Symantec Says Antivirus Is Dead, World Rolls Eyes

AV's new roll in IT (Canary in a coal mine):

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A $100 smartphone running Firefox OS pops up on Ebay

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Scientific computing’s future Can any coding language top a 1950s behemoth  Ars Technica

I remember it. I learned Fortran in college in the early 70's

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One of the Most Epic Nature Photographs Ever Taken

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A deer shaped icicle I found after a snowstorm in January

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Australians, being a hardy people, deal with the presence of the world's most dangerous marine animal with warning signs and vinegar. The vinegar helps deactivate any tentacles clinging to your skin so you can remove them without doing yourself more damage. The warning sign shows a picture of a swimmer in briefs being attacked by something out of H.P. Lovecraft, and cautions that ‘marine stingers are present in these waters during the summer months’. The committee in charge of creating the signs presumably considered adding words like "danger" or "no swimming", but found them over the top. They try not to coddle you in Australia.③

Really nicely done article. Read it here. (The rest of the stories on the site are equally good. Check it out!)

Fascinating.  I've been terrified of those box jellies since i was a kid.  i saw a video of these guys on a boat catching one in a pool-cleaner net (with the long pole).  The wind blew one tentacle that lightly brushed on his arm.  In no time, the arm looked like there was a red, throbbing vein the whole length of the arm about 3-4 inches in diameter.  crazy!

do not mess.  and even worse is this new one they found recently which is even more potent and so small you can't even see it!  it looks like a bubble!  i don't know how people live down there, just the fear is too much for me.  and what's going on there...all the animals are the "most venomous" in the world.  snakes, spiders, jellies.  is venom somehow attracted magnetically there or what?  good gawd.

And for the most part the snakes and spiders aren't great beach goers

I think the sharks would go on strike if the spiders/snakes started encroaching on their traditional territory.

it's all relative - I don't know how people live in a place where carrying personal weapons is an accepted norm

+1 Give me the excitement of a possible agonizing death by a black widow in your thunderbox over the boredom of being shot amongst the endless concrete/bitumen of "civilisation" any day.

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Why Apple needs Samsung

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Review:  Hack your way to success in 'Watch Dogs'

Creepy website about Nanotechnology:

http://www.nanoandme.org/home/




I guess what's so creepy to me is the overwhelming sense that it's a total propaganda engine intended to smooth over people's fears of nanotechnology while giving them little factoids to say "See? It's not so bad, now is it?".

*shivers* 

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These and others can be found at 50 Optical Illusions To Trick Your Eyes

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Anyone here related to Eugene?

Computer may be first to pass Turing Test, successfully impersonating a human

Quote from: Arizona Hot on June 09, 2014, 10:04 PM

Anyone here related to Eugene?

Yeah, I only fool people about 30% of the time too... nobody confuses me with Wintermute...

Just as long as Case and Molly don't, you should be ok.

Well, replacing "Ukraine" with any number of other countries, I think it's an interesting twist on the Turing problem to "adjust" people's reactions.

^That's come up with this 'test' in the past.

There's been some research and debate over whether letting the test subject know there's the possibility of a machine in the equation also affects people's judgement. And whether endowing the computer agent with some sort of persona is a positive or a negative addition to the mix.

In the end, I don't think it really matters. People will knowingly accept falsehood as truth if they're sufficiently motivated to do so. So the fact a certain percentage of people are fooled doesn't really say that much that you can take and run with as is. But that doesn't make it any less interesting or worthy of further study. Because each iteration seems to generate even more significant questions about human consciousness and perception.  That's why I love things like the Turing Test. We often learn as much about ourselves as we do the thing we're trying to study.

That can only be a good thing.  

Yep!

And I dabbled for a couple of days way back with the idea of a Turing program in one of the old AOL chat rooms (where they wouldn't be informed). Aka if the overall ambient intelligence of the environment is reduced, it's easier to pass!


But forgetting where I saw the remarks, I now like better a new test where it's less about "fooling" than "different but sufficient" "intelligence".

One of my longest little thought experiments on this stuff is building a system with one of the old Pentium 1 chips stuck in the middle of it. So sure the hard crunching is done by the newer cores, but somewhere in there the machine "can't trust" itself. So then you build in a meta routine that tells itself that! That forces a fundamental new type of computing.

So when you ask it "when will this comet next pass Earth", instead of peeling out an answer like 2.673 days, the machine has to say something else like "About two and a half days". And when you go into "Chat Mode", the machine knows why it's flawed and has a routine that says stuff like "Sorry, I just can't get any more accurate than that because of my design".

Good stuff on the chem video.

That Photocopier video has been posted here before but I forget exactly which thread, either this one or the humor thread.