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.

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.

LOL, I thought for a moment we were having an interview with Pee Wee Herman/Paul Reubens.

Do you get tired of that? :-P

While this may just be triggering a fight of flight response, it interesting the note that the irrational portion of the brain seems to override the rational part (the one that 'knows' your hand is safe). After reading BringsApples post it struck me that these two cases may be opposite sides of the same coin.

Well, here I'd substitute rational/irrational with 'conscious' and 'primitive'.

You as a human know you are missing your hand (or in the case of your example that your hand isn't really going to get hit). However, the really primitive bits are still in there going "Hand, this is mission control, do you copy? Status report please." (Or in the case of your hand being there but not getting hit, "Alert! Hand, take evasive action" because its job is to do that kind of thing.)

And this is probably well below what can be your conscious brain. So, no matter what your conscious brain knows and is aware of, the really primitive parts are handling other stuff.

From the exceedingly little I recall from psych class (yes, only one, a long time ago) this is probably the structures of the brain that we share with alligators and pretty much everything else.

I'm inclined to think kheldan probably nailed it (in very broad strokes), the brain is actively looking for a response from the limb and not getting anything. So maybe what this does is fool the primitive part of your brain into going "OK, status report from hand occurred, we can dial back the urgency". And I'm sure that part of your brain can't be overridden with "I know my hand won't get hit because this is just an illusion", so it responds as if it's happening.

No matter what you know rationally, the really basic structures of your brain have their job, and still keep trying to do it.

Though, this should be in no way be considered to be an accurate description of the physical stuff, just a high-level hand-waving thing.

I used to know a quadriplegic who used to occasionally get an itchy foot ... despite the fact that he hadn't had any sensation below his shoulders for 25+ years. Scratching didn't alleviate anything, because it wasn't really itchy. At least, not in the way we tend to think of it. I'm sure the sensation was just as real.

I think that if you re-attach soon enough, the nerves end up re-mapping to the neurons as your brain sorts out what's what.

Over time, your brain figures out that this particular one doesn't quite match what it used to, and then maps to the one which is there now.

I suspect during the initial period until the nerves sort themselves out, you have really mismatched/clumsy sensation, but over time as the brain and neurons sort everything out it gets better.

Of course, I'll freely admit I have no real understanding of the process, and that this is pulled out of nothing but speculation and things I think I remember hearing in terms of explanation.

Seems to me that when some area of your body doesn't get much or any stimulation for long periods of time, it gets more sensitive

Must ... not ... make ... penis ... joke ...