It's another reason your programming community should lock into a platform as well. I know certain languages where this user would no longer be able to participate and publish packages anymore.
The opinion about standards is probably subjective to personal (and cultural) preferences. Your criterion for 'worst' toilets in Japan might be same reasons why someone of a different culture would prefer those toilets over the western conventional ones.
(They would argue that squatting allows for a healthier bowel movement, and feel that dry toilet paper can never wipe off poop as well as hand+water.)
In my opinion, it's not. Natural intelligence is another way of saying that dynamics and interactions of millions of neurons in our brain is too complicated for us to understand. Our brain is just a complex machine, and the complexity at the level of its individual components is based on very fundamental laws of physics and chemistry.
In that sense, you bring up an excellent question. I don't think there exists any unique "natural intelligence" which Hofstadter in the linked article is referring to. Watson is only different from "natural intelligence" in terms of complexity.
Conway's Game of Life can perhaps be used as an analogy here. The uninitiated is likely to assume a very complex source code upon observing setups like 'spaceships' and 'glider guns'. However, it all is based on some very simple rules which can be easily implemented by a high school computer science student.
I'd to extrapolate this logic towards the concept of 'life' itself. I feel that what we call life is just collective of natural processes too complicated for us to comprehend completely. Scientific research has allowed us to understand biological processes to some extend, but not enough to us to deduce the state of a living entity at t+1 by observing the state at t=0. The common assumption is that there is some independent/supernatural force (consciousness) which allows the living entity to 'chose' the new state at t+1 (free will).
Watson appears to be "intelligently" making a chess move, but as Hofstadter points out, Watson is simply following a set of rules. We can independently calculate Watson's move since we know it's source code.
My conjecture is that if we are theoretically able to capture the complete state of your brain cells at t=0, and understand how they work, I can theoretically calculate your chess play before you make it.
WBC appears to be a living entity, acting out of free will. But the reality is that, molecular composition of WBC is merely attracted to the chemical trail left behind the bacteria, which in turn is repelled by WBC.
We do not consider a piece of rock rolling down the hill to be a living entity, because our understanding of physics allows us to calculate the state of a rock at t+1, given it's position a t=0.
This is what I miss about my Oldsmobile Cutlass. I could comfortably sit 2 passengers (+ driver) in the front - there was even an extra seat belt in the middle. Besides being great for taking naps, the bench-seats also allowed your date to snuggle up to you on those long romantic drives :)
With it's low price point and a very user friendly admin panel, I too would recommend Dreamhost's shared hosting service. I've had a good experience with their customer service and they have some nice bells and whistles such as automated backups, PageSpeed, Railgun (cloudflare), being carbon neutral, etc.
We have to remember that shared hosting is not for heavy or critical websites. There are always some unwritten, but well-intentioned rules attached to unlimited hosting plans. As you would imagine, the server performance on any shared hosting depends on you and your neighbors adhering to them.
I'll agree with you, shutting down a customer without notice is not acceptable. Maybe if a customer is actively trying to scam the hosting provider by violating the terms... but I think even in that case, customer should be given a 24 hour eviction notice so that they have time to transition elsewhere.
> We have to remember that shared hosting is not for heavy or critical websites.
If you look carefully, you can find providers of shared hosting who will be honest about what they're selling you in terms of capacity and that you can rely on.
DreamHost is not one of those businesses.
> There are always some unwritten, but well-intentioned rules attached to unlimited hosting plans.
There are a couple of help desk tools which can compile a Q&A style knowledge base out of customer support emails. Here's one I'm familiar with: http://www.desk.com/product#sec6
Important reminder to maintain a backup of any data stored on your online accounts.