So, are you saying that it's OK to rape and beat your wife as long as you don't leave marks?

And absent signs of physical trauma, you won't believe it happened?

Wow. Just ... wow.

Well, because women and men cheat for different reasons.

I know someone who eventually always seems to be drawn to chatrooms and texting people -- in no small party because he's a complete man-child (not that everyone who cheats is).

It absolutely devastated his wife, because while he wasn't always available to her emotionally or sexually, he was having 'interactions' (purely virtual AFAIK) which were both emotional and sexual with someone else. He said it put some zest back in his life, which devastated her even more.

It was just as hurtful as if he'd actually been schtuping someone. He thinks he's done nothing wrong, and completely makes the same argument as you do -- and it boils down to "if you're going to overtly flirt with strangers, or start having on-going conversations with people are aren't strangers ... sooner or later you're probably going to just go ahead and do it, and that might be a line they're not willing to accept."

It also massively undermined trust and pretty much everything else in the relationship. Because if your partner is spending all of their time wondering who you're rubbing your parts up against when you go out, the rest of it starts to deteriorate.

So, I figure your options boil down to: 1) accept that it's going to happen but stay in the dark, 2) accept that it's going to happen and be informed, 3) try to prevent it from happening, or 4) realize you're not gonna stop it and move on with your life.

And depending on the kind of person you are, there may only be 1 or 2 in that list which are even options for you.

In university I did the whole open relationship thing. It's not for everybody. I don't have a problem with people who can do it ... for me it was a lot of work, and very draining, and wasn't what I wanted longer term.

It was fun, because I was in my 20s, and who wouldn't have liked a couple of different flavors? Would I do it now? I don't think so, but you never know.

Me, I think people started screwing around within 6 months of the first people getting married (at most). Men seem to have an evolutionary imperative to cat about as much as they can.

So either we need to fix evolution, or we need to better understand what we think marriage is for and what it means.

I appreciate your fidelity and trying to do the right thing, but statistics simply aren't on your side.

What are we up to now? 50% of all marriages end in divorce? It's going to happen regardless.

Many argue that monogamy isn't a natural state for humans. I certainly think it's one which takes a lot of effort and isn't for everybody.

For many people, the mistake was in the decision to get married in the first place. I've lost count of the number of people who while they were getting married there were already clues that they'd be miserable and/or it wouldn't last.

The relationship was already dysfunctional or toxic and doomed to fail. But who is going to be the one to tell the bride and groom that??

When I see TV ads for websites which are pretty blatant about the fact that you're there to have an affair, it's pretty evident there's a market for it.

I agree the technology arms race around cheating is a little creepy.

But just think, if your wife can easily do the things in the summary ... the government can do MUCH MUCH more. So, it's hard not to be in favor of any tool which tries to make it harder to track what you do.

LOL ... no, I'm saying BOFH-ize it; pay attention. :-P

Dilbert is quietly optimistic in the face of crushing evidence to the contrary and in defiance of common sense.

BOFH is actively malicious in the knowledge that being optimistic is for suckers who don't create their own fate. ;-)

One leads to soul crushing disappointment. The other can be quite lucrative.

I'm more inclined to think it is more akin to calculating trajectories than it is AI.

There's no 'intelligence', there's fancy pattern recognition.

I have no idea of the formal definition of AI, but to me without some form of abstract decision making and actually applying it to something, it's just clever automation.

Vending machines have been able to identify what kind of coin you put in for decades. That doesn't make them 'intelligent'.

Is it a more sophisticated form of input that a keyboard? Sure. But, to me at least, a machine which goes 'ping' when its inputs has been satisfied isn't any form of 'intelligence'.

Now, show it a 5 and tell me what it does. If it says "error" or "6", then I'm afraid I'm going to say I disagree it's 'AI'.

Every few years, management makes me order it and when I tell them they have to train it, they want ME to train it and then hand it back to them.

LOL, so do it!!

Lock yourself in the server room, and spend the next few days reading gibberish into the microphone while doing an impersonation of your boss. Claim some overtime for it.

Occasionally run up to them with a voice recorder and say "quick, I need you to say this so I can train the speech stuff". Gather enough snippets to be able to stitch together conversations ... "Miss Moneypenny, this is the boss, I need you to give that IT guy a huge raise. Oh, and my wife is away this weekend, so come by around 6pm, show up naked and bring a friend! Daddy's been a bad boy!"

Bonus points if you can hack the dictionary to replace every 3rd noun and every 4th verb with something dirty.

Go all BOFH on it. Management will still end up with useless voice recognition, but in the mean time your opportunities for fun and profit are not to be ignored.

By the time there's a working system, you'll be retired on a beach somewhere able to phone in withdrawals from the CEOs offshore account.

Get on with it man!!

Kind of what I was thinking. I had an ex who was doing machine learning 20 years ago.

Training neural nets and the like to recognize patterns was seen as a step to machine learning, and a way to apply it to specific problems.

But identifying the difference between a '6' and a '9'? I agree that this is 'AI' as much as me heating something in the microwave makes me a chef.

This isn't 'AI' as far as I'm concerned. It's neat, it's cool. But it aint AI.

