Best of luck. I've been here since the main use in going to your website was finding the latest news on Enlightenment, and I really appreciate all of your work.

Can't you just look at your Facebook settings to see what information is available to other people who are logged in to Facebook?

They used to have a dancing google logo (letters bounced every now and then) on ipv6.google.com. I was hoping they'd put that on the main page, but no.

The telescope was originally going to be called "Save Ferris", but they couldn't work out the acronym.

One of the preprogrammed demos is it acting out the scene where C3PO was telling a story to the ewoks. So there's a star wars person there somewhere.

I think you're making a logical error. You are comparing the value of the certificate as a predictor of success (that is, how much - if any - weight to give their degrees and certifications when deciding whether to hire them) and the value of the training process - yes, completely ignoring the certificate at the end - for someone that you've already hired and whose ability is not in question.

The question isn't whether someone with less intelligence or no experience in the subject matter can become an expert on a subject from a training program; the question is whether the smart and knowledgeable person you hired (let's at least assume that you hired someone who meets your standards, and have ruled out potential hires that would not cut the mustard without the certification or degree) can come out with much more and deeper knowledge of the subject.

So E represents 0 and/or 1?

Excellent, I'll risk providing nourishment for a troll just *once* more to show how this particular layfolk has illustrated my point. Psychologists are hardly at all related to psychiatrists, making that an ill-posed analogy. One branch of psychology is "clinical psychology". That branch deals with analysis and such and is what most people think of as "Psychology", and is indeed related to psychiatry. The rest of psychology, however, has nothing at all to do with that. So, the completion to the analogy may well be "lobsters".

For those reading who aren't trolls: If you happen to think this way, then your definition of psychology probably comes from elementary school, TV, or a college intro course (which too often amounts to about the same thing). There are many branches of psychology; the least scientific of which seem to be the most well known to layfolk. Although I do agree that some fMRI studies of the brain can be pretty close to phrenology.

In fact, the assumption that cognition is computational or mechanistic is where the mind-body problem comes from (right from the 17th century). If it's all just syntactic, then explaining semantics is now a problem, and you have problems like dualism. Non-algorithmic doesn't mean magic, by any stretch. If you don't assume algorithmic, then there is no mind-body separation about which you can have a dualist stance.

If you think that the universe in general is algorithmic, e.g. that the evolution of the sun is an algorithmic process, then we might easily only disagree about terminology. Those who do not follow computational theories of mind might say that the complexities of intelligent behavior are more like the complexities of the sun than anything you will get out of a turing machine.

There are a frightening number of different issues once we go into details, and there is a long history of people attempting to address them. I don't think a slashdot thread is capable of holding it all. And of course, the more one learns the more one realizes that the answers are far fewer than the questions.

You're making a *huge* assumption that humans operate algorithmically, which is exactly the problem being discussed in the debate between Searle, Dennett, Haugeland, and others. Getting a handle on "understanding", or more specifically the origin of meaning, is the larger question that these folks are addressing. So you're entirely correct about needing more than intuition, and that is what people have been trying to do using these means for many, many years.

That's funny, using sudo for administration always makes me think of ubuntu, speaking of noobs in the basement.

Seriously though, I don't like giving a regular/admin user easy access to root like that. If my user password is compromised by some means, the sudo thing means root is also compromised. I'd rather have the authentication and environment separation.

I have a Chinese Room that wants to talk to you.