They left out the part where they profit. Otherwise, it checks out.

I still have a modem that looks like that, I just can't easily use it anymore. I also remember all the talk about taxes, and then how taxes in different states were applied to e-commerce and still are.

The issue with all discussions around the digital world is that the infrastructure doesn't have the same costs as say having a road. It is partly why ownership is being redefined so heavily when it comes to digital bits and whether you can own anything other than a license. Because the internet is not really physical beyond some cables and smart pieces of plastic, a tax applied to it is a little like trying to tax certain thoughts. Nothing makes solid sense in terms of how to impose a tax on anything since all of it is ultimately "wisps in the air" that ultimately exists chiefly in the mind.

This is a weird project. I'm not sure what the point of it is, exactly. Whole point of webrings was that they were not generated and were made by real people.

I bet after all this time, it still doesn't have a glossary function.

They are if the world doesn't stop trying to control how you have children and in what way you want to educate them, and how to look after their health.

There are a couple of ways of seeing this. One is that there is a conflict of interest. The other is that there has been a conflict of interest in the military for years, and this guy has proven himself to be useful in fighting it such that he has been given an unusual amount of power. Obviously, number 1 would be bad. Number 2, though, would be laudable. I'd be careful about jumping to a conclusion until more evidence comes to light in either direction.

Are you saying that senior military leadership has earned the right to a little light graft?

>Are you saying that senior military leadership has earned the right to a little light graft?

I'm saying graft isn't the only explanation at this point.

>Photoshop showed up in 1990 and the people retouching photos by hand had every reason to be worried, because it took that work. It didn't take photography. Thirty-odd years on it's open on every photographer's machine and nobody calls it a threat.

Uh, the entire film industry went under, along with film developers and the majority of film cameras. Everything shifted to digital, for the most part, which is why "every photographer" has "Photoshop". (which also really isn't true. I'd say many probably have Gimp as Photoshop has lots its mind charging fees)

I don't know what the fascination with these AI versus human tournaments is. I'm old enough to remember the whole "Deep Blue" vs Kasparov exhibition, and I didn't really understand the fascination with all that either. That humans can make sufficiently strong calculators has never been a dispute in my mind. If the human wins over the calculator, good, but if the calculator wins, okay. What does that tell us exactly? The human had a bad day? The machine had a good one?

> That humans can make sufficiently strong calculators has never been a dispute in my mind.

Within our lifetimes (unless you're quite young) it was doubtful if a go ai would ever beat a decent human. Same was true for chess a generation or two earlier. It's news because it's the handoff of man to machine being the best at a particular thing.

This current news is news from the other way, this human did _exceptionally_ well.

>It's news because it's the handoff of man to machine being the best at a particular thing.

That's a way to see it. Another way to see it is that for any given event in a zero sum game, one of two outcomes, where two players are involved, will occur. Man only had to beat machines for what, 200-400 years only for it to beat man how many times for it to be "best"?

It's all narrative. Abstract strategy games with perfect information (like chess and go) look at a casual glance like they should be difficult for computers, but in fact they're rather ideal. Before AlphaGo, belligerent go players used to smugly dismiss chess as a 'solved game' (not what that means) because chess engines have been better than the best humans for years.

Surely we didn't think they were ideal before alphago--they were huge challenges back then no? Just that now we can solve them.

Poe's life had many complications due to poverty and jealousy that made his being a literary genius almost irrelevant. Researching his death produces even more questions than answers, as a strong case could be made that he was made to appear to have died of a morphine overdose in a ditch.