I guess you missed this article from two days ago, then? (The classic "mystery" in neural nets is how they distribute weights during learning, the answer to which is "rarely better than a human would, and according to the algorithm they train by.") I know you saw this one; you commented on it. Or perhaps you were talking about computer-automated proofs? Those aren't sophisticated, merely long-winded; the result of applying simple propositional logic over and over again.

If we had algorithms that were actually capable of exceeding human comprehension in a meaningful way—and not just outpacing or outlasting us at regression and tree search—the world would be a much different and more exciting place. It is very unlikely we will have AGI until the human brain is almost fully understood, simply because we don't know what direction we really need to be pushing in. Given that there's now evidence that the brain's neurons could be DNA computers, that definitely has a long way to go.

As a researcher in machine learning: lol nope.

Most WoW private servers use a copy of the entities database which is created by ripping the game data from the official servers using a special add-on. It was this copyright infringement in particular that I was thinking of.

Now that's just plainly overly generalized; "theft of services" is an entirely real thing and may not involve anything tangible; the most obvious business example is refusing to pay a consultant. In the case of private MMO servers, this isn't happening: the client, protocol, and server content are already paid for, after all, so what is done is definitely infringement, but there are definitely still kinds of intangible theft.

Easy: a computer scientist who would like to create a smarter parser to distinguish "then" from "than," but doesn't code, and so writes a spec outline instead. (Presumably in Word.)

It is a pun on that thing, so no.

To be honest I've been trying to move to SoylentNews, but I can't quite stomach the blast from the past—the comments are few, the SlashCode is yesteryear's, and the stories tend to be a day or so behind. (I am glad, however, to see that Beta is more or less sleeping in R'lyeh.)

Then they'll happily charge you extra, even if you don't use it!

I'm sure that would fall under the most expensive category, just to be "safe."

1. Children's hospitals receive donations and nail research grants with an alarming deftness. Boston Children's Hospital is, according to their own architecture, the best. There's no shortage of money. They did have some layoffs a couple of years ago, but with a ridiculous savings ratio (255 jobs, costing 89.5 million annually, constituting somewhere in the neighbourhood of 3% of their budget.)

2. Their primary website is located at 134.174.13.251 (childrenshospital.org). Patient info retrieval is hosted on 134.174.13.5 (apps.childrenshospital.org). There is a booking form located on the main site, but at any rate it's working just fine now.

On top of that, they're taking comments until 2015 and didn't even realise this would be such a big deal, so in all likelihood the exemption will get preserved. (Particularly since congresspeople are now speaking out about it.) It's practically accidental.

Well, here's the tl;dr of TFA: Social media is the starting point. Hence the Arab Spring—you use Facebook or Twitter or whatever to spread your message and/or propaganda, and then accrue those with personal willingness to march and coordinate action through the net. Five dictators have been overthrown in the Middle East since December 2010 (as well as uprisings and protests in more than a dozen other countries) following social media germination, so clearly it's viable for that. Unfortunately this means it's also a single point of failure, as shown in Egypt when they depeered from the rest of the network in early 2011, easy to infiltrate and possible to manipulate.

I take it you didn't RTFA, then, which is a summary of the real paper, in which they show that doesn't really work. (And abuse factor analysis.)