You are sort of missing the point of the conversation here. When I said "we have to change the very basis for how they work," I didn't mean the hardware. While those ant-like robots are the most humanlike in intelligence, scaling up that hardware to human size would be technically infeasible. I meant that, if the goal is to have computers have humanlike intelligence, then the whole way the system works would have to change, hardware and software both. You said you are "trying to integrate figure-ground discrimination into the algorithms as efficiently as possible." In other words, the way the computer you are using "thinks," it requires you to tell it what patterns exist, what to do when it sees them, what to do when it doesn't see them, et cetera, et cetera. This "intelligence" of precisely following a programmer's algorithm is simply not humanlike. The extent to which that computer is humanlike depends, as you said, on your own programming ability to impose a small part of *your* human intelligence into the computer. The computer will only be able to mimic the small portion of your intelligence that you are able to give it, and not one whit more. The program you eventually write will not be really doing the same thing you are doing in your own head at all. You are not following any kind of algorithm when you look at a cute kitten and say, "Awwwwww." It's simply that the way your perception works, the kitten triggered a sufficient amount of a pattern linked to the "Awwww" emotion to evoke enough of said emotion that you were made consciously aware of it, and following a pattern of "what I do when I feel sufficient awwwwwww," and said pattern not being overridden by other patterns (such as "what I do when I'm in front of my boss"), you triggered the pattern for saying the sounds of "Awwwwww" in a particular tone of voice. This networking of patterns and behavior is the basis for humanlike intelligence. So, for a computer to be humanlike, we have to throw out our current programming techniques and start fresh with an attempt to create computer architecture (by which I mean, both hardware and software) with a pliable, adaptible artificial network that "learns as it goes" not because some algorithm tells it what it should be learning, but rather, because learning and processing are one and the same. That's how a human mind works: every time you perceive something, you reinforce or change patterns simply through the act of perception. The human mind is in a state of constant change. This is w

Our intelligence is not a result of computations. We are consummate pattern-matchers. Here is a really simplified version of how it goes: When we perceive something, it causes a certain bunch of sensory neurons to fire, which correspond directly to that perception. The neurons connected to those sensory neurons fire in turn if they recognize a pattern there -- for example, some neurons only fire if they see a vertical bar traveling from left to right, or other specific patterns like that. Then the next level of connected neurons fire if they recognize a particular pattern in the level before them, and so forth. We learn by building up patterns of patterns. The match to a pattern pops up automatically, or in other words, perceiving and recalling a matching previous pattern happen because the perception and the recall are linked by sharing the same set of neurons in the middle. For an example of how this works, take driving. When you first got behind the wheel as a kid, everything seemed very unfamiliar. All the knobs were confusing, and you probably had to concentrate to remember which pedal was which. You probably had trouble recognizing following distances and when to turn to fit into a parking space and that kind of thing. But with practice, your brain began to recognize and store the patterns of driving, until almost all of driving became subconscious pattern-matching -- the lines on the road should be at particular distances, the feel of the brake matches to how quickly or how slowly the car comes to a stop, et cetera -- we don't have to think about any of these things because they match stored patterns in our minds. We don't have to consciously think about anything unless it breaks our expectations. Unexpected or unknown things draw our attention because they defy the patterns we know. In contrast, a computer is terrible at pattern-matching. Many, many man-years went into the Google search algorithm, but really, what it's doing is trying to mimic the natural human ability to glance over a list and recognize what you are looking for out of it. This very basic ability has to be painstakingly coded into the computer. If you lined up a bunch of toys and asked a preschooler to hand you the "meanest one," the preschooler will be able to match his or her idea of "meanness" to the various traits of the toys and decide which one is the most mean. The computer, on the other hand, has no ability to take the concept of "mean" and expand it to apply to a toy, *unless a human writes an algorithm d

I am having trouble understanding what your table fields mean. I am assuming that Week_14 is the number of times a song was played in Week_14? In that case, you will want to use MAX(Week_14) with GROUP BY Country to get what the greatest Week_14 is for each Country (it will give you one row per country). I would need to know more about the table structure to give you more specific help than that.

You shouldn't worry about having to use PHP. Running MYSQL queries in PHP is super simple. You use mysql_connect() to get your link to your MYSQL server, you use mysql_select_db() to select the database, you use mysql_query() to run the queries in the database, you use mysql_error() to find out what the error messages are if there were errors, and you use mysql_fetch_assoc() to get the results if there were no errors. Once you have the results, you use echo() on them to print them out wherever you need them on the webpage. So, you see, you'll really only need to learn how to use a handful of commands to do what you need to do.

This is a feature, not a bug, that is built into most browsers. A browser's ability to remember what's in a textarea helps you if you start to fill something out on a page and then navigate away from it -- the browser can then remember what you started to type. This browser feature is why you can click the "back" button and find your text still in a box, not wiped away. I'm not sure how to stop it from happening, though. Controlling what the user's browser does is understandably difficult to do.

