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It’s a con I first witnessed over a decade ago, a message saying Hotmail would start charging for its service unless people signed the attached petition and passed the email on to all their friends. Since then, I’ve seen the scam attributed to practically any free online service, but the truth is, the contents of the spam are very rarely ever true, and its more often the case that someone’s playing dirty tricks with your emotions.
This morning I logged into FaceBook and witnessed an all new low. People, people who I previously considered quite intelligent, were joining a group titled “I WILL NOT PAY £3.99 A MONTH TO USE FACE BOOK FROM JULY 9TH 2010!“. Now I’m going to resist explaining for the umpteenth time who I can tell just from face value that the group’s a con, because quite frankly, if you’re still falling for this tripe after being raised by the internet itself, I believe we’re past the point of convincing you otherwise.
Now this sort of group isn’t new to FaceBook, but it’s what’s unique about the discovery that really diminishes my faith in humanity, so much so that I’m tempted to give sheep a slightly more elevated status in my appreciation for how gullible and conformist people can be. Curious, I clicked the link in the quest for references. I wanted to know where people were getting the idea from that FaceBook would actually charge £3.99 per month. £3.99. THREE NINETY NINE, as if the ridiculous figure couldn’t make the stench of deceit any more potent. Sorry. Will resume resisting.
So anyway, I step through the door- with a pocket full of posies- to see what blighted doom lay on the other side. The answer? Football. Suddenly everything is explained, and from this point on, I’m going to find it very hard to express myself; I am officially speechless. A single post by the groups creator reads:
UEFA Champions League
This is the group that is devoted to the UEFA Champions league. It has the results, upcoming fixtures, standings, schedules, teams, players, scores and news. We also want to hear the opinions of fans…
OK, so lets take it one step at a time. As I write this, there are currently 2,043 “likes” and 5,325 comments. At first I expected the usual 50:50 split of people whining in hysterics about how they’ll never conform (oh the irony), to people trying to explain that it’s all a hoax and there’s nothing to worry about. Then I re-read the initial post, and thought maybe there’d actually be some discussion about football. Again, I was amazed. Firstly not a single comment about football; people were actually responding to a post they hadn’t even read! Less amazing was that my initial ratio prediction was way off. Waaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaay off all the way beyond the Urals somewhere. Not a single sceptic to try explaining the hoax. Maybe like me they’ve realised there’s just no hope any more, and they have better things to do (like blog about it - hah!). I was staring at 100% hysteria, examples (named and shamed), I’ve picked out the most amusing, ironic and moronic:
Matt ‘Crisis Mc’ Spooner - FUCK YOU!!!
Johnny Campbell - Yea great idea facebook, charge us millions who use a service that crashes freezes, and can’t connect to brilliant move…not!!!!!, tell you what when you get all these and more issues sorted maybe we will cosider a small fee to use, but at the time being no way, my space is shite bebo is even worse twitter is bollocks, so get a grip facebook i will leave the day you charge, cheerio
Florence Owusu Afriyie - WHILST WE ARE PAYING TO ENHANCE AND LEVEL UP ON OUR GAMESON FB, I WILL NOT PAY £3.99 FROM JULY 2010 TO USE FACE BOOK, NO WAY!!!!!!!!
Nicola Parslow - No way I’d rather spend £48 a year towards visiting friends in the real world!
Michael Soulfunky Grierson - you can kiss my arse you greedy fuckers …i join to make a site called freebook …cunts
Though in humanity’s defence, I have just seen this, and can breathe once more:
Peter Davis - You stupid people, Facebook are NOT charging, over a million conned already by this group. How many of you are going to come away from this fiasco with your credit card details and passwords intact?
Peter Davis, a high-five is being fed-ex’d to you right now.
I WILL NOT PAY £3.99 A MONTH TO USE FACE BOOK FROM JULY 9TH 2010! has over 1 million members, and no where does it explain that FaceBook has or has not made such a proposition, and a quick check on Google (who I refuse to pay 10p per search for, starting next month) shows that FaceBook never did make such a proposal. This is a perfect example of how the masses can form a mountain of opinion from a molehill of something which barely even qualifies as rumour. It makes me cringe.
The truth is, companies like FaceBook and Google make their money by being free for the end user. By being a free service, anyone with an internet connection has access to it, which makes the site more attractive to investors and advertisers, which combined make more revenue than a market equilibrium on the end-user’s side could ever achieve. To charge as much as just a few pennies would be detrimental (think of the huge ratio of users who are probably too young to even have a card to make the online payment with); £3.99 per month is, as 1 million people have just demonstrated, suicide, which is exactly why it would never happen.
