Given the youth of the game I suspect there is much less analysis and history in
support of the game. The difficulty that computers faces is the same one that players face and
while depth search for a computer is difficult it is more difficult for the human player.

The game was invented in about 2002... and chess has a history that spans 1500 years
and Go 2500 to 4000 years.

While difficult to test I suspect that if we restricted chess players to the same age
and tenure profile of Arimaa players a machine would romp over the novice chess
players (max experience 13 years, average perhaps 7).

Now that there are champion machines the game may well move into the
class of games only played by machines. Or, Programmers and hardware mfg
consortiums could compete little different than the America's Cup.

The game might prove the ideal context to form a man+machine or team+machine contest
where the men shape strategy and the machine carries the game to conclusion
with nudges from the man-power.

Now should I bother to learn the game at all?

Capital punishment is the choice of the poor.
When society is starving for resources quick execution makes sense to me.
When society is wasting 1/3 of its food execution makes little sense (same for the waste).

As for cruel -- the decades on death row is nasty.

Those that make the drugs of choice in this case are international and they refuse to
supply to this purpose and end.

A pure suffocating gas like nitrogen (but not CO2) will do the job.
Noble gasses like He, Ar, Ne might also work. He has
national security issues. It is also best extracted from natural
gas flows in Texas and Ok... other flows are fracking intensive
and He low so the anti fracking folk could help or hinder helium
as a choice. Helium would also be too funny for Saturday Night
Live to ignore.

Balloons are short lived...
At this point it is an experiment so no need to own or be part of the cell service infrastructure.

This is not a 7x24x365.24 class service.
At some point this could become an important service in the event
of an emergency. It may also be valuable over places like the Black
Rock Desert for about one week a year.

And yes some sparse parts of the world may find value long term.

Since I have some phones that have the FM radio enabled all that is needed is headphones.
The antenna is the wires of the headphones.

That is not to say that the pin for the antenna is connected to the headphone connector.
It is also not clear what the regulations domestic and international are for testing the
FM radio for unwanted interference and matching the national band allocations.

But the original question is interesting. Local radio is invaluable in a disaster. The power budget
and infrastructure (transmitter towers) for FM radio are much more available. The service area of
a single FM radio tower could cover hundreds if not thousands of cell towers. Cell towers also depend
on digital backbone and data connections (routers) that also need uninterruptible power.

Local emergency management need only contact the radio station and the radio station only needs
a single generator. Radio is part of the emergency broadcasting system and disconnecting the FM radio
is disconnecting the EBS.

Having said this I recall waiting on the local FM radio station to announce school closure on one
especially nasty blizzards winter morning. There was no announcement... the school system could
not connect to the station by phone and the roads were so deep in snow that direct contact was
impossible.

Legislatures in earthquake, tornado, blizzard, hurricane disaster risk areas (the entire US) should
be paying attention to this. Because of the EBS link your representatives should be demanding internal
communications that fail to enable this important service. Disconnection and de facto dismantling
of the EBS in favor of pay for service revenue should be blocked.

Then there is: "As Radio.no notes, Digital Audio Broadcasting (DAB) will provide Norwegian listeners more diverse radio channel content than ever before. Indeed, DAB already hosts 22 national channels in Norway, as opposed to FM radio’s five, and a TNS Gallup survey shows that 56% of Norwegian listeners use digital radio every day. While Norway is the first country in the world to set a date for an FM switch-off, other countries in Europe and Southeast Asia are also in the process of transitioning to DAB." (gizmodo-dot-com)

Thus I also want DAB support in future phones...

There is more to this narrow minded view of the testing system
than is obvious.

It makes a conclusion and presents a solution without any data that
supports the conclusion or solution.

They assert that a girls only class is the solution and the problem is boys
dominating the class.

They do not address the possibility that educators could simply be biased
and the same individual educators in a special class would imprint that same bias without
change. The result would then be identical.

Not addressed in this data is the assumption that systematic issues in education
are the reason girls do not invest themselves in STEM anything. Society also
adds to this...

Personal antidotal bias is that the smartest math and science person in my k-12 education
decided to pursue her dream as an artists. As a spouse in a traditional marriage
she could do this without concern for the finances of it. She was not alone although
another gal almost as smart ended up as a NASA outreach educator.

The other very important issue is that girls and boys do not develop on the same
schedule biologically. Moving the girls and boys into their own classes without
adjusting the schedule will also get the same result.

If educators are going to be honest they need to design an education programs that
allows biology and maturation shape the schedule of boys and girls class content.
In a K-12 school the age differences where one child can be 364 days older than another
must also be considered important.

One real issue is that standard tests are anchored on birthdays and on a calendar.
Adjusting the time for one groups tests vs. another would be seen as very unfair
yet it may be more so.

If we cold take sex out of this and substitute cognitive maturation we might get
better outcomes from the child's point of view. One clumsy attempt on this
is homogeneous grouping. Assignment into a group might be because an individual
was slow to grasp or simply unable to grasp the material.

I think the school has a bias and thinks they have a solution. Then they found numbers to support it.
There are girl and boy only schools where supporting data might live. One might be
a serious review of the famous schools and their curriculum as framed before standard testing.
These schools (perhaps 1780-1920) and their syllabus (teachers notes) may still exist
and may prove interesting.

