Your statements are wrong on so many levels, that it's hard to even begin with. First, if someone says "X is a mere Y" or "X is nothing more than a clever combination of Ys" than you should be very cautious of this reductionism. Of course humans are biological machines, but we are also much more than that. It shouldn't be too hard to grasp, that knowledge and culture and language brings a whole new quality to this whole realm of biological machines. We really stand somewhat outside of normal evolution.

And you also describe the work of geniuses as mix of well known things, only . Music for example is based on rules, patterns and it can be expressed or represented in mathematical algorithms. But what composers do is much more. They have musical ideas, they reflect on them, they have a story. And they mix their ideas in unexpected ways (you can analyze this after the fact, but you cannot guess them beforehand). The whole is really more than the sum of it's parts, we need an holistic approach, not a reductionist one

It doesn't surprise me that this example of reductionism is not only accepted, but also lauded here in /. No one likes the unexplainable, unexpected genius, only "hard work" is accepted. And only here can truly soulless music can be appreciated because "the concept of a soul is imaginary anyway". You dehumanized yourself here.

Once, Oscar Peterson answered to a student, who wanted to impress him by aping him: "yeah, you know what I do, you know, how I do it, but you don't know, WHY I do it". This pattern extracting, rule breaking (made doing so by other rules) program can ape styles, but can it invent new ones? Can it reflect about, what it does? This program reminds me of a more clever version of Karl Jenkins, whose melodies many people find nice but get boring after some pieces, because you begin to know, what musical knowledge and tricks he deploys.

Yes, there is a lot of mathematics underneath music, beginning from very mechanisms of sound creation, over to function of accords and harmonics reaching out to the structure of larger pieces. Every student of musicology knows that. Every student of musicolgy also has to compose smaller pieces after a particular style. It's really not surprising, that a computer program can do it, too. There is probably years of hard work in what Cope did in wading through compositions and writing the program, I won't deny that. But is that really creative? In the times of Mozart, there were a lot of musicians, who "knew the rules". But Mozart remains unique. If he were alive today and listened to Cope's "Mozart" pieces, he would easily outdo them, by inventing something completely different. Computers can analyze the "what" and can apply the "how", but they cannot reflect about the "why".

Market research fiirm Hitwise thinks, that Bing's market share is (was?) actually falling.

The best way to keep a secret is .. to forget it :-)

Compiling lists such as the Beloit College Annual Mindset List is in itself 20th century old-think about large collections of people like the baby boomer generation. Did they ever heard about concepts like the long tail? No one likes generalizations, which are applied to himself (as many posts above) point out.

Back at university I somehow dodged functional programming. I knew functional programming was and is an important concept, but besides an excursion to Prolog and some SQL I never went outside imperative and/or object-oriented programming. I never wanted to learn Lisp or Scheme, Haskell seemed to much for mathematicians back then. Scala intrigued me enough to give functional programming a try again. It's object-oriented, has generics, is strongly typed, but has a powerful inference systems, so declaring things is not too tedious. Java classes and packages can be used within. It has not only builtins for concurrency but also for parallelism. However, it was the functional programming paradigm opened my eyes, what I was missing yet.

It's one manifestion of the "Yrr" from The Swarm

Repent, the end is nigh!

I was a long time user of KDE (I think, it goes back to the early 1.x releases) and never even bothered to try out GNOME. I knew, that some of the really cool apps (Mozilla, Gimp etc.) are GTK+ and the KDE and GNOME both share technology from FreeDesktop.org), but overall I always had the impression, that KDE was so flexible in configuration and the use of Qt superior to GTK+) that a change wasn't needed and not even desired. But with KDE 4.0 I had big usability problems that even KDE 4.1 did not really solve. One of the reasons was immaturity, it had fewer features than 3.5 and the remaining one were often buggy. The other reason was a change in usability that I did not understand in the beginning. GNOME is less functional even compared with KDE 4.0 but I appreciated it's stability for a while. I used it extensively with Compiz and found few stability issues. It's less configurable, but the handling is solid. In the meantime, I switched back to KDE 4.1, because it begins to look usable again. I simply appreciate Qt more than GTK+ and overall I have the impression there are more (and more really usefull) apps in KDE than in GNOME. KDE 4.2 will hopefully implement everything what was promised for 4.0.