That's (sort of) what NaN (not a number) is for in C/C++, also "NULL" is traditionally used to represent a missing/undefined value in a database.

Yes, but I don't know of anyone claiming that GAI will "teach" us anything, what I hear people saying is that we will teach it what to look for and how to behave. Also intelligence and consciousness are two entirely different things that may or may not be related.

AI is a tool that attempts to replicate the pattern matching abilities of a human brain, it can already find useful patterns in natural language and unformatted text faster and more accurately than any other method including traditional analysis by human experts, with the added advantage that every "discovery" it makes can be logically audited in excruciating detail.

If you were not blown away by IMB's jeopardy stunt then you're either under 30 or simply don't understand the difficulty of the problem they cracked. If you're waiting for skynet to emerge and attack before you call it "real AI" then I think you will be waiting a very long time. Besides, unconscious autonomous machines deliberately designed to indiscriminately kill humans have been with us for millennia, they used to be called mantraps, nowadays they are called landmines.

Personally I prefer speculation to the hubris in your post, at least I know that the people attempting to extrapolate today's technology did not stop thinking "decades ago".

You won't fix incompetence by yelling at it, you will simply hide it from plain view. If the Sgt Major routine actually worked for engineering projects then why do we have inspectors/testers? - Why not just hurl insults at the engineers until they get it right first time, every time?

I've been pan frying in olive oil for 40yrs, steaks, bacon, eggs, pancakes, etc, never had a problem with it smoking???

Theory: A OTP has a finite length in bits, a finite number of bits means a finite number of possible combinations, anything with a finite number of combinations is crackable by brute force in finite time (assuming time is infinite).

Practice: Make the number of combinations large enough so that the time to crack it makes cracking it impractical, eg: 100 trillion years.

Not really, just added more fuel to the fire. It was actually the worst drought in 10kyr history of the fertile crescent that triggered the "Arab Spring", akin to the dust bowl years in the US but in the food bowl of N.Africa and the M.E. It also coincided with sever drought in Australia and Russia, grain prices skyrocketed out of the reach of normal Arabs.

Two million Syrians (10% of the population) abandoned their farms and moved into the cities, and there were regular food riots in Cairo and other major cities before anyone had heard of Snowden! The Arabs didn't all suddenly log on to FB and work out they were being oppressed, they became hungry, and when people become hungry they get desperate and unpredictable. The spark that ignited the powder keg was the guy who set himself on fire in the town square, go google WHY he set himself on fire and then ponder why that resonated so strongly across an Arab world where even the "middle class urbanites" were struggling to feed their families.

The other two points are spot on. :)

Yes, we have always been one election cycle behind you, for example, the current PM and most of his cabinet can be accurately described as tea baggers.

You are describing Tony, Malcolm has two things the rest of the LNP ministers lack, a brain and a heart.

Yes, except google is mind bogglingly popular precisely because its search results are not dictated by short sighted bean counters.

Yes willingly, nobody has a fucking gun to your head to use this stuff, lack of willpower in a toy store is not "oppression".There's no trickery in any of this, you voluntarily (and often eagerly) sign up for a service and pay for what you use in either dollars, eyeballs, rabbit skins, whatever. Bitching about the privacy costs of of a FB account is like bitching about the electricity bill while sitting in an air-conditioned room, it will always be modded up because people hate paying bills.

Of course government spying is a whole different ball of wax, nobody signed up for that!

It's political speak for - the industry did not deliberately obstruct the investigation.

They didn't break any laws, the problem was there were no laws to break.

You give the Kardashians too much credit.

I assume the prosecutors need a complaint from the blackmailer before they could charge him with rape. It's certainly seems like the prosecutors are doing their very best to hang him on a technicality, twisting the crime to fit the law is nothing new, it's a very nasty habit that unfortunately appears to be common among US prosecutors. Sure the guy is a complete arsehole, but AFAIK being an arsehole is still legal.