I switched to Dragon Naturally Speaking years ago....

In Soviet Russia, you imagine a Beowulf cluster of f*** beta, you Microsoft shill/Apple fanboi/Linux neckbeard.

Simplest variation of the Turing test on the planet: imitating slashdot posters.

In which case, there must have been an "odor of self-congratulatory aggrandizement" about Minsky (I haven't studied AI in general since 1998, but at least I know how to spell his name) because the guys working on it now are a lot nearer to what he was aiming for when he started out.

Now remind me (as I said, I haven't read the name Marvin Minsky since 98) was he a strong or a weak AI advocate?

Does your brain do pattern matching? Yes, it does. Therefore they are artificially modelling a process involved in human (and animal) intelligence. Would you prefer that they called it "synthetic psychology"? "Computation neuroscience"? "Electronic subconcious studies"?

I was about to ask you what your preferred replacement for the term AI would be, but then I got to this point:

I don't think you really care enough to have thought of a better term, do you?

True, but you also didn't highlight the first definition, the definition the dictionary compilers thought was more important: "a branch of computer science dealing with the simulation of intelligent behavior in computers."

Visual pattern recognition is intelligent behaviour. Unless your definition of intelligence is predicated exclusively on higher-order reasoning and free will.

You're forgetting one important factor: they did it in a quantum computer. Do you know how difficult those things are to build? Do you appreciate that this makes them expensive? And can you see how this would mean that all the quantum computers in existence are very very small in terms of component numbers compared to computers that work within the bounds of Newtonian physics?

The machine they used has 4 quantum bits. 4 quantum bits! That really is very little computing power. And with that they did a non-negligible task.

But the important thing isn't that this was a breakthrough in AI research, it was that quantum computing reduced the task from polynomial time to logarithmic. I think the summary calling this "a significant improvement" is a bit of an understatement.

Are those consumables cost to the retailer, or the manufacture cost?

But there's a heck of an up-front cost to setting up a fast charger, and as the most important place for these is on major trunk roads, you're looking at planned infrastructure -- not just any old Tom, Dick or Harry can set up a service station on a UK motorway, for instance -- there has to be a proven requirement for capacity at the site, and then it is franchised out. Smaller petrol station companies almost never get these concessions.

Are you also going to ask for references for a single individual killed by other solid objects or similar size and weight? Newton's laws don't have to be proven individually for every single configuration of matter, you know.

Yay! Now we can break free of the oil and gas companies evil grasp by using electricity... that will up the demand for oil and gas powered electricity generation. And what with all the transmission losses and efficiency problems, we'll make life difficult for the oil and gas companies by forcing them to sell us more of their stuff. Seriously, if the oil companies have been suppressing EV technologies, their shareholders should be suing the CEOs for professional incompetence.

Anything can be achieved with a big enough array of capacitors. A motorway (en_US:freeway) charging station won't have constant demand, so not only would it be acceptable to charge up supercapacitors between cars, but also desirable -- plugging a charger like that straight into the mains is going to generate a heck of a spike, and it'll put a humungous strain on your transformers. (I know -- they use energon, not Li-ion.)

Commercial charging stations.

That's a bit harsh. It could have been a typo, or he could have just had a crap teacher in high school physics.

As I'm saying all over this thread, TFA is about programming languages, not user applications. Incompatibility in user space happens when the application gets unmaintainable and new code can't be added without breaking old code, because the old code is poorly understood and poorly programmed. If you don't know how the code works, not only is it unmaintainable, but its behaviour is not replicable. The problem is in the programming, and possibly even in the programming language. Cleaner, neater programming paradigms would make maintenance easier, and increase the backwards compatibility of user applications.