Archive 17. May 2003

dot.comical

Poor commercial sites. Maybe it will eventually dawn on them what the problem is: they're sometimes so boring that nobody wants to link to them. And then down they go in the Google ranking, because the pages are simply and plainly not relevant.

Teufelsgrinsen

At Der Schockwellenreiter you can find the original article.

Court bans domains with city names

Hardly has a court issued a sensible ruling on Internet matters ( Court clarifies liability for Internet forum operators), when the next one comes along and does very strange things again. Let's look forward to a good wave of nonsensical lawsuits and cease-and-desist letters. You can find the original article at heise online news here.

Marvin Minsky: Artificial Intelligence is Brain Dead

Minsky is right. Sure, today's AI solutions uncover credit card fraud: but they are narrow specialists. Only capable of attacking tightly defined problems.

The big goal, the creation of artificial intelligence (and dealing with the big picture and the overall question of what intelligence actually is) has receded into the background, replaced instead by a focus on details and fragments of the world.

Logically, there's money for this from the business sector - in times when government funding for research without a specific purpose is declining further and only purpose-driven private funding (or from the business sector) is available, researchers eventually have to deliver something as a result that can be put to use.

And that's why real AI research is falling by the wayside. We now understand in much greater detail how computers can solve partial areas. But do we know more about how intelligence actually works? How we can replicate such a thing with machines? No. That part has receded into the distant future.

At heise online news there's the original article.

Script Kiddies

Ouch.

Teufelsgrinsen

At Der Schockwellenreiter you can find the original article.

Texas bill: enviro = terrorist

In Texas there is a bill that would make Greenpeace (or other environmental activists) a terrorist organization and donations to Greenpeace a punishable act.

I found the original article at Warblogs:CC.