About Minsky, he has been dead for years. The science of AI had moved beyond him a long time ago. Even his school, MIT, is no longer a center of computing research after the Aaron Sorkin incident discredited it in the eyes of traditional hackerdom. Digging up his corpse from its unquiet grave for this bit of virtual necrophilia is a total waste of time.

As for Epstein's suicide, is it not nice of him to be so obliging? We abolish the death penalty, and he goes and penalizes himself. This will not save us money, however, because the court system is too inert to simply stop, and his myriad victims are too vindictive to let it go.

I am angry Jeffrey Epstein won’t have to face his survivors of his abuse in court. We have to live with the scars of his actions for the rest of our lives, while he will never face the consequences of the crimes he committed the pain and trauma he caused so many people.

This is because you refuse to believe in Hell, where he is rotting all alone in the fire that comes from within, the punishment of over-socialized critters like him.

That depends: Can Daunt flush out the execs that made B&N the miserable, publisher-enslaved shops that they are now? Those execs are the ones who stare at the lights of Amazon, thinking it is a car, when it is nothing but a lamppost. Daunt worked around that in Britain and he can work around that here.

It is not clear if the comments are on a Website itself or are merely about the Website.

• If they are not on the Website, the owner of the site can disavow the comments.
• If they are about the Website, the owner can just ignore the comments since they are not on the site, just as if they were on Facebook or Twitter. That is how some news sites hive off comments so that they do not have to deal with them.

If the comments are not a physical part of the Website, I do not see how they could matter, since the owner(s) of the site are not responsible for them.

That suit interfered in the politics of Indiana several years ago because he did not like how Hoosiers behaved and what they believed. Now he wants to interfere with the functioning of the walled gardens because he does not like how the human cattle within behave, even though it has been obvious for years how crap-strewn the gardens are. The behavior of the cattle has even been codified long ago.

Nothing is going to come of this because this will be a fight between that rag doll stuffed with hundred-dollar bills and an Ivy League graduate with more pull than the planet Jupiter.

Businessmen — the wealthy magnate kind — want extra time for their golf games and extra time to extract more work from their underlings. So they talked magic felafel to the politicians and, ta-da!, we're stuck moving our clocks every March and November for their benefit. (Hoosier politicians resisted the felafel until Someone Else's Man Mitch got it enacted in 2006.)

Kaspersky is still an excellent anti-virus software, and since I am nobody in the eyes of the nation-states, I will continue to use it. If it goes away, I will not switch to another anti-virus software: I will switch to DeepFreeze and revert to an original state of my computer whenever it is infected.

• Cook does not say in what language, of which there are very many; or
• that most of those languages use English words, meaning that you will still have to learn at least minimal English — especially if you write comments in your code; or
• that his ultimate goal is to flood the market with programmers and thereby push down the average wage that they earn — which in turn will drive the truly talented to look for other careers.

This seems like Cook is looking to turn the States into a land of cheap programming labor, like those lands that corporate America enjoy today.

Blaming Google and Facebook for other people's lies is like blaming the builder of a perfectly good road for car accidents. Stop whining for censorship, O Atlantic, or it will come back to bite your ass!

Has anyone mentioned, that those corner stores provide taxes and license fees to the city governments where they are located? If this Bodega shuts them down, where will the taxes come from? If the cities try to extract them out of Bodega, it will dance so prettily in the courts to keep from paying them. Those two jerks do their target marks and their cities no favors.

I have already switched to Pale Moon for Windows. I also did the same for my Mac, even though Pale Moon is still experimental on macOS and I needed to do a long search for its latest version. (If you are interested, it is here.

It makes me wonder how Google manages to maintain itself technology-wise if it has no traditional hackers among its low-level workers? Traditional hackers tend to be libertarian, which Google may mistake for conservative. And Google tends to scare or insult such people away — it once offered programmer Zed Shaw a junior sysadmin position. Maybe Google is propelled by sheer inertia or is being propped by Wall Street to make Silicon Valley look like the place is still attractive. Who knows? It certainly can't be its technology when it is starting to look like a brightly-painted sunshine-and-fresh-air leftist version of IBM.

It does not seem obvious to anyone that colleges and universities define "critical thinking" in a way that is different from "critical thinking" defined by businessmen. Businessmen always ask for critical thinking skills in potential employees, cannot find it, and whine. Academia whines back, "But we are teaching them critical thinking, we are!." In other words, "critical thinking" is nothing but a buzzword. The inabilities cited above are a product of that lack of knowledge for which American education is famous.

FORTRAN IV. Yeah, I am that old.

Cinema is a way for TED to preach its peach-and-civility message to the middle and upper-middle classes. However, it will not reach the mostly-white, poor and unchurched mob (read the Atlantic article for this: Breaking Faith) who fuel the angry political screaming, who ensured Trump's victory, and who neither go to theaters nor will listen to TED. In that way, TED's mission is futile.

I used to think that it was a privilege to serve people who also loved the idea of service

No, the open-source programmer does not make a program or a library or a toolkit in order to serve. They do that for pleasure or in order to prove to the world that they can. It is a distributed model (as opposed to a top-down model like Canonical's) that has worked well for decades. It has nothing to do with service. Maybe Shuttleworth should read The Cathedral and the Bazaar before equating open-source with service.