Don't piss on Javascript. Sure, the standard library is terrible and poor cross compatibility makes it impossible to do anything interesting in a browser without shims, but purely as a language the whole "class = function = object" idea is truly magnificent in its own way, especially with the implementation of anonymous functions and closures. The ability to override "this" as well provides many useful metaprogramming tools; just recently I used it to load an external library into its own independent global scope (since it is not well behaved and I don't want it messing with the existing global scope). I always find pleasure writing Javascript when the task is narrow enough and I've got everything I need. And just so you know I have used C, C++, C#, Java, Ruby, Lisp (Scheme), PHP, and Javascript.

(more on-topic, I can't speak towards Perl, but PHP can be done right and when it is it can be maintained by anyone, although most of "anyone" will probably write you a horrible kludgy mess instead)

I didn't say Uber is perfect or doesn't require regulation. I just said it makes existing rules obsolete. Although if it charges "3X as much or mor [sic] than a local cab company", then either the business model has failed in that area and will soon collapse, or there are some sneaky economics involved such that a higher charge makes sense for enough of the market that it works.

If you want to be driven by above-average drivers only, you can request a higher-rated driver from Uber (and pay more per mile) or — if Uber's vetting process seems insufficiently rigorous to you — go for a different company altogether. But don't try to impose it on the rest of us.

This statement, I think, is the defining difference that the Internet will make on public policy. It used to be that if you wanted a higher quality, you had to find a quality brand you could trust, and if the market doesn't favor lots of competition for whatever reason, a quality brand just wouldn't exist without government intervention. After all, why would a rational profit-seeking corporation do anything right if it put them at a cost disadvantage against other corporations already doing quite well by doing it wrong? So we got ourselves lots of government regulation to force companies to provide a quality product.

But now with the Internet, a brand like Uber can effectively sell us the quality we're willing to pay. The taxi market is traditionally so monopolistic that the only way to make good quality available is to legally require it from everyone. But the Internet makes that obsolete. What follows is a "15 round fight" not just over Uber, but about every industry touched by the Internet. The worst part is that many people will fight for obsolete leftist/rightist ideologies in which they are already emotionally invested, even though the issues were never that simple anyway.

Now that commercial-grade engines are available free-as-in-beer

Free-as-in-FREE-beer! It doesn't make sense the way you say it! Beer is not automatically free!

It's possible that the game programming camp is setting the children up with a point-and-click game dev engine

There's no better point-and-click game dev engine for learning than Scratch; if that's what they used, expect the kids coming out to have learned some of the logical skills involved in computer science. Syntax is easy if you've already got a good grasp on splitting up complicated problems into smaller ones, breaking smaller problems down to math and logic structures, and integrating many smaller components into a larger system, all of which is the core of computer programming and is what you learn in Scratch without worrying about syntax.

The old, big content publishers may be stagnant and evil, but that doesn't mean Amazon will be any better. I for one do not welcome our new hipster overlords.

We have a lot of subconscious mental faculties that are beyond even our most complex computers. One big one is still the ability to make intelligent conversation.

This no matter what some marketers at the University of Reading have thrown together at the last minute. It's a shame we still have such a gullible population when it comes to computers. Oh well. Time to go program a GUI in Visual Basic to track some IP addresses...

Today we have computer navigation, plain-language database queries, and speech processing such as Siri. AI? No. Table lookup, elaborate.

You've got the beginnings of a well known thought experiment called the Chinese Room:

Searle then supposes that he is in a closed room and has a book with an English version of the computer program, along with sufficient paper, pencils, erasers, and filing cabinets. Searle could receive Chinese characters through a slot in the door, process them according to the program's instructions, and produce Chinese characters as output. If the computer had passed the Turing test this way, it follows, says Searle, that he would do so as well, simply by running the program manually.

So the person running the commands manually, operating the same as the computer processor basically, has passed the Turing test. However neither the human being nor the "computer" really understands Chinese.

What you are implying about Siri et al is that human beings operate differently. But how do you know that human intelligence isn't just a series of elaborate table lookups? While the stated purpose of the Chinese Room thought experiment is, according to Wikipedia, "to challenge the claim that it is possible for a digital computer running a program to have a "mind" and "consciousness" in the same sense that people do", it actually proves something else: as long as you define human "consciousness" as going beyond mere computation, it is impossible to test that it exists. But since all we can observe of a human are its inputs and outputs, that is the only basis upon which we can compare human "intelligence" to AI. The basis of the Turing test is to measure whether the inputs result in similarly intelligent outputs.

If AI research has taught us anything, it's that humans are much more intelligent than we thought we were. We have a lot of subconscious mental faculties that are beyond even our most complex computers. One big one is still the ability to make intelligent conversation. Siri may be able to understand some requests enough to deliver the desired response, but a lot of the time her level of comprehension is below a retarded four year old.

I do think, however, that if a computer could fool a dog into believing it was also a dog 100% of the time, then it would have the intelligence of a dog, with a caveat. The dog being fooled would need to understand the philosophical nature of the test and also understand how the computer is likely to fail. Otherwise it would be like asking Siri to provide feedback for an English paper; she just does not understand the question being asked.

The question is really more about "are this AI's actions indistinguishable from a being we know is intelligent". If the test administrator is qualified to judge that, and the test is run enough for the results to be statistically significant, it's perfectly reasonable to suggest that because the actions are indistinguishable, so too must be the level of intelligence behind them.

Please don't blame this on computer scientists. This story was almost certainly generated by marketing types trying to line up with some anniversary of some kind. I'm not exactly sure because TFA for the original story says something about "60th anniversary of Turing's death" and "created in 2001". And the 30% is clearly a lie to make up for their failure to even reach the 59% at which Cleverbot was already tested.

Well basically, and of course when you have to explain something like this it loses its bite...Verizon is what all the guys want, and knows it, so it gets away with acting as bitchy as it wants to. I only repeat the saying because it seems to aptly describe Verizon, not because I'm personally a fan of gender-stereotype humor.

FYI even a Verizon customer service representative told me that on the Pacific coast, AT&T coverage is better.

The proposed AT&T+T-Mobile merger made sense, because they both use GSM over similar wavelengths. But how would Sprint and T-Mobile combine their network services? Their voice data at least is on completely different infrastructure.

Now I know that Sprint and T-Mobile don't have the best wireless coverage, but you're going to have to try a little harder to justify the claim they have the worst customer service. I was under the impression it was just a universally accepted fact that Verizon's customer service is the worst in the industry despite their otherwise excellent network service. As I've heard someone say, Verizon is the hottest girl at the prom, and worse, she knows it.

Your MP3 argument doesn't stand. It's been proven that a well-encoded 128kbps MP3 is indistinguishable to the human ear from lossless content. Of course not all 128kbps MP3s are well-encoded, and in fact most of them probably aren't.

But I'm not trying to disprove your argument. I'm simply highlighting the fact that the only people that make such arguments tend to pepper the argument with falsehoods, like your MP3 comment. And the point isn't that the comment is false so much as it is that many well-educated people will point out that it is so, unintentionally weakening the larger argument that there is a better quality available.

Unfortunately the "hight quality" side of the argument tends towards audiophilia, and it's easy to dismiss true HD when it's associated with gold-plated Monster cables.