In a particularly lame move, somebody put Bing search into Thunderbird. When searching your emails, you can also get irrelevant web search results via Bing. What the use case is for that I have no idea.

With the recent problems being encountered by Windows users all across the country, people are begin to ask themselves if windows is a virus. In response to the high demand for an answer to that question a study was done and concluded the following.

1. Viruses replicate quickly.
Windows does this.

2. Viruses use up valuable system resources, slowing down the system as they do so.
Windows does this.

3. Viruses will, from time to time, trash your hard disk.
Windows does this.

4. Viruses are usually carried, unkown to the user, along with valuable programs and systems.
Windows does that too.

5. Viruses will occasionally make the user suspect their system is too slow (see 2) and the user will buy new hardware.
Same with Windows, yet again.

Maybe Windows really is a virus.

Nope! There is a difference!

Viruses are well supported by their authors, are frequently updated, and tend to become more sophisticated as they mature. So there! Windows is not a virus.

Huh? Mengele's twin research had nothing to do with intelligence of twins separated at birth. It involved mutilating twins (e.g., injecting chemicals into their eyes to try to change the eye color) or killing and dissecting them.

There was no systematic scientific design. Just sadism pretending to be science. What useful information, intended or unintended, has anyone found in his data?

ORLY? All the scholarship I have read about the twin research concludes that there was no serious effort at science and that the data that were collected were useless. Do you have any citations to support your assertion that the twin research produced any good scientifically useful data?

San Francisco already did this. Almost all the masonry buildings in SF have been reinforced since the 1989 quake, and now the rules are being tighened on wood buldings. If you've been in an older building in SF, you've probably seen huge diagonal steel braces. That's what it looks like.

All new big buildings meet very tough earthquake standards. The bridges and freeways have been beefed up in recent years. Overpass pillars are about three times as big as they used to be. Two elevated freeways were torn down after one in Oakland failed in the 1989 quake. The entire eastern span of the Bay Bridge was replaced with a new suspension bridge. The western span was strengthened, and there are now sliding joints, huge plates of stainless steel, between the roadway and the towers.

What I'm worried about is when AIs start doing better at corporate management than humans. If AIs do better at running companies than humans, they have to be put in charge for companies to remain competitive. That's maximizing shareholder value, which is what capitalism is all about.

Once AIs get good enough to manage at all, they should be good at it. Computers can handle more detail than humans. They communicate better and faster than humans. Meetings will take seconds, not hours. AI-run businesses will react faster.

Then AI-run businesses will start deailng with other AI-run businesses. Human-run businesses will be too slow at replying to keep up. The pressure to put an AI in charge will increase.

We'll probably see this first in the finanical sector. Many funds are already run mostly by computers. There's even a fund which formally has a program on their board of directors.

The concept of the corporation having no social responsibiilty gives us enough trouble. Wait until the AIs are in charge.