That's a pretty low bar. So to pass the test a computer needs three very low IQ subjects and seven normal people? Hell, the Alice program would probably pass. How about a more reasonable percentage, like 95%?

Yep, for a little over two years. Hated it, except when I got to "fly" a C5-A simulator and walk around inside the computer that ran it. I've never seen so many printed circuit boards in one place before or since. But that lasted maybe an hour :(

Mow there are some saying "you brought him home, what about the tourists that got captured?" Well DUH, they were idiots for visiting a war zone. In the military you don't have the luxury of choice, you go where they send you. I certainly didn't want to be in Delaware, especially since there was nothing there and the climate played hell with my arthritis (which seldom bothers me now that I'm old and not in Delaware).

And as you said, if he was AWOL the army will take care of the matter.

Stylish? Really? You actually care about that??

I have a Kyocera now, but have had Motorola phones in the past. I never had a bit of trouble with them until they got dropped in water and died.

That's the main reason I bought the Kyocera; it's waterproof and shock resistant, and cheap enough that i don't have to worry about losing it.

It is a bit underpowered. It's responsive and fast, but if I'm listening to internet radio over wifi and playing it through bluetooth speakers and Google starts a download (which it seems to do daily) the damned thing reboots. Other than that I've had no complaints about it.

One brand of phone I'll never buy again is LG. It was a flip phone, and was 10 years ago. Most crash-prone, unreliable piece of shit I ever had. Sent it back under warrantee and the replacement was even worse. And ever since Sony deliberately infected my computer with their XCP rootkit I'll never ever buy anything from Sony again. Someone should have gone to prison over XCP.

What's saddest about the Arizona tragedy was that a crime was, in fact, committed, and never prosecuted. How can an unsecured weapon around children not be child endangerment? I've seen newspaper stories about stupid people being charged with it, but none of them involved firearms.

A Turing machine is an abacus. Have a look at schematics of chips some time.

Do you feel that the brain is more than just a electrochemical analog computer, running a simulation of the world in your head using some pretty weak inputs?

No, it is analog but more than a computer. A computer is nothing more than an abacus with electrons for beads and billions of wires (one bead per wire rather than nine since it's binary); given enough time an abacus could come up with the exact same answer as Watson.

How many beads and wires does it take for an abacus to become sentient? Because when you're talking about a Von Neuman computer architecture you're talking about an electric abacus.

Will we ever build a sentient something? I think probably, but it won't be an abacus like today's computers are.

Impossible today, but give it a few hundred years.

Maybe for a city kid, but I've ridden horses and grown gardens before. Except that you load it differently and only have one shot, I'm pretty sure I could hit a rabbit with a musket, I hunted when I was a kid. OTOH someone from Franklin's time would be utterly lost trying to use a phone, microwave, car, even a TV. And what could anyone from that time do for a living?

If you went to his time it wouldn't be that unfamiliar; you've seen westerns and read history books. Our culture and technology would be completely alien to them in every way. Hell, I doubt Franklin could stay out of jail in today's world.

The closest to a real sci-fi matching possibility. would be a generational ship where the ship will take thousands of years to get to its destination

I used to think that until I saw this.

You didn't think your thoughts were based on fairy-dust, did you?

No, they're based on chemistry. Which, I guess, is fairy dust to some. But it's certainly not based on electricity.

First Contact will happen by 2024;

I read those articles, and those guys are talking outside their fields without realizing it. One is an astronomer and one an astrophysicist, so they're leaving out an important part of the equation: biology. How hard is it for life to start in the first place? We simply don't know. We've never seen it happen.

Our galaxy could be teeming with life, maybe teeming with intelligent life, life could be very rare, occurring in one in a hundred galaxies, and it's even possible that we are indeed alone, or the first. There is yet no possible way to know.