But computers might one day also be "illogical", in the sense, as Hofstadter put it, as "subcognition as computation": human thought as an emergent property of a highly interacting system. This cowboy in washington is one query in millions. Here's a paper by Robert M French that clearly show some crucial distinctions (for the really interested people in this debate, check out his paper's on the Turing Test also; they're amazing).

Why co-occurrence information alone is not sufficient to answer subcognitive questions

Oh boy; here we go again. As a cognitive scientist, I'm appalled by /. people buying on the hype.

Hmm.... huge discoveries... intelligent machines... let's see:

Wolfram: who was the cowboy in washington?

Google: who was the cowboy in washington?

Yup. No improvement after all these years.

Wanna Tip? Please read some Hofstadter.

It revealed he is a man. Anything else?

you forgot facebook!!!11!

You really must be new here

BRAVO! Julius Caesar wouldn't put it another way.

Rather sadly, I think you're right. Apple is in on this with guns blazing, and they want to reap the network effects to the max; more users, more apps, rinse repeat. After a threshold, it might become all qwerty: perhaps substandard (one day), but pretty much a system in equilibrium, with market forces unable to enter significantly. Motorola--and google by the way--are really losing the timing with this bending over for the telcos. Sad state of affairs; I was ready and willing to get one.

if/when the paywall goes up, google the url (assuming you heard about the story or were redirected there by someone), and it will most likely let you in. You really gotta hand it to those guys, they want the google traffic, while blocking those that went to their sites in the first place.

Ok mods will burn me for this... but I think that their move to charge 30% off of the dying news industry might seriously backfire. Consider this:

i) the media industry has friends in high places;
ii) given enough time, they will become desperate and have nothing to lose;

To bet against Steve has been a surefire loss for a long time. But I would never fight against those with friends in high places, desperate, with nothing to lose.

I think it's only a matter of time between the news cycle starts turning all "Apple the subject of antitrust laws?" or the classic "Should Apple be broken up?". Neither AT&T nor IBM nor MS had a good run with the state dept. Perhaps Apple is overstreching a bit too far here; I for one think the backlash isn't worth that 30% cut.