Before getting started, I’ll let you watch the video, and then discuss it afterwards:
My first reaction to this was to wonder how much of the scene was scripted. Even the most developed interactive bots still struggle to put a comprehensive sentence together, let alone with the addition of emotion and gesture. Though MicroSoft must be taking this seriously or else the whole project is a waste of time. So my conclusion is that yes, we are looking at real A.I. when we look at Milo, but chances are, the A.I. created so far has been specialised - and is probably only adequate enough - for the purposes of the demo we’ve just watched. Ask him to comment on the weather or your make-up, and well, dare I say a BSoD probably couldn’t be more wished for as a convenient way of ending the awkward silence.
But let’s look at the bigger picture. When I say this, I think, how BIG is this bigger picture? This could end up in numerous places. Imagine a PC game based in a medieval of fantasy setting, similar to Oblivion. You’re about to enter a forest on a mission to rescue some damsel in distress, but you know the forest is teeming with dangerous wildlife, and bandits. At your side, you have not just one squire, but a small band of brothers. Being able to give orders verbally without having to click generic, limited options is one thing, but having to use emotion and gesture to give a pre-battle motivational speech which could entirely sway the mood of the battle, or even convince nearby eavesdroppers to join in (or if done badly, scare them off), that would bring gaming to an whole new level never even imagined.
But where next, outside of the gaming world? A boy that could actually genuinely tell you that your dress looks good and recommends what colour shoes to go with it? A virtual teacher to take over the job of substitute teacher in nursery? A.I. of this level may also have its therapeutic qualities, I’m sure there’s an opportunity for helping autistic children somewhere here.
But I’d say if there was a line, this would be it. The social consequences of anything further could be disastrous. An A.I. bot capable of doing all of the above, would be very human indeed, I can imagine youngsters in a few generations time being brought up unable to distinguish humans in the real world from characters on their TV screen. Loners would become more lonely, as they no longer need friends at all, when they can just load one up from their hard drive.
If your onscreen friend insulted you, you could just delete him, or if you’re tech enough, could reconfigure or script him (or perhaps if the AI’s sophisticated enough, just tell him, and he’d never even accidentally do it again). If you’d like a new friend with a specific personality, you could make one on the spot, and then when you want him to go away, he would do so without asking “why, what’s up?”.
Now imagine the frustration of not being able to do this with real-world friends. I’m starting to think perhaps this could backfire and turn non-autistic people autistic. It seems that with mankind’s ongoing quest for perfection, we’ve given up altogether and moved on to create a super-species which could, in generations to come, ruin everything it is to be human.
And who knows, but why not, while on the topic of humanity… a character capable of performing virtual sexual favours. I wouldn’t be surprised if that was the aim of the project after-all; seriously, who could possibly work at MS, on a project such as this in particular AND have a girlfriend? Think about it. If such A.I. ever went commercial, there is no doubt in my mind that there will be a whole load of characters to chose from, as-well as functionality to design your own.
Well, I probably shouldn’t say such things about the team behind this project, and probably speak out of jealousy, as I honestly wish I was there working on this project with them. When I complete my masters in artificial inteligence, I think I found the place where I want to go. This is the current apex of AI technology, without going as far as to rely on robotics.
No, in response to people such as Anna and Sandi; I haven’t read the book. I didn’t even know there was one, in-fact I hadn’t even heard of the film and had no idea what I was going in to watch, and I prefer it like this, I always find trailers give too much of the film away, let alone books.
I didn’t even know that the term “Angels and Demons” was meant to be metaphorical. I was half expecting the opening scene at CERN to show the opening of some portal that brings Hades himself to single handedly slaughter the world.
What actually happens is this: Some dirty scouser from the Illuminati manages to steal some explosive anti-matter and uses it as a bomb against the Vatican. In the meantime, the four favourite cardinals to become the next pope are taken hostage. Tom Hanks is called in to solve century old riddles to rescue the cardinals and retrieve the explosive.
It did seem a little unnecessary for him to point out Christianity’s flaws at every opportunity, and then go on to explain them. Everyone knows why Christmas is celebrated on December 25th, I don’t need to be reminded. This is a film, not a history lesson. The film did however, always manage to justify these flaws, not just for Christianity but religion in general. This leaves just two beefs:
- Why not just use a normal bomb? Why did they have to bring the element of sci-fi in with this explosive created from an experiment at CERN? I’m quite sure A-Level physics taught me that anti-matter bomb just wouldn’t work, the amount of energy radiated by annihilation (collision between matter and anti matter) is no where near as much as the energy required to make anti-matter in the first place. I’m always the last person to point out scientific flaws in films, and I never dis-recommend a film because of it, it just bugs me that they brought this in when a stick of dynamite would have fitted just as well in the storyline, making the climate of the discussion of science vs religion totally plausible.
