Microsoft, and Blackberry saw the Apple train start 5 years ago, not going my way they said, and ignored it.
They both should have started crash programs to understand and catch up.

Then they heard a noise, looked up, and the train was aimed at them and they could not get out of the way, and the 5 years was wasted.

Apple seems to have a better way of making decisions early in the game, of allowing ideas to gather resources internally and have groups kick ideas around and build them up until they can become a viable product. This is not easy. Apple might have had hundreds of ideas that they think-tanked and killed off, but at least they had the ideas. Google is a lot like this as well.

I get the impression that new ideas have a hard time gathering headway in Microsoft, that petty corporate politics determines if an idea is good or bad and not the intrinsic merits of the idea, so good ideas are starved of resources and destroyed and the bad ideas of the favorites are fed resources, which go to waste.

How can Microsoft change? Hard to say?, those in power will cling to it. They need a new board that does not cling to useless cronies for too long - look how long that drone Ballmer stayed on top, killing one good idea after another. How do I know this? I do not know for sure, but since all the ideas that came out of their stable were duds, the good ones must have been head shot early on.

I am going to patent a screw-your-buddies software package that divides the bill up among me and my friends in such a way that I pay zero, and they do not know it...;)

What happens if 7 of a group of 8 people have the software ?, would the one guy paying the whole bill plus tip figure it out?

Can this be applied to votes? Oh, it already is....

That reminds me of the sign Wile E Coyote - Super Genius....
I feel comments have great potential value in allowing the topic to evolve and can take it in new superiors directions. That said, comment moderation is needed to eliminate trolls. Troll IP addresses should be tracked and once a troll is confirmed, he can get auto deleted or even barred from the topic as long as it is confirmmed he/she authors only crap. It takes a smart moderator to winnow the wheat from the chaff. Some entry creds are needed to weed out trollmods - volunteers who crave power.
This means a parallel to the normal academic process of publication followed by letters to the writer and follow on publication, but on a vastly accelerated form that can only be done online. It may be labor intensive? Where will valuable volunteers come from? Journals already have trouble getting learned critical commentators - will it work online?

Microsoft = Kodak, died a long time ago, but scattered brains kept it moving until the rot made it fall down and the flies got at it...

Read the V-K test is a story artifact, there is no such test, nor has there been need for one. That said, and method to test made people from real people is a natural step, assuming 9 nines DNA copying so DNA tests will not figure them out? In addition, it is becoming obvious that the mind of man is a hierarchical arrangement of various mental centers. There may be ways to test these by vocal or physical stimulus. In addition, to find out what makes a brilliant person - each one of these tuned to that end result, bear in mind that a tuned athlete will differ from a trained physics guy.

Of course, if you implant 16 fertilized human eggs in a cows uterus - will there be enough mammalian similarity that they will implant and grow into humans with no detrimental aspects coming from the cow via nutrition, hormones and DNA switches not set right? Might be a good way to raise armies?

Yes, the concept of an inhibitory race is an elegant way for this to work.
As a retired engineer, outside of my area, I am not familiar with many of these terms, however, I see the emergence of a functional basic AI capable of passing the Turing test as imminent.
The test procedure envisioned in Blade Runner is a discerning Turing Test, and I am sure the AI deniers will emerge to try and put humans first?

How does the circuit discriminate? I have seen the auditory time delay used to locate a direction in direction finding - this allows an animal to look at a sound source and use head angle change to create intersectin arcs to locate in both polar and horizontal directions.

If we have two(for simplicity) levels that are a decision point, with more impulses coming to one than the other, if both axon potentials are the same, how does one input have the greater weighting?

not as we know FM radio. It seems that the initial signal decays and if another one arrives before it has decayed to zero, then the baseline is raised and with more and more frequent inputs that level is raised until it reaches the required level to trigger the next stage of the process. I have read that these processes all vary in their decay time and the level needed - I imagine that critical survival items would have a lower threshhold - fly flies, frog leaps, man balances etc.
I suspect that all these links are slowly examined by detailed research on assorted animal nerves, with occasional chances to confirm in the human model through accidents etc.

So if more rapid =larger, Then the signal pours into a leaky bucket, and the level falls when less rapid ensues = de facto analog.
An AI new born would have resources of memory, which we can liken to instinctual memories found in many places. The rate of access to this and the depth would hasten maturity, and a faster clock speed also do this.
A lone AI would want the high speed interaction of another like it, or more, so we need to build them in groups, once we know how.

Yes, We humans all have varying forms of intelligence. Some are math whizzes who never solve the reproduction equation on saturday night.Some can compute complex 3D motion and solve the muscle equation to hit baskets.
I think that as we understand the mix of processes and brain areas that make up the average mind we will also learn what make the extraordinary mind, in math, social skills and athletics and what the tradeoffs are.
Is there a maximum degree of intelligence? Can an AI have an IQ OF 3,500,000 - if so, would we seem like bacteria to it?

Comparing man and AI in a digital is to fail. The human condition in all the ways we think, lay down memory, recall, amend memory etc, is not at all digital. It seems to me that almost every study finds neurons have large numbers of interconnections and even though the nerve cells does change from one state to another, in a way that resembles digital, all the summing and deduction of various inputs, and the same things happening to the large number of interconnected neurons tells me that we can not easily reach this digitally. Some say that a large and complex digital system that emulates an enormous neuronal network in an analog manner is hiw we will achieve AI. A lot of the experts say we can only create AI, when we fully understand it, and we are far from fully understanding it.
Others seems to feel that if we break the mind down into dozens of interacting analog systems, each one of them will be manageable digitally, and as we achieve this digital emulation of each analog system we will reach the starting point - posit an AI child, with a pace of thought 10,000 times as fast. Will it go mad from being lonely?
Will we be able to slow it's clock at ~ 10 Hz, to think as fast as we do?(assuming the alpha wave is the master clock). Can we dial the speed as we wish? Will it learn to hate us - its slavemsaters? How do we pay it? Will there be a currency it wants and will work for? Will it want a gf/bf, be prey to hero worship, treason etc?

Invention of retina laptops - what invention, they are fabrications.
The rest is normal progress in machine and OS

Apple was off to a good start with the Apple II, it then went into fail mode until they went into desk top publishing, and that carried them for a few years, and then they were near death at ~~$2 per share when the iPhone and iPad came along at just the right time and Blackberry(who was run by Canadian idiots who ignored it for 5 years). If Blackberry had responded instantly with a catch up, we would see an entirely different phone/tablet ecosystem. Microsoft also had high placed idiots.

Now however, Apple seems out of new ideas, it can only try a cheaper iPhone, which will cost more than dozens of Android variants. So Ellison may be right, the sun is setting on the Apple empire - still, $150 billion or so will allow Apple to live on for a while, unless they do something incredible stupid - like buying their own stock = simple cash combustion, I see they actually burned some cash last quarter - what did it get them? Nothing is what it got them.

Duck tape - fits, many of the MD's in the system are quacks.....

They call the product of these software authors "Fiction, any relationship with anyone living or dead is purely coincidental" except that the dying must live it...