Most bleeding edge AI research is being done by Google, Facebook, and Baidu.

Usually what happens when a few big Capitalist firms hoover up all the experts in a discipline, is that the discipline is badly stunted for quite awhile afterwards. Free inquiry doesn't happen when a few rich assholes who 'got there first' (the definition of Google and Facebook at least) buy up all the smarts and stick them in a building somewhere.

"We" don't have to make one. All we have to do is set an AI towards self improvement/production of better AIs.

Right. I wrote a pattern recognition program, in FORTRAN, for a college assignment in 1978. It self-improved, learning the pattern embedded in the 'learning' deck and getting near perfect results on the 'test' deck. But it didn't take over the keypunch, nor the high speed card reader, or even the Line Printer, which would have been the logical thing to 'grab.'

Like any AI that is being fretted about here, if it had, we could have cut off it's supply of punched cards, or turned off the power.

My wife just got a Virgin Mobile Nokia phone. She really likes it. I might end up getting one too.

I hate it, too. It's almost impossible to get out of your hair and it ruins your clothes. I just plain stay out of the stallion barn to avoid it.

Right. Brillo software will presumably be used in appliances. Brillo pads are used in appliances.

Lots of us do. Why are you spamming the whole discussion repeatedly with this single point?

40k is a lot of code, when it's not been written in layers of glop-gloop abstraction.

Somebody at Google wanted some beer money, and convinced their manager somehow to let them file. You get a bonus of a few hundred bucks at most companies for contributing to the wallpaper collection of patents in the hall the CEO likes to escort visitors through.

because Google?

No, scratch that. It doesn't work anymore.

Do they sell 2600 on Amazon? I have these visions of adverts recommending 2600 to me popping up all over the web as I browse.

The narrative for Hillary Clinton is "she hasn't been convicted of anything so she's electable."

It's so sad that there is a portion of the American public that will fall for that.

There are so many thousands of other people better suited to be president.

Did I type 'thousands' up there?? OMG.

Probably those damned spammers got ahold of her addy the first sixteen times, but things finally calmed down.

That funny smell is something else. Look! It's probably coming from that pony over there!

By the 'tragedy where four people were killed' do you mean the instance where Ambassador Stevens, an openly gay man, was captured by Islamic Terrorists, then tortured and sodomized before being killed?

There couldn't possibly have been anything premeditated there. It's common practice when a gay man is tortured, sodomized, and murdered, to just say four people were tragically killed. And then the media typically blames it on a film that riled up the murderous torturers. Happens all the time. Nothing to see here. Let's all move along now. We've got people to get elected in a week or so.

Buckstar.

Does anybody even go there? Do they have a clown and a burglar as mascots yet?

You can't just take the thing out of the colorful display box it sat in at the department store, take the styrofoam packing blocks off the ends, and plug it in.

It isn't even all the same brand, from the same company!