They are shifting them again. This new test includes this requirement: The machine's designers must not be able to explain how their original code led to this new program. So now anything we understand is not intelligence??? So if someone figures out how the brain works, and is about to describe its function, then people will no longer be intelligent? Intelligence is a characteristic of behavior. If it behaves intelligently, then it is intelligent. The underlying mechanism should be irrelevant.

It is actually the intrusiveness that bothers people. Most people don't really care if they are recorded, as long as it isn't obvious and in their face. Not many people are bothered by store security cameras, etc.

Dart is close enough to JavaScript that much of the same JIT code can be used, and the people that designed Dart include some of the same people that work on JIT. One of the design motivations for Dart was removing some of the barriers to better JIT optimization. Dart is already faster than JavaScript, on a broad range of benchmarks, so it is silly to argue that it can't happen.

If you have 100 hours available for testing, you can use static analysis to find 90% of the bugs and spend the rest of your time on the 10% that require deeper insight. Or you can waste 90% of your time being a human compiler, manually cross-checking symbols. Which is going to result in more reliable software?

Are you serious?

Dart can be translated to JavaScript. But it is intended to be directly interpreted by the browser, in which case it is 20-30% faster.

It shouldn't have been built, but for other reasons - the biggest one being the enemy for which they're designed to fight is not who the US military is likely to be dealing with in the future.

What role do these hyper-advanced aircraft have when you're fighting Al-Qaeda, ISIS, or whoever the stone-age-terrorist-du-jour is? We're not going to be fighting China, that's for sure; both they and we are way to inter-dependent.

So sure - the money already spent is sunk cost. But why throw good money after bad?

You can convert A to B, where A and B are any Turing complete computer languages. So, for instance, JavaScript can be converted to PDP-11 assembly language which can be converted to Python which can be converted to C++. The main reasons to use one language over another are performance and the ability to express the algorithm clearly. Dart is (slightly) faster than JavaScript (since fewer type conversions and symbol lookups need to be done at runtime). But the main advantages are that it has better scoping and is more strongly typed, including structures and classes. This also means it is more reliable since more problems can be detected by static analysis tools, and runtime checks can be more rigorous.

I would allow the defendant to appeal the ruling. I would also allow the legislature to impeach judges that engaged in misconduct.

Yes. He should be prosecuted. I think we can all agree that judges shouldn't be allowed to murder people with impunity.

If you already know JavaScript, and either Java or C++, then you can learn Dart in about 20 minutes.

There is already a source-to-source compiler. So you can write in Dart, and then convert your Dart program to Javascript. Then your server can deliver either Dart or JS depending on the client browser's capability.

Most cow methane is not farted, it is burped. Bison have a similar digestive system to cattle, and produce similar amounts of methane. Deer and goats are browsers rather than grazers, have very different digestive systems, and produce little methane. Cattle and sheep and being bred to burp less, and strains of gut bacteria are also being modified to generate less methane. Food supplements may also help, mostly by encouraging the "right" gut bacteria.

Quibbling about whether it is our "fault" that animals burp is not really important. If the methane burping/farting can be reduced at reasonable economic cost, then it doesn't really matter how much the bison would have burped.

Disclaimer: I am a vegetarian, so it is not my fault in any case.

But free-to-p[l]ay gaming is also becoming a serious contender. It solves the problem of gamers who won't buy a game without a demo, it solves the problem of having an adequate online player base, and it solves the problem of gamers who simply won't buy games but who might buy the occasional piece of DLC.

The truth is that Gamestop guaranteed their eventual nonexistence when they dropped games for old consoles. I get that they can't stock everything, but it eliminated my reasons to go in there. I can get all the same stuff cheaper somewhere else, and I can get a lot of stuff that they can't (or won't) get. Since I don't really need a $200+ headset, I'm not sure what I'd go in there for anyway.+

An independent judiciary is a keystone of a free society. So, yes, jailing judges for their rulings is quite reactionary.

In high school I took a science fiction class, and we read the Foundation Trilogy, which contains a description of the Encyclopedia Galactica which was an instantly available compendium of human knowledge. When a student mentioned that it would be cool if we actually had something like that, most people agreed that "it won't happen in our lifetime".

When I first used the Internet in 1982, it seemed almost magical how I could communicate with people and instantly download files from dozens of computers. I mentioned that it would be really slick if everyone had access to something like that. The lab director laughed and said "not in our lifetime".

Most "not in our lifetime" forecasts underestimate the exponential nature of progress. Once a certain critical mass of knowledge has accumulated, additional progress can be astonishingly fast.

That is decades away. This research is just the first baby steps of trying to understand how memories are stored in neural patterns. It will be a while before any useful treatments come out of this. It is possible that we will eventually be able to implant knowledge modules instead of reading books and taking classes, but a lot of basic research needs to be done first.