I actually got so disappointed by my fellow canadians allowing such bullshit to go on that i left the country.
Canadians may have a lot of heart and lay down their lives to protect freedom in every war out there (almost, so damn proud of Chretien basically telling Bush to shove his "you're either with us or against us" where the sun don't shine over Iraq), but they're also extremely naive and stupid when someone tells them to bend over you're going to enjoy this (basically all natural resource exports to the US)
Non-techs can't even seem to follow the rule of locking their computers when not at their desks. They tried to be more secure by adding short expirations for passwords without the ability to recycle passwords and passwords having to be different for each system. So what happens? A plethora of yellow stickies on monitors with everybodies latest passwords.
Hell, when i was there the tech people couldn't even understand what a video card with digital output was, 'it's a computer so it's all digital right?'.
Besides, this is nothing special, this happened more than once every notable holiday where people send those stupid digital cards which have always been expressly forbidden. My guess is that the big story is 'China bad man!', and probably only because they've finally learned how to trace attacks one hop backwards.
It's all propaganda against China, because of course all these chinese hackers breaking into govts everywhere are too stupid to use a proxy. Geeks shouldn't fall for this type of propaganda, but the majority will. The question is, why all the propaganda against China? My slightly conspiratorial view is that it will make it so much easier for the states to default on everything it owes China, but i guess we'll see in a few years.
Maybe i should elaborate, i used to work for the Canadian Government. The salaries that they offer computer programmers is about the same salary they offer to somebody whose job is to get and put away paper files. So about 2 times less than a code monkey would get in the private sector, and about 4-5 times less than a good programmer would receive. Seriously.
So what happens is most of the programmers and most of the programs get written in VB, yes pathetic i know. Security is virtually non-existant. I actually got let go the first time (got fired 3 times and quit once, gotta love their stupidity) because i was seen as a security threat because i knew more about the computers there than the fresh out of school computer grads. Not your normal grads, but the ones who got the degree because they thought that's where the money is and don't even own computers at home. Yes, tech admins who can't even assemble their own computers.
Then we have a president who's learning from the states about the profiitability of running a war on drugs, even though it's currently reaping in less money than the cartels were offering the gov't every year to just let them provide drugs to the US who so desperately want them.
Ant's aren't easy because you can't really view them as individuals.
So basically your definition of Intelligence is the ability to choose to act non-intelligently?
Show me an AI that learns to play Chess all on its own starting from nothing but the board and pieces, then I'll consider it intelligent.
Umm, can you point ANY human that can learn chess just starting from nothing but the board and pieces. You do realize that you have to teach humans how to play chess as well.
Show me a human who could do that and i wouldn't call them Intelligent, i would call them psychic!
It's pretty trivial to teach a computer the rules of chess and have the computer build a database of moves on it's own, actually a lot simpler and a lot quicker than having a human do exactly the same thing. It might take a lot of work to come up with a computer that beats grandmasters all the time, but a trivial chess learning program will easily beat more than half the human population, if not closer to 90% or upwards. Nature actually does a lot worse since if you just taught all humans the rules and nothing else they wouldn't get very far, hence the reason that there are books out there that are basically databases of moves and algorithms for humans.
Perhaps the problem is that you think that humans exhibit intelligence which is rarely the case.
"It's the best thing since professional golfers on 'ludes." -- Rick Obidiah