I didn't define it. The Greeks did.

Thanks for the info. This definitely seems like poor design rather than a broken concept though. I'd like to see them brute force a 2048 bit RSA key. Wireless authentication protocols have the ability to be just as secure as anything else.

And this is the problem with the culture at Google these days. Ever since all employees started using macbooks and they only hired 20 something's with thick frame glasses and "nerd" t-shirts they've been on a steady decline into the toilet. This geek tech culture is a serious blight. You people are ruining a once magnificent company. Oh ya... And get off my lawn.

I'm not sure about this claim. Whether it's a traditional key or a proximity key it still falls in the "something you have" category of security. And while I admit I don't know exactly how the proximity keys work I do know that if they use an rsa handshake then they're certainly more secure, than a laser cut key.

It's unfortunate that true randomness cannot exist in the physical world as we know it. Even the roll of a die is a deterministic equation. No matter how complex you make a program you can't make it "feel". That is a required component of sentience. Perhaps "feeling" is an illusion? If so, then nothing and no one is sentient. The creation on a true AI requires us to resolve countless paradox of the physical world that we don't even truly understand yet. Ultimately it will be the philosophers and physicists that give us the answers to developing one, if it's even possible.

5 Reasons to not reinvent the wheel:

[Java] Is a Great Language
There’s a Great Free IDE: [Netbeans]
[Java] Supports Mobile Development
[Java] Is Cross-Platform
[Java] Powers Games Development

Sentience implies the ability to "feel". It relies on certain unprovable truths like the existence of free will. If you don't believe in any of this, that's fine. There's no reason a computer can't be as deterministically complex as the human brain. That, however, is not the same thing as being sentient.

You don't have to study software for very long to learn that there is no such thing as a true random number generator. This is why all programs dealing with randomness are called pseudo random number generators. There are many PRNG's that can give the appearance of randomness, but it's impossible to ever be truly random.

This is the crux of the problem with trying to label a machine as sentient. Sentience applies to the ability to "feel"... beyond the ability to merely reason. It incorporates paradox like free will and choice. If you're of the opinion that neither free will or choice exists then you might believe the human brain is merely a series of electrical impulses and chemical reactions. You believe in the deterministic mind, not the sentient one. Could a computer be as deterministically complex as a human being? I don't see why not. But that is a far cry from declaring it sentient, unless you want to downgrade the definition of sentience to "deterministically complex".

It is fundamentally impossible for a purely deterministic machine to achieve sentience in the true spirit of the term. This is compounded by the fact that the term itself is surrounded in paradox and a lack of complete understanding of our physical world.

Yes. Sentience. Don't make the typical mistake of assuming you understand something just because you've labelled it. We don't know what sentience is, merely that it (probably) exists. In this way it's similar to the concepts of "energy", electro-magnetism, or the big bang. We can observe them, but we don't fully understand them.

The answer to creating a sentient being of our own won't be found in the computer science department. There's still major milestones to hit in biology, philosophy, and perhaps even spirituