The article is a little over-zealous its characterization, though it's careful to note that this is not actually a theoretical novelty. The summary, on the other hand, bastardizes and exaggerates it.

Not to mention, but what a conceited prick the author is as well.

One of the main reasons I accepted the Varnish proposal was to show how to write a high-performance server program... Because, not to mince words, the majority of you are doing that wrong.

Oh, please do mince words. Why don't you tell all of us, your sad little children, how we should be doing things, oh master. Clearly you're the shit! Get over yourself already.

"... So my question is this: when I can get a very good netbook computer for under $400 why do I need to pay $1,200 per ear for a hearing aid? Alternatives would be welcome."

Welcome to the world of for-profit health. Medical device approval process, litigation and because your insurance company will presumably pay a big chunk (not a reasonable assumption anymore, though) is largely responsible. Just one of the million reasons we need health care reform.

The Lancet didn't retract that ridiculous paper from 1998 until last month and it pretty much started all this ridiculous BS. It's absolutely unconscionable that they didn't retract it sooner. Ten of the original 13 authors retracted back in 2004. That should have been a hint.

The problem with vaccines is that being vaccinated as an individual isn't what makes you safe. It's the vaccination of the herd that protects. That is, for a particular disease that you might be vaccinated against, let's say measles, it's safer to be the only person in a crowd who isn't vaccinated than to be the one person in the crowd who is vaccinated. Vaccines aren't 100% effective and what makes them truly effective, is having everyone take them.

Back in 2006, some girl in Indiana got measles on a trip to Romania. She came back and shared that gift with the people in her church, simply by showing up. Roughly 10% of the 500 people present weren't vaccinated and 32% of those people developed the measles. One person who got the vaccine also got the measles, but 94% of the cases were unvaccinated people.

The problem these days is that people don't bother to learn history. Anyone who's been to an old cemetery (I live in Arkansas, and we have tons of them) pretty much can't miss the fact that there are tons of kids aged 10 and under buried. Why? In the early 1800s, infant mortality was about 20%. Think about that. One in five infants (1 year old and younger) died. A lot more died before the age of 5. Not all of that is vaccines, but a lot of it is! Before the vaccine, smallpox alone was killing 400,000 Europeans a year.

Personally, I think vaccines ought to be required by law because they're a public safety issue and people who won't do it should go to jail.

Now I'm going to have to sue Xerox for violating my patent for the business process of how to make money from companies using ridiculous patent infringement lawsuits.

For those current in the field, this discovery is not surprising.

Especially since those current in the field probably read about it 13 months ago when the paper was published.

I'm glad to see a CEO so devoted to getting his game out for the fans. Screw the developers. It's the fans that matter!

From TFA: ...according to the study published in the U.S. Journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

I'm going on the assumption that "published" implies past tense. As in, done. Yet, a search of PNAS finds no connection between the quoted author Philippe Schmitt-Kopplin and the word "Murchison" appearing ANYWHERE in the text of an article. And since no title is mentioned and no other authors are mentioned, I'm not really sure what to say.

I mean, I suppose it's possible PNAS completely screwed up somehow. I tried matching just the guy's first name, just his last name. He has written for PNAS in the past. He's written three articles on wine. That's quite a jump, from wine to meteorites.

I'm not saying it's not there. I just can't find it among the 81 PNAS articles on the Murchison meteorite.

I was wondering how long it would take someone to come along and desecrate Foundation. Foundation was my introduction to real Sci-Fi literature. It's always held a special place in my heart. The obvious problem with Foundation as a movie is, it'd be epically boring if it's even remotely true to the book. It's just not something you can properly do as a movie.

But, if I'm able to completely separate the movie, in my mind, from the book, then I might actually enjoy it. As corny and ridiculous as Independence Day was, I kind of enjoyed it.

One interesting strategy discussed is for the professor to make the final count for more of the final grade each time cheating is discovered.

Another interesting strategy is to fail them out of the class. There's no excuse for cheating. The punishment should be severe. Especially if it's something obvious. For example, when I was in school, some moron managed to get a copy of my code for an assignment (possibly a copy I left on the hard drive). They were so stupid, they didn't even remove the comments from my code, including the ones with my name. Given that I was getting an A in the class and the other person was doing pretty poorly, the professor had no question about who wrote the code. His only question was, how was I connected with the person. I was like, "Who are they?" I didn't even know the person and fortunately the professor believed me.

But the point is, they could have hurt me by their cheating. If the professor thought we were in cahoots, I could have been punished for merely being thoughtless and leaving a copy of my code on the hard drive. The cheater should have been failed out of the class, as far as I'm concerned, if not suspended or expelled. I busted my butt in college and never cheated and I observed a great deal of cheating. It's completely unfair to the rest and I have no tolerance for it.

Since this is an area I'm very familiar with, I'll throw in a little science about why these predictions are not only realistic, but actually probably a bit pessimistic.

