Delta1212

Not just North Koreans. South Korea would get hammered. Seoul is not far at all from the DMZ and even without nukes, conventional North Korean artillery should be able to reach it from across the border.

They don't do any of those things in Chaucer's English, either. Outside of maybe a few experts and devotees of the field, but the exact same thing could be said about hieroglyphics.

On the other hand, we technically don't know that about any of our fellow humans, either.

Words and even grammatical forms are constantly being introduced and culled from daily usage. Language actually evolves pretty rapidly, especially when populations of speakers are isolated. Small changes are generally noticeable within lifetimes, usually between older and younger people. Patterns of change are easily visible within a matter of generations. It usually takes many centuries for divergence to the point of total incomprehensibility to really develop, but that's still faster than most megafauna speciate.

They have to be designed to actually talk, though. Nobody has built a supernetwork linking up all of the various skills currently available, nor built a network capable of assembling all of those skills into any kind of coherent whole. Also, be careful conflating skill with intelligence. There are many animals with individual behaviors that approach or surpass what a human is capable of accomplishing, but that is not the same as having human-level general intelligence. The fact that we have designed networks whose single specialized skill happens to fall into an area that we have traditionally assigned to intelligence has more to do with the lack of evolutionary pressure for Go-playing ants than because the skill in question requires human-like intelligence to do well with. I am a big proponent of AI and its potential, and I do wonder a bit about what the threshold for subject experience is and whether we have crossed it yet if we ever possibly can. Especially with some of the more advanced object recognition systems where are essentially building internal models of meaning out of the raw visual data that they are presented with. Is that enough to get quails out of, or is there something more that is required? Regardless, it is important to understand what our more advanced AIs are actually doing and how that relates to intelligent behavior and learning ability. This is a subject where there tends to be a major disconnect between the perception of how smart an AI needs to be to perform a certain task and how smart it actually needs to be. AlphaGo and its ilk are extremely impressive, but nothing thus far is anywhere close to a true general intelligence AI. I think the path we're currently on certainly leads there, and that the challenges are mostly ones of engineering, funding and technique rather than high level concept, but just because you can see the broad strokes of how to get from here to there doesn't mean that we are already there.

Even the best ones currently don't really have human-level intelligence, though. There are some that can do specific tasks better than unaided human can, but that isn't really the same thing.

I've been following AI development pretty closely for roughly 5-10 years now, and it's well past the point where I've begun seriously wondering about about whether some of them have any kind of subject experience or not. (Keeping in mind that I'm talking about a level on par with my wondering about the internal lives of bugs rather than anything approaching human-level intellect).

The US vote wasn't really outside the margin of error. Most of the polls conducted in the run up to the US election, especially the consistent and high quality polls, are national polls rather than state polls. Hillary's national total was pretty close to where the polls pegged her: the votes were just not distributed in a way that would have allowed her to win. That's not something that is adequately captured by the way polling has generally been conducted for US Presidential elections.

There is not a clear cut difference between those two things when you dig into the nuts and bolts of science. All of our rigorous descriptions of reality are really just models used to predict behaviors, and all of those models are tested in various ways to see how well they line up with actual results and where there are gaps that need to be filled or that might require a new model. They're like maps. You can have topographical maps and road maps and maps depicting rainfall and satellite maps. All of these maps represent some aspect of an area, and if you ask which is the best map, the answer will depend on what exactly it is you want to know about an area. But none of them are the "real" map. As always, the map is not the terrain. That doesn't mean that you can check the map against the terrain to see how accurately it is being represented.

I'm going to go out on a limb and bet that you have not had very much extended contact with hardcore gamblers. Also see: The entire thread leading up to this discussion

I think the point is that they love card counting for the publicity, rather than the card counters themselves. They ejected card counters, thereby demonstrating to the world that card counting is effective and convincing the gamblers who are all convinced of their own systems in other games that the house can be beaten, even though the things they are trying themselves don't actually work.

Yes, actually I guess you're right. I would imagine the abnormal betting rhythm would become fairly obvious to someone who knew what they were looking for.

If you're doing it in your head, pretty much. Although it takes more than a one-night winning streak to get banned. Generally, the people get caught after going back to the same casino continuously. Casinos invest a lot of their security budget in tracking people on the floor in order to detect abnormally large win rates over time.

More or less, although especially when multiple decks are in use, it can become unrealistic to remember all of the cards that have come up vs which ones are remaining, so most card counting systems are a bit simpler than just trying to remember the cards themselves. For example, you can keep a running score that different cards add to or subtract from as you see them so that you can tell when a deck is running "hot" based on the weighted value of the remaining cards even if you don't remember specifically which ones you have or haven't seen yet.

A properly dealt game of blackjack has a slight advantage to the house that switches to a slight advantage to the player if you can effectively count cards. A properly run lottery does not provide any advantage to someone with a machine that picks numbers for them.

I'm wondering if the friend might have been involved with more than just "calculating" the numbers to pick each week.