If you don't own and maintain your own machines, you will forever be at the mercy of the people who do. Your downtime, your critical windows, your business continuity, your backups ... do you really want these things controlled by someone else?

Many of us have always looked at the cloud and thought "what a terrible idea". What are the chances that, unless you actually test it, your fail over to another provider will actually work?

If Amazon is losing $2 billion/year, it's hard not to think other people are thinking the same thing. And they're only going to keep losing that much money for so long before someone says "enough".

The cloud isn't magical, and it isn't immune to economics.

And if all of your business critical data is in the cloud and you haven't made plans to keep it going -- well, that sounds pretty irresponsible and reckless.

"Shareholder capitalism is the doctrine that companies exist solely to make money for their shareholders. It is frequently contrasted with stakeholder capitalism, which holds that companies exist for the benefit of their customers, workers and communities, not just for ever-fluctuating number of mostly remote and unengaged passive investors who just happen to own stock in them, often without even being aware that they do.

"The rise of shareholder capitalism in the U.S. is often dated to an influential article in the Journal of Financial Economics in 1976, titled “Theory of the Firm: Managerial Behavior, Agency Costs and Ownership Structure” by Michael C. Jensen and William H. Meckling. They argued that shareholders should demand higher returns from complacent corporate managers. The idea of shareholder value was publicized by a 1981 speech in New York by Jack Welch, who had just taken over General Electric, and by Aflred Rappaport’s 1986 book “Creating Shareholder Value.”

"The shareholder value movement sought to persuade corporate managers to ignore the interests of all stakeholders like workers, customers and the home country, other than shareholders. Granting CEOs stock options, in addition to salaries, was supposed to align their interests with those of the shareholders.

"The theory had an obvious problem: Who are the shareholders and what are their interests? Most publicly traded companies have shares that are bought and sold constantly on behalf of millions of passive investors by mutual funds and other intermediates. Some shareholders invest in a company for the long term; many others allow their shares to be bought and sold quickly by computer software programs.

"Unable to identify what particular shareholders want, CEOs with the encouragement of Wall Street have treated short-term earnings as a reliable proxy for shareholder value. (...)

"Shareholder value capitalism in the U.S. since the 1980s has even failed in its primary purpose — maximizing the growth in shareholder value. As Roger Martin, dean of the Rotman Business School at the University of Toronto points out in a recent Harvard Business Review article, between 1933 and 1976 shareholders of American companies earned higher returns — 7.6 percent — than they have done in the age of shareholder value from 1977 to 2008 — 5.9 percent a year.

"For his part, Jack Welch has renounced the idea with which he was long associated. In a March 2009 interview with the Financial Times, the former head of GE said: “Strictly speaking, shareholder value is the dumbest idea in the world.”

"In the aftermath of the failed 40-year experiment in shareholder capitalism, Americans need not look solely to other democratic nations for models of successful stakeholder capitalism. The U.S. economy between the New Deal and the 1970s was a version of stakeholder capitalism, in which the gains from superior growth were shared with workers, CEOs were moderately paid and the rich engrossed far less of the economy. In reconnecting with America’s native tradition of stakeholder capitalism, American companies can learn from the example of Johnson & Johnson, whose credo was written by Robert Wood Johnson in 1943:

"We believe our first responsibility is to the doctors, nurses and patients, to mothers and fathers and all others who use our products and services.We are responsible to our employees, the men and women who work with us throughout the world.We are responsible to the countries in which we live and work and to the world community as wellWe must be good citizens.and bear our fair share of taxes.We must maintain in good order the property we are privileged to use, protecting the environment and natural resources.Our final responsibility is to our shareholders.When we operate according to these principles, the shareholders should realize a fair return."

The failure of shareholder capitalism, Salon, Mar 29, 2011

Indeed, many of us could probably give the same lecture we've heard it so many times.

Yup, seatbelt, popcorn lighting, nearest exit row, oxygen mask (mine first, may not inflate), seat cushion for debris location, no smoking in the lav, card in the seatback pocket ... got it.

Of course not. First, Physics Nobel prizes are given for experimentally tested stuff, not for pure theory, particularly when said theory can (in principle) be subjected to testing at some point. Second, Nobel prizes are never given posthumously. The methods for testing GR were only developed near Einstein's death, and GR was only fully experimentally confirmed after he had already died. Hence, by a+b, no Nobel prize for him. Had he lived a few more years and he'd have won it.

See my reply to the commenter above you.

Yes, and Special Relativity is a minor antecedent to Einsten's real contribution, General Relativity. SR was a nice sum up of what was known until then, but not fundamentally novel, which is why he didn't earn his Nobel for it. Now, GR on the other hand was the kind of stuff that only happens once a millennium.

The usual way for something like GR to be developed would be by scientists noticing slight problems in measurements, then doing more experiments, then trying to generalize from those perceived mismatches, then testing again and again and again etc. It'd have taken several decades. Einstein took a different approach. He went on to think very hard on the fundamentals of Physics for about 10 years, then noticed that things couldn't work any other way and so formulated GR entirely. And it was so well done that it's been confirmed since the very first experiment that went to test its specific, outrageous claims (and there are a lot of those). He nailed it all correctly the very first try.

This is why he's recognized. E=mc2 is minor. GR is the true genius part.