First of all, our understanding of the human brain has improved vastly in the past two decades. Especially in the areas that will be necessary for creating intelligent machines. The cortex (the part that kind of looks like a round blob of small intestines, with all the creases and folds) is much like a computer with a bunch of processors. Previously focus had been paid to the individual neurons as the processors. But a much larger unit of processing is now becoming the central area of focus; The Cortical Minicolumn which, in groups for a Cortical Hypercolumn. As minicolumns consist of 80-250 (more or less, depending on region) neurons and there are about 1/100th of them compared to neurons, it cuts down on complexity significantly.

Numenta and others are starting to take this approach in simulating cortex. Cortex is largely responsible for "thinking". The other parts of the brain can be seen, to some degree, as peripheral units that plug into the "thinking" part of the brain. For example, the hippocampus is a peripheral that's associated with the creation and recall of long term memories. The memories themselves, however, are stored in the cortex. We have various components that provide input, many of which send relays through the thalamus which takes these inputs of various types and converts them into a type of pattern that's more appropriate for the cortex and then relays those inputs to the cortex.

The cortex itself is basically a huge area of cortical minicolumns and hypercolumns connected in both a recurrent and hierarchical manner. The different levels of the hierarchy provide higher levels of association and abstraction until you get to the top of the hierarchy which would be areas of the prefrontal cortex.

What's amazing about the cortex is it's just a general computing machine and it's very adaptable. To give an example (I'd link the paper, but I can't seem to find it right now and this is from memory, so my details may be a bit sketchy, but overall the idea is accurate), the optic nerve of a cat was disconnected from the visual cortex at birth and connected to the part of the brain that's normally the auditory cortex. The cat was able to see. It took time and it certainly had vision deficits. But it was able to see, even though the input was going to the completely wrong part of the brain.

This is important for several reasons, but the most important aspect is that the brain is very flexible and very adaptable to inputs. It can learn to use things you plug into it. That means that you very likely don't have to create a very exact replica of a human brain to get human level intelligence. You simply need a fairly model of the hierarchical organization and a good simulation of the computations performed by cortical columns. A lot of study is going into these areas now.

It's not a matter of if. This stuff is right around the corner. I will see the first sentient computer in my lifetime. I have absolutely no doubt about it. Now here's where things get really interesting, though... The first sentient computers will likely run a bit slower than real-time and eventually they'll catch up to real time. But think 10 years after that (and how computing speed continually increases). Imagine a group of 100 brains operating at 100x real time, working together to solve problems for us. Why would they work for us? We control their reward system. They'll do what we want because we're the ones that decide what they "enjoy." So 1 year passes in our life, but for them, 100 years have passed. They could be given the task of designing better, smarter, and faster brains than themselves. In very little time (relatively speaking), the brains that will be produced will be vastly beyond our comprehension. Imagine what they can do for us.

I know it sounds very science fiction-ish, but it's not. It's the future. I've never been so sure of anything in my life and it's why I spend a great deal of my free time studying neuroscience, neural simulations and AI.

...it can only be assumed that the reason they are opting for a 3rd trial is to hope that they can somehow bait the Judge into making an error that will help them on an appeal."

No, I think other assumptions could also be made. Such as, maybe they're just a bunch of vindictive pricks who have the money and just want to screw with someone they lost to (well, it wasn't a loss, but they surely see it that way). Why not piss away another pile of cash?

'It definitely works. I downloaded the file and ran it and it worked,' Miller said. 'The only thing is that it warns you that the file will change your phone, but it also says that the certificate is from Apple and it's been verified.'"

That's it? Who'd be dumb enough to fall for t#1$j213!%
NO CARRIER

Wow, that benchmark makes IE look almost as antiquated as the game Civilization.

Explain to me the business case for the internet.

The internet didn't just spring up out of nowhere. It started as a VERY small network and grew over a number of years. Check the date on that baby!

It was initially a way for the DOD to stay in touch with researchers and a mechanism for sharing information among universities. So the DOD funded it because there WAS a business case for it.

Then, it 1993 (damn near a quarter century after that first RFC), the Mosaic web browser was released. The rest, as they say is history. NASA has been around a lot longer than the internet and there's still not much of a business case. Don't get me wrong. We've learned a great deal and there have been great applications to come from what we've learned. But the fact is, we have more pressing issues on Terra Firma at the moment. Things like finding me a fucking job so I can feed my family.

I mean, seriously, when I was 8 years old (back in the 70s), I wrote to the White House asking to go to the moon. This led to me gaining a pen pal at NASA who I corresponded with for years afterwards and I credit him with helping to spur my interest in science. I don't think I would be the person I am today without someone like that inspiring me. Sending me photographs autographed by astronauts and all sorts of PR stuff. For me as a kid, it was very special. So understand, NASA holds a very special place in my heart. But at the same time, we have an economic reality that and there are a lot of families struggling to put food on the table. We need to keep our eye on the ball.