- So it turns out the goodest of good guys (I’m really sorry to spoil this for whoever hasn’t seen the film yet, but it seems an old cliche which I personally always anticipate in every film I see anyway, and it always annoys me when I’m right) is actually the villain, and he planned the whole thing for his own glory. Sorry, there are so many elements that could not be planned. The main thing being the timing. With the bombs timer being so ambiguous, as it used a battery with an “approximate” lifetime and was affected by the temperature of its surroundings, he still managed to time the conclusion of his master-plan so perfectly by heroically taking the device in a helicopter and letting it detonate high up away from everyone. Again, they could have done away with this whole conspiracy, the film would have still achieved its same goals, while making more sense at the same time.
Overall I’d still recommend it. As an action film, the perfect balance is achieved, where there’s not so much going on that your eyes dart around the screen struggling to take it all in, and at the same time, there’s enough to keep the film moving at a good pace. As a philosophical film, it does well to openly study the debate between science and religion. As a romance film, there’s nothing tongue-in-cheek about it… See what I did there?
If you’re tech enough, you could probably have guessed what this topic was all about, if not, then two words: Wolfram Alpha. Despite it’s initial, general appearance, it’s not a search engine, but a “a computational knowledge engine”. Instead of gathering information from the Internet, it has it’s own internal knowledge base, and hence returns factual answers based on what you ask, rather than opinions.
This can be anything from share prices to, well, as someone put it this morning:
The integral of x^2 dx from 0 to the population of Jordan divided by the GDP of japan in British pounds per second.
And there I was surprised I still remember what an integral is from A-Level maths. In English, the question is asking, if you were to draw the graph of X^2 (which is a curve that gets steeper as you increase X, as the result goes 0, 1, 4, 9, 16, 25 etc for every increment), up to where X = Jordan’s population, and then work out the area under this curve, and divide that figure by the Japan’s annual economic output in terms of sterling per second.
The answer is in fact 7.569*10^14 persons cubed seconds per pound sterling, which I’m still trying to decipher. The best bit is it even gives a graph based on how the figure would have changed over history based on Jordan’s population growth and Japan’s economy (though, it’s failed to account for change in exchange rates between Yen and GBP), and then cites its sources.
As it turns out, this kind of calculation is just a smidgen of what it’s capable of. I was going to give some more examples, but you might as- well just look at the ones already on the website.
I tried a few experiments of my own, and found that the average global wage rate for each person is approximately £1.17 per hour, (the flaw here is that not everyone in the labour force is actually employed, so the actual figure is just a little higher). Furthermore, the world labour force only makes up 45.99% of the world population, meaning that if the world were communist, everyone would earn a whopping 54 pence per hour, which is still greater than my average salary between last October and last month.
This is why commy-dictator Kim Jong Il should be put in charge of the British M.o.D., we’d all have a pay rise, and on another plus-side I’m also sure he’d do a better job of brainwashing us into thinking our troops are fighting for a noble cause.
Thanks to the awesome power of my mom’s home internet, I’ve still got three hours to wait until the new Windows 7 Release Candidate build arrives, though I still wont have a chance to install it (I’m meant to be busy revising for an exam) until this weekend. This gives me plenty of time to get my hopes up about bug fixes I can expect. That said I can only think of one: I’m currently using Build 7000, ie the very first release, and shutting down is a pain, it seems to hang for ages, after I’ve had to do a forced shut down. It’s OK for when I’m leaving the house or going to bed, as I know it’ll shut down eventually and wont have been on all week draining away at the electricity meter while I’ve been on holiday, but when I need to do a reboot, particularly in a rush, then it can be a nuisance. But, that’s it really. I guess the only other thing I’m looking forwards to is the opportunity to reformat and clean up the mess on my hard drives, but that said, I haven’t really got much of a mess to be cleaned…
I’ll be reporting back this weekend with my first impressions of the RC, though my predictions are that I’ll not have anything to report. I’ve used Windows 7 Beta since it was first available, with Vista on a second partition just incase, and haven’t stopped using it or regretted installing it. At first I found it liberating to use, it seemed to fix everything I hated about Vista, and I had to nitpick to find bugs, which were fixed as more windows updates were released. In other words, I can’t imagine the release candidate as being much of an improvement as theres little to improve, apart from of course, performance. Performance can never be good enough. Never even satisfactory.
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