YOU admit you don't know and try to figure it out. But many people don't like to think about it-- they may not be so good at it. So instead they find someone or a simple idea they like and just get behind them, so they don't HAVE to think.

Seems to me this sort of thing leaves FB vunerable to the creation of massive amounts of bogus information. Might a flood of the right inputs overflow their databases with erroneous info on non-existent people, imaginary interests, etc. I started seeing those "you might be interested in" links to stuff, and just as a thougt experiment started having conversations with a friend full of nonsense words, thinking that it might be possible to fool Facebooks intelligence into thinking some of the nonsense are up and coming items of interest that it might start offering to others. One might be able to confuse it further by referring to legit websites but treating random phrases found on the site as if they were people's names, in order to get FB to think the website is referring to an individual when it's talking about something else-- "I'm going over to Crude Oil's house today. Crude has a new motorcycle I want to check out.". And now, every website talking about crude oil in existance can be used as further verification that a person named "Crude Oil" exists and is involved in lots of stuff...

Picketing has beem rendered largely ineffective by the advent of shopping malls and of course, the internet. You cannot picket on private property or on the streets, so at a mall the best you can do is picket at the entrance to the parking lot, which undermines the action because it is shared by all the stores in the mall.

You're doing fine. But you'll have to stop when you get to handguns. There's an idea, ban all metal objects except handguns, and then handguns will be incredibly easy to detect.

Or rather, perhaps the best text to try it with is the same instructional text words, but just scrambled. The fact that the instructional text contains the words expected to be encountered in the interface may be all that is relevant, that it actually is conveying some kind of information via the logical statements contained therein, a completely erroneous conclusion.

My first impression of the linked article is one of skepticism that they are really getting out of it what they think they are... While a computer program could certainly apply word relationships from an instruction manual to its interactions with a game program, presumably it has some method of characterizing and tracking word relevance as it "learns."

That very characterization process may actually contain all the necessary "learning," and the actual text be irrelevant. The real test they need to do, is not to compare it with a program that isn't using a text as a guide, but one that is using a completely irrelevant text as a guide. I think the learning may be happening entirely in their learning mechanism such that any text would work as well-- "wrong" advice would be characterized as such by trial and error, so even bad information is useful in a system like that.

I recall back in the 1960s or early 1970s, reading a children's craft project book of some kind that had a simple AI project where you could manually train a system of matchboxes containing colored candies, what the right answer for a given input pattern was (it was either a simple letter pattern recognizer, or would learn tic-tac-toe board patterns, I forget). But what I do remember, is even the "voters" in the population who consistently voted wrong provided useful information, if you can characterize them as always doing that. I wish I could remember what book it was in, but it did make some light bulbs turn on at the time. I suspect that the word-characterization process here might work just as well given ANY piece of text fed into it, it's just a source of data to characterize, and once the data is characterized, pretty much any data would produce the proper trained result. The manual text is then just a substrate on which to hang the learning information on, such that pretty much any substrate will do.

So how often did your db9/db25 connector studs back out when unscrewing the cable instead of the cable screws because someone had overtightened them? Seems to me it was an all-too-common occurance.

It's too much baseball, football, etc.. The "my team, right or wrong," mentality has spilled over into the politics, no doubt aided by the media which is populated by an overabundance of sporting promoters.

That, and the fact that sticking to one team no matter what means you don't have to think about the issues, you only have to repeat the quips fed you by the team spokespersons.

Yes, reviews can be shills, emails can be spam, phonecalls can be telemarketers, pages in magazines can be advertisements, etc.. But if you have any kind of a hard time identifying them as such, you've been living in a CAVE for the last generation or so. There's a lot of yahoos out there and you need to take everything with a grain of salt. You needed Dvorak to tell you THAT?

Getting into a patent war with Apple is a really bad idea. Apple's portfolio can no doubt put Samsung out of business. Payback is a bitch here.