I'm not sure I understand your question. Are you trying to create a textarea that allows people to put in rich text? If so, you will have to move out of being "simple HTML" and move into a Javascript-based solution. Try looking for What You See Is What You Get (WYSIWYG) editor plugins for your page. Let me know if I have misinterpreted your question. :)

How did I figure it out? In my experience, position and Z-index are both only used when you're trying to do something fancy, like make a floating box with a bigger version of a picture appear when you hover over its thumbnail. You weren't trying to do anything fancy like that, so I figured those lines were what was giving you the issue. A lot of people are suggesting you study manuals and such, but that's not how I learned. Instead, I learned by searching on the internet for whatever I wanted to do -- flyout navigation, equally-sized columns, image placement, etc. I then copy and pasted whatever CSS code I found into a test page. Then -- this is the important part -- I commented out individual lines, or I changed individual values, until I was able to understand why the thing I had copy-and-pasted actually worked. After doing that with enough pieces of code, I began to grasp the basic principles and was able to start designing my own CSS from scratch. This is how I've taught myself several different programming languages.

It's the "position:relative" in the "content" class in the css that's making your flyouts go underneath the content. Just delete that line from the css and the flyouts will go just like you want them to. I just gave it a quick test on my computer, and it appears to work. Of course, I am assuming that what I'm looking at in the link you posted before is still what you are working on, and not some much older version. And don't worry about Z-index -- I think they invented that just to discourage beginners from learning CSS. It's much easier to position things using divs within divs, padding, and margins.

When there even half the uproar over insults to fringe believers as there is over insults to ethnic minorities, I will agree with you.

What you appear to have read out of my post was, "Whine whine whine everybodyz meeen to me!!1!1!" I respectfully request that you try reading it again without wearing whatever tinted glasses you were wearing before. I have met plenty of people like the ones you describe, who go around shouting about how all the rest of us are not catering to them. Those people are in every religion, including atheism. But I am not one of them. I am going to try to make my point again, and perhaps I will do a better job of communicating it this time. What I am saying is, the definition of a "crackpot nutjob" is something along the lines of, "Someone who believes something that I find ridiculous." It is not correct (morally or factually) to say, "Jewish people are all crackpot nutjobs." But many people in our culture -- as "tolerant" as you say it is -- would agree that "People who worship Thor are all crackpot nutjobs." Because they find the idea of worshipping Thor to be obviously irrational, it seems clear to them that only irrational people must be able to worship Thor. Thus, Thor-worshippers must be mentally inferior, because they are so stupid that they cannot recognize the silliness of their beliefs. Thus, it is acceptable to categorize them as just a couple points past drooling. I prefer to think in logical terms. Just because your rational thinking leads you to conclusion Y, that does not mean that people who reach conclusion X are irrational. Just because some people who believe X are irrational, that does not mean that all people who believe X are irrational. And just because you find X ridiculous, that does not mean people who believe X are worthy of ridicule as being "crackpot nutjobs." I am speaking here about even people who are, say, Flat Earthers. Just because you and I find their belief absurd, that does not mean they are necessarily mentally inferior. They may be merely working from a different set of premises and evidence. (I am not saying that their premises and evidence are of the same quality as ours, I am saying that their thought processes could very well be equal in quality to ours.) Not only is mocking these people an immoral thing to do, it makes them defensive and less willing to change their minds about what they believe. Attacking people only serves to close the gates of communication. I do not care one whit about whoever it was the "crazy nutjobs" in the original post were. I am merely offended that it is considered acceptable to label people with such a derogatory

How strange. Time Machine has always worked perfectly smoothly for me. Turned out my MacBook's logicboard had a factory defect, and the casing of my MacBook had yet another factory defect, so I got practically the entire computer replaced for free. (I have a first-generation MacBook, so they hadn't worked out the kinks yet.) When I got it back, I restored from the Time Machine backup with just the one click, and I couldn't even tell that anything was different, aside from the whole casing-no-longer-coming-apart-at-the-seams thing.

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A totally unrelated thing, did you ever realize how nice our society is to complete crackpot nutjobs as long as they don't actually drool?

You are completely wrong about this. Our society is horrible to people it considers to be "crackpot nutjobs." In our culture, it is perfectly acceptable to ridicule those who have beliefs contrary to one's own beliefs. So, the fewer people believe something, the more ridicule those people will receive for it, most often suffering accusations of having a lower mental capacity. This happens despite unrefutable historical evidence and logical deduction that, in the realm of ideas, popularity and correctness often have little to do with one another. The exception to this is that once a set of beliefs reaches a certain number of people -- a "critical mass" number, if you will -- it becomes politically incorrect to communicate your ridicule publicly. This leads to resentment on the part of closed-minded people. That resentment gets communicated in the form of petty spitefulness, such as through malicious gossip, through ostracization, or through posting semi-anonymous comments complaining about crackpot nutjobs in general. In the case of Ron Paul, for example, his followers reached critical mass at such a high speed that it left closed-minded people's heads spinning. The news media could no longer ridicule him out loud, so they chose to gossip and ostracize. I will leave it to Paul-ites to express the details of this unfairness themselves, but objectively, there is a clear news bias against Paul, and one does not have to be a supporter to see it. I sympathize with him because I am a member of a minority religion that has been right on the line of critical mass for many years, and I have personally suffered extreme ridicule from Christians and atheists alike. Actually, the atheists have been much worse than the Christians, in both the level of vitriol and the utter refusal to acknowledge that a sane person could believe the things that I believe. To such closed-minded people, if you do not believe what they believe, you are obviously a crackpot nutjob, meaning that you are mentally and morally inferior in every way. As someone with an IQ of 155 who has no trouble holding a steady job, who graduated from an Ivy League school with a GPA of 3.69, and who completely disdains mind-altering substances, I find this extremely irritating. What more do I have to do to prove that I am rational? Oh, of co