A SAVE IN NINE SAVES YOUR BEHIND............ IF IT'S ON PAPER IT WON'T TURN TO VAPOR!!

I had never thought about what it would be like to have a computer crash... That's right kaputski, one minute on, next minute dead... totally dead. And, as you might have guessed by my comments so far, that is exactly what happened to me recently – and I might add is one of the reasons that I haven't written any of my, intelligent and pithy comments for a fairly long spell.

As it happened; I am happy and sad to say at the same time, I was fairly cocky, because after all, I have lots of computer experience and I use a really good back up service. And you might also be guessing that I was humbled and sorry that I had been so brash.....

I learned a valuable lesson when one day, for no apparent reason, my computer came on, started up.... and after about two minutes, made a poofing sound and died. Totally and completely died, it would not even turn on......

I (luckly) had the foresight to subscribe to CARBONITE (http://www.carbonite.com) that I subscribed to because I also worked from the road and I thought a little safety net would be in order (WOW – turns out that was one of the BEST decisions that I have made!!

But, I must say that despite getting all my files – which was really important, it never occurred to me that the physical “set-up” would be so time consuming. It reminded me of buying an article of clothing and then trying to alter it to make it fit. A little here, a little there – it's not as easy as it looks.

Re-finding contacts, websites that I visited and my news sources! I depend on them to get my morning news! Yikes, it was awful.....

So actually, the "quick and easy" set up process became a longer journey, much longer than I expected; which was "ba da bing, ba da boom.  And here it is WEEKS LATER and I am still.... in the process of finding my fun places, and news sources (and remembering and changing PASSWORDS!!). 

By my calculation, it will most likely take many more months to be back to "normal" as I remember those little daily Internet stops, friends email, and other important stuff that I didn't pay attention to.... dang, but believe me this experience has made me very careful. I have become a list printing maniac!! I won't ever be lax again. And as I am determined to have my “comfortable” computer up to it's predecessors' state I still have a few days (weeks, months...) to go!

Enuf said ------ time for mush!

ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE - SMART BUT NOT CLASSY

( http://www.dailymail.co.uk/sciencetech/article-2260784/IBM-wipes-supercomputers-hard-drives-bid-stop-potty-mouthed-machine-uttering-obscenities.html ) This very funny article I insert in its' entirety - It is probably the best example of UNINTENDED CONSEQUENCES that I have ever run across!!

ENJOY!!The game show winning supercomputer that couldn't stop saying 'bull****':An IBM  supercomputer had to have its memory wiped because its programmers could find no other way to stop him swearing.Artificial intelligence Watson, which famously won Jeopardy! against the game show's human champions, kept making obscene outbursts after memorizing the contents of the Urban Dictionary.

The website is a repository of English-language slang, and inevitably includes a range of profanities and insults completely inappropriate for polite conversation.

But Watson proved incapable of mastering the subtleties of good mannered repartee and, after he began uttering obscenities, his masters were forced to delete the taboo vocabulary.

Watson is an artificial intelligence computer system capable of answering questions posed in natural language, specifically developed to answer questions on TV quiz show Jeopardy!

He competed on the program against two former winners in 2011, and romped home with the $1million first prize.
 

For the show, Watson had access to 200 million pages of content - including the full text of Wikipedia - but was not connected to the Internet while playing.

Eric Brown, the IBM research scientist in charge of tutoring Watson, had taught the computer the Urban Dictionary in an effort to make his communications seem more natural, Fortune reported.

It was an attempt to give Watson the knowledge he needed to pass the so-called Turing test, which gauges whether a computer can really 'think' by whether it is capable of carrying on natural sounding small talk.

But while Watson hungrily scoffed as much knowledge as he was offered, Mr Brown, 45, found that that his microprocessor-based pupil had much more difficulty understanding the subtleties of human communication.

It was after he started answering 'bullsh_t' back to human researchers that it was decided to pull the plug on attempts to teach Watson slang. Mr Brown's team had to wipe the Urban Dictionary from the computer's memory and develop a linguistic filter to keep him from swearing again.

The failed experiment seems to back up the contention by John Searle, the U.S. analytic philosopher, that Watson - despite undoubtedly impressive capabilities - cannot actually think. Based on his Chinese room thought experiment, Searle claims Watson, like other computers, is capable only of manipulating symbols with no understanding of what they actually mean.

The Chinese Room experiment, first posed by Searle in 1980, supposes there is a computer program that gives a computer the ability of carry on an intelligent conversation in written Chinese. If the program's processes are executed by hand by someone who speaks only English then, in theory, that person would also be able to carry on a conversation in written Chinese.

However, the English speaker would not be able to understand the conversation, just as a computer executing the program would only be merely offering responses based on predetermined instructions, rather than based on its own understanding.

http://www.dailymail.co.uk/sciencetech/article-2260784/IBM-wipes-supercomputers-hard-drives-bid-stop-potty-mouthed-machine-uttering-obscenities.html

GEEZER PLANET - MY FAVORITE PLACE TO LAUGH