I presume that the simulation programmers are US-based and will create scenarios of American traffic conditions. For real-world testing, just put a few of these vehicles in a downtown Jakarta rush-hour and see how many survive. Here we've got every motoring madness know to man - and then some. I'll be first in the queue to buy any driverless car that can get from north to south Jakarta unscathed.

The British police have long since crossed the Rubicon of public trust and support. It is tragic to see a once respected and admired group of public servants become a venal, corrupt and despised bunch of bully-boys, despotic and arrogant beyond belief. In my more cynical moments I reflect that post-Thatcher Britain has at last got the guardians it deserves.

"It's not really that alt coins destroy bitcoin's credibility, it's that bitcoin itself has no credibility in the first place"

So 'real' currencies have intrinsic value and credibility? In the modern topsy-turvy world of economics, all debt is magically transmuted into credit, and duff debt is magically turned into 'sub primes'. It's all a financial sausage factory.

"I'd want to soak up every minute of it. Maybe they should look into the mechanism called: "It's frickin awesome" How on earth did such a vacuous comment get modded +5 insightful?

Pen name taken from the river Orwell.

"And while many of its people and countries are not well off at all, there are some nations that are doing quite well financially, and should be able to create the infrastructure (including organizations and facilities) necessary for such research."

Have you ever lived and worked in Sub-Saharan Africa? If you had, I don't think you'd be asking this question.

"The amount of information available to the public today that wasn't when Obama was elected is staggering."

Never confuse quantity with quality.

It's good to see that the spirit of Sir Les Patterson lives on. Looks like Ozzy politicians are even more short-sighted and dumber than the sorry bunch of venal no-hopers currently running Westminster.

"Whom". It is ". . . who is it that is actually paying whom?"

Correct - in formal usage. But 'whom' is in decline, and for many writers is mandatory only when governed by a preposition.

"People seem to forget, the internet RUNS on advertising money."

Only people who have been successfully brainwashed believe this Big Lie. In olden times businesses had budgets for marketing and promotion which included advertising. Selling yourself and your services was an overhead cost.

Along comes the Internet. Personal interest, hobbyist and fan sites then come along, and tech sites that share their knowledge and expertise altruistically, for the common good. Then we hear the magic word 'monetize', and all hell is let loose.

Next is born that spawn of the devil, the notion that businesses have a God-given right to force us to watch advertisements, and fight tooth and nail to stop ad-skipping, ad-blocking, and the like. So don't feed me any crap that 'the Internet runs on advertising money'.

"semi-autisitc fuckwitted word salad"

When a computer can come with such linguistic inventiveness, we may truly say that AI has arrived.

" I get the impression they just have a list of possible ways of phrasing the translation of a phrase." Yes, that's one way of doing it - but long-winded and slow to develop.

I write tests and quizzes using Moodle. Regular expressions are an economical and elegant way to parse short answers and award part-marks until an acceptable threshold of correctness is reached. And very simple to edit when exceptions need to be added.

"The theory is that you are being taught as a child learns" Bad theory. Childhood language acquisition is different from adult acquisition.

I just signed up and had a crack at the French lessons. My reaction? It's interesting, but limited. On the positive side there's some very nifty use of regular expressions in parsing the input answers - but on the negative, quite a few of the recordings are fuzzy and unclear. One example: the word 'diner' was completely unrecognizable. Its main limitation is that it's not communicative; everything is chunked into simple expressions without context. It's mechanical learning. I could see a use for it in my own teaching as a remedial/diagnostic tool, but I wouldn't recommend it as a primary means of learning French.

My first reaction to this Wikipedia entry is that it's well (and very carefully) written; the content is supported by 29 detailed references to mostly legal and media sources. I cannot see any reasonable peg for Barry or his legal advisors to hang a lawsuit on. An accusation of bias would, I think, be problematic - several celebrities who like and respect him are mentioned (and quoted) at the beginning of the entry, without editorial comment.