Yes, to set up a more robust missile defense against further strikes by the US from shipboard. Probably a smart move as it allows them to both somewhat check our own offensive capability and respond with a show of military force that doesn't (or at least shouldn't) escalate the situation appreciably. This is what I would consider a heightening of tensions rather than a likely spark for anything larger on its own. Edit: Actually, adding this because the above is a bit speculative on my part in response to Russia saying they were going to do essentially that, but not necessarily singling that ship out as part of that plan: At the very least, military "drive-by" showings where a country sends a large ship or some planes through an area that technically they are perfectly free to occupy but that will make the other guys nervous is a common way of showing displeasure without doing anything overtly violent. We've been doing similar to China over their technically illegal construction in the South China Sea. It would be weird if Russia was putting a single destroyer into position as part of any plan for actual military action. You'd see a lot more movement or little at all. Not something comparatively small and obvious like that.

Probably not much on its own. That's pretty much what I would expect them to do at this point. It's the international relations equivalent of shaking your fist. The real question is what else they'll do about it. Most likely just some heavier bombing of areas held by people we like but won't feel honor bound to defend militarily, and that'll be the end of it until and unless someone tries pushing the envelope again on one side of the other.

Have Russia and Assad acknowledged the existence of the weapons, though? I've seen a lot of denials about the attack but I'm unclear on what their position is as to whether Assad even had the weapons. I mean, he clearly did. But there is a difference between us knowing that and him admitting it.

Yes, Turkey is a big issue with pretty much any decisions relating to Syria. As a member of NATO, they are nominally a close ally, but Erdoğan has taken them from secular democracy to theocratic dictatorship-in-all-but-name in record time, and their interests in the area don't perfectly align with the rest of NATO's thanks to their own Kurdish separatist movement. Further destabilization in the area is only going to exacerbate both of those problems, neither of which are good for us. They also technically deny that Assad did any such thing as far as the chemical attack is concerned. We all know it's bullshit, but if they were spoiling for a fight, their current position on the issue would make the US strike an "unprovoked attack." But they aren't spoiling for a fight so they won't respond to it as such even if they'll yell about US aggression a bit.

Assad could probably interpret it as an act of war if he wanted to, and Russia could then interpret it as an attack on an ally if they wanted to. But right now, nobody wants that. The US doesn't really want to be on the ground in Syria right now. Assad certainly doesn't want the US invading. And Russia and the US don't really want to get into a shooting war with each other. Wars depend on at least one party recognizing a state of war. If someone wants a war, they can label even fairly minor things as acts of war. If nobody wants a war, some much bigger things can happen without sparking one. The question is always "Where exactly is the line in the current environment that each party feels they cannot allow to be crossed without having to respond?" A single air strike from the US that was given a call-ahead so the target wasn't caught unaware and thereby minimizing casualties, especially for Russia, might piss off Putin and Assad, but it isn't going to cross that line quite yet. If Putin feels that some fist shaking and strong words are an appropriate response, that's as far as it will go. You get wars in two scenarios: At least one side wants a war and feels confident they can win. Or both sides feel that backing down at each step along the way would be worse for them than escalating. Nobody on that side is chomping at the bit for a war against the US, and this wasn't something that they apparently think they can't back down from. So no war. Not yet, anyway.

Syria does not pose a threat to the United States, no. However, there is a difference between "does not pose a threat" and "can be cleaned up in a couple of months with little resistance and minimal casualties on our side." There is also a major difference between "Syria is not a threat to the United States" and "invading Syria is not a threat to the United States." As has been mentioned, Russia considers Syria to be a close ally in the Middle East, and there is already Russian military heavily involved in the country on the side of the Syria government. A US invasion force attacking the Syrian government would get very, very messy very quickly.

The sequel. Iraqi Freedom seemed like it was going to be US forces steamrolling through resistance. And that's exactly what it was. At first. And then it wasn't.

Even if the military is fully handling things and Trump is just rubber stamping plans made by smarter men, the military is a hammer and not every problem is a nail. When you want a tactical response, you turn to the military. When you then don't want that response to escalate further, you turn to other institutions, and I'm less than confident that the other instruments of government are in full working order. The State Department is barely staffed at the top levels right now and who the hell knows whether Tillersom is even competent yet. He even has Kushner unofficially pulling State Department duties. Trump has been provoking a lot of people around the world, and I'll even admit that at least some of them deserve a little poking with a sharp stick, but without a fully functional State Department, he's tinkering with live ordninance without an explosives expert on hand. Two points. I was 13 when we invaded Iraq and had much the same thoughts about how that war would go as to what you are currently describing re:invading Syria. Second, it's not so much Syria itself that is the problem. It is the fact that Assad is considered a close ally in the region by Russia. They're already on the ground there, so you're hardly going to see the US waltz through that territory unopposed.

I have very mixed feelings about this and will straight up admit that a large part of that is that I do not trust in Trump's ability to negotiate complex diplomatic waters. There is a marked difference between boldness and stupidity, but it is often difficult to distinguish between the two at the opening salvo.