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.

If this rubs SF.net the wrong way so much, why do they continue to operate in the US?

That's a great idea. You want to pay for them to relocate? They're a business. They were established in the U.S. by U.S. citizens. To pick up and relocate isn't exactly something they can do overnight. Nor is it something they can do inexpensively. They're not exactly a huge profit-center. Not to mention, they're owned by another U.S. company, which must also adhere to U.S. laws and would likely have to relocate with them.

As SF.NET said in their post, they live in the real world. You might want to try joining them there.

He ought to be fired for being stupid enough to think the government should waste even a penny dealing with conspiracy theorists. Just ignore them. It works just fine. Sure, they pop up now and then, but really, think about it: Of all the various theories about the Kennedy assassination, what do any of them matter in the long run? How does it really affect the government? It doesn't.

All the 9/11 conspiracy theorists have accomplished what? Pretty much nothing.

The more important question is: Who gets to decide who is the conspiracy theorists? That's where the real danger is. Hard to believe Obama would hire such an idiot. Sounds like a George Bush kinda guy.

My concern, which doesn't appear to have been raised yet, is this shit blows around in the wind and cross-breeds with non-GMO corn. I'm guessing nobody has any idea how badly this has happened yet. This stuff could be ending up in our food, making the most important and second largest cash crop (after marijuana) in the US poisonous to consumers. I wonder why that doesn't sit well with me.

why haven't they put it in a really major journal--Nature, Science, PNAS, or something like PlosONE if the whole publication really had to be open access?

Yeah, their editor-in-chief is only the chief of mammalian genetics at NIH, and their editorial board is a bunch of slackers from the likes of Georgeton, UCLA school of medicine, Mount Sinai School of Medicine, Vancerbilt, Nortwestern, UC, etc.

OK, I haven't read the paper in detail... Glancing at their results table, it doesn't seem clear cut overall. E.g. there are cases where rats fed 11% GM corn show a response, but rats fed 33% GM corn don't, cases where male rats are apparently affected, but not females, and vice versa. They also don't name the maize they used as a control, so we don't know how accurate it is. Maybe you should read it in detail. FTFA: The raw data have been obtained by European governments and made publically available for scrutiny and counter-evaluation. So, they didn't actually perform the experiments, they're using the results of experiments that others did. It doesn't invalidate your point, but if you read further, I think they realize this:Furthermore, groups of animals were also fed with diets containing one of six other normal (non-GM) reference maize lines; the same lines for the NK 603 and MON 810 tests, but different types for the MON 863 trials. We note that these unrelated, different non-GM maize types were not shown to be substantially equivalent to the GMOs. The quantity of some sugars, ions, salts, and pesticide residues, do in fact differ from line to line, for example in the non-GM reference groups. This not only introduced unnecessary sources of variability but also increased considerably the number of rats fed a normal non-GM diet (320) compared to the GM-fed groups (80) per transformation event, which considerably unbalances the experimental design.

Yeah, I know, actually reading the article before posting your critical analysis is pretty hard to avoid.

It sounds to me like the issue isn't the GM itself, but the over-use of novel pesticides that it permits.

No, you're misunderstanding. They don't allow the use of pesticides, the pesticides have been inserted into their genome. The pesticides are derived from bacterial DNA that is naturally herbicidal. Unfortunately, it's also a rodenticide, which means it's probably pretty poisonous to us as well..