program's instructions, and produce Chinese characters as output. If the computer had passed the Turing test this way, it follows, says Searle, that he would do so as well, simply by running the program manually.

So the person running the commands manually, operating the same as the computer processor basically, has passed the Turing test. However neither the human being nor the "computer" really understands Chinese.

What you are implying about Siri et al is that human beings operate differently. But how do you know that human intelligence isn't just a series of elaborate table lookups? While the stated purpose of the Chinese Room thought experiment is, according to Wikipedia, "to challenge the claim that it is possible for a digital computer running a program to have a "mind" and "consciousness" in the same sense that people do", it actually proves something else: as long as you define human "consciousness" as going beyond mere computation, it is impossible to test that it exists. But since all we can observe of a human are its inputs and outputs, that is the only basis upon which we can compare human "intelligence" to AI. The basis of the Turing test is to measure whether the inputs result in similarly intelligent outputs.

If AI research has taught us anything, it's that humans are much more intelligent than we thought we were. We have a lot of subconscious mental faculties that are beyond even our most complex computers. One big one is still the ability to make intelligent conversation. Siri may be able to understand some requests enough to deliver the desired response, but a lot of the time her level of comprehension is below a retarded four year old.

I do think, however, that if a computer could fool a dog into believing it was also a dog 100% of the time, then it would have the intelligence of a dog, with a caveat. The dog being fooled would need to understand the philosophical nature of the test and also understand how the computer is likely to fail. Otherwise it would be like asking Siri to provide feedback for an English paper; she just does not understand the question being asked.

The question is really more about "are this AI's actions indistinguishable from a being we know is intelligent". If the test administrator is qualified to judge that, and the test is run enough for the results to be statistically significant, it's perfectly reasonable to suggest that because the actions are indistinguishable, so too must be the level of intelligence behind them.

Please don't blame this on computer scientists. This story was almost certainly generated by marketing types trying to line up with some anniversary of some kind. I'm not exactly sure because TFA for the original story says something about "60th anniversary of Turing's death" and "created in 2001". And the 30% is clearly a lie to make up for their failure to even reach the 59% at which Cleverbot was already tested.

Well basically, and of course when you have to explain something like this it loses its bite...Verizon is what all the guys want, and knows it, so it gets away with acting as bitchy as it wants to. I only repeat the saying because it seems to aptly describe Verizon, not because I'm personally a fan of gender-stereotype humor.

FYI even a Verizon customer service representative told me that on the Pacific coast, AT&T coverage is better.

The proposed AT&T+T-Mobile merger made sense, because they both use GSM over similar wavelengths. But how would Sprint and T-Mobile combine their network services? Their voice data at least is on completely different infrastructure.

Now I know that Sprint and T-Mobile don't have the best wireless coverage, but you're going to have to try a little harder to justify the claim they have the worst customer service. I was under the impression it was just a universally accepted fact that Verizon's customer service is the worst in the industry despite their otherwise excellent network service. As I've heard someone say, Verizon is the hottest girl at the prom, and worse, she knows it.

Your MP3 argument doesn't stand. It's been proven that a well-encoded 128kbps MP3 is indistinguishable to the human ear from lossless content. Of course not all 128kbps MP3s are well-encoded, and in fact most of them probably aren't.

But I'm not trying to disprove your argument. I'm simply highlighting the fact that the only people that make such arguments tend to pepper the argument with falsehoods, like your MP3 comment. And the point isn't that the comment is false so much as it is that many well-educated people will point out that it is so, unintentionally weakening the larger argument that there is a better quality available.

Unfortunately the "hight quality" side of the argument tends towards audiophilia, and it's easy to dismiss true HD when it's associated with gold-plated Monster cables.

I'm not normally one to defend DRM, but in what way is the Blu-ray DRM "awful"? As far as I can tell it doesn't require an internet connection. Is CSS also awful? Because as far as I can tell the only difference is that AACS is more effective. The only way I can make sense of the statement is if you mean to say that all DRM is awful, and you're just being redundant.

My post was definitely not the best I've done on Slashdot, and much of it came from not really knowing much about Europe. My ideas are vague and intentionally intensified to provoke some kind of meeting in the middle. Thank you shitzu for actually knowing something.

I think though that my original point may have some merit thinking about how everyone in Europe uses GSM. Didn't American cell carriers have fragmented technologies because the technology still wasn't mature yet? Maybe it goes back to the 80s and not the 90s, but generally the first adopters don't have the kind of standards to work off of that formed the basis of Europe's cell networks.

Fleecing the customer is more dominant in the US because the US networks are shitty. Somebody said T-Mobile essentially has a 1990s network in the 2010s. Well, there are no 1990s networks outside of the US. Everything was built up later, after the tech was more mature. It's the same reason internet speeds are slower in the US than in Europe, and the same reason they still cost more regardless. The infrastructure is old, the pricing structure is old, and the customers have to pay for that somehow so they might as well get shiny new technology at the same time to make up for it.

Either that or the EU is socialist and regulates its industries better.

Running obsolete systems isn't quite on par with typical security through obscurity. It's not a matter of guessing the right URL to access elevated permissions. It's a matter of procuring 50-year old technology, which by the way nobody outside of the US ever actually got good at producing. How exactly would you go about hacking into a system not connected to any networks and controlled by 8" floppy disks? Especially since, in addition to the obscurity, there are armed guards everywhere?

It's also important to note that newer is not always better. Newer is most often more complex, and in computer security, complexity is the enemy. Add to that the much higher engineering standards of software more than 30 years old, and I'd say it isn't really just obscurity that makes an obsolete system more secure.

If like me you want to know what the "procedural mistakes" were, and not read what is almost certainly someone's unnecessary diatribe about why the end result is wrong (hint: it's wrong, so, so wrong, and we all know why), let me help you find them. Use the last link in the summary, copied here:

http://www.techdirt.com/articles/20140416/06454126931/lavabit-loses-its-appeal-mucking-up-basic-procedural-issues-early.shtml

Summary: The case is about whether Lavabit should have been held in contempt, which hinges upon whether the court had the right to demand what it was demanding. However, Levison did not make any legal argument against the demand at the time. Therefore, it was justifiably held in contempt. The issue of whether the court had the right to demand private keys is important, but the issue needed to be raised sooner and with more force. Now it's irrelevant to further proceedings.

I am not a lawyer and I have not actually finished reading the article yet.