Little of this matters -- TV sitcom and even cartoons have very rigid rolls for the sexes
to play...

What does this mean for Itanic, Sparc, MIPS, Coldfire and yes ARM processors?
Ya know this will not help the internet of things.

The structural changes should eventually (OK ASAP) be moved to these other machines as well.

Like hardware the initial foundation layers are the critical decisions that make or break
all sorts of things. The VM folk need to look very hard at this... virtualization very much
depends on the early low level stages if it is to be reliable and correct.

I guess I should have looked at the code but hey this is /.

In the article: "...stopped taking his medication because he didn't like the way it made him feel and it was expensive."
Now that is clearly a mandate for universal mental health care!

The modern pharmacopoeia of mental health drugs is better than many chemotherapy
strategies for cancer but not much better. Many are also too darn expensive.

Side effects need to to be understood and absolutely not understood is the effect
on a human when starting or quitting the program. Miss a couple doses and
a lot of individuals get untied.

The most difficult context "bipolar" seems to be involved here. A prescribing
doctor almost never sees a person in both manic and depressive states
outside of a locked facility. The transition triggers are ill understood.

It is the rare and exceptional program where a psychologist is trained
to and licensed to prescribe medication. The fees are astoundingly
high. As doctors they must all pay for insurance. As educated individuals
they have made a serious investment in time and money (debt) to become
trained and certified.

Statistics make the overlay of professionals and the population a sparse map
across much of the nation....

Decades ago it was noted that if you hire a programmer you must budget for
two so he or she has someone to talk to. This is true for psych professionals
they need continuous learning and a "community" to work with. In isolation
they seem to go a little bonkers.

One important perspective here is, when a citation is issued or an arrest made the weight of the law is
heavy on the the side of law enforcement. Citizens and officers alike are equally protected by a quality
record that documents the actions of both sides.

Both citizens and officers would do well to have body and dash cameras.
It is true that Google glasses were a bust but the world learned a lot.

However once an officer turns on his lights or exits his vehicle in the prosecution
of his charter there should be no restrictions on recording including voice.

And anyone that had to listen to AM and FM radio including short wave for entertainment or news knows how
fragile radio links can be. It is necessary to solve the lightning strike problem to 99.9999% or better.

Fried communication, fried or interrupted systems that need to reboot, location sensors include GPS need
to recover quickly.

Protecting the current fly by wire systems is easier by a bunch.

It is clearly a gimmick but those that would snort it on a dare could kill themselves with
the reverse osmosis effect and airway obstruction. This marketing game could also wreck it as a valuable
emergency first aid adjunct. Bandages infused with it as well as other female pad and diaper friendly
compounds could (or not) have antiseptic properties of value.

The legislation that bans it bothers me because it is based on FUD
and bald faced ignorant lies.

I am scared of vodka soaked tampons and bartenders pouring
doubles without being asked. All in all I am more scared by
the ignorance...

For kids I also worry about jello shots.

Not true.
WiFi is the most common target of BIOS whitelist.
Hidden is worry that FCC compliance rules for power and emissions be violated
vendors whitelist only WiFi cards they have "tested".

I tried to update five laptops to new WiFi cards and ALL failed because of the
BIOS whitelist. HP, Compaq, Toshiba.... The lockout was absolute nothing
would boot at all.

In my case I wanted AC WiFi and USB2 does not support sufficient bandwidth.
So I picked up some tiny PCI WiFi cards ... NO system would boot with the
new card. All did a BIOS lockout.

To me this means that the whitelist is a dependency repair list. Should any whitelist
device fail replacing it likely trips on a supply chain sole source dependency chain where
the life and availability of the devices are critical in knowing the life expectancy
of the purchase. No company computes or divulges a MTBF repair analysis that does not assume
full availability of spare parts. The white list changes the numerical analysis drastically and
worse it changes it in unknowable ways.

The white list in the BIOS for WiFi type hardware makes sense in the context of radio frequency regulation. Makers of mini-pci hardware
should jump up and down and toss restraining orders. If you are not on the white list you are SOL as a vendo and side door money
can limit the competition.

WORSE in all this is the white list is invisible. I am inclined to begin asking for disclosure of the whitelist and lacking disclosure
returning the hardware for failure to operate as advertised. Has PCI slot... PCI compliant cards do not work.

Driverless vehicles will enable a lot of options. Some for the user
some for the community some good and some "interesting".

The safety issue is interesting. Some communities may elect to ban
all vehicles except autonomous cars for safety reasons.

Some may relay to mass transit as individual vehicles are not as
traffic dense or fuel efficient as rail or water.

Taxi drivers and Uber may become a thing of the past.
Well maybe not Uber. They may find ways for you to earn $$ by
loaning your autonomous auto when you do not need it. Their dispatch
system could dispatch an auto-auto as easy as a drive+car.

Individual vehicles for persons that do not wish to wait.
Community fleets for those willing to share and wait a bit.

Parking -- an autonomous car could circle on the street and not
park thus increasing traffic. This may cause some communities
to tax traffic and not passengers. More one way streets are likely
as a machine could navigate a wide flow nicely think rings like the
Olympic logo.. tedious to navigate for a person but ok for a machine.

Electric vehicles could go find a charger. Hybrid vehicles might
go and hibernate.

Traffic congestion and parking density are the rock and hard place
that when addressed could make someone wealthy and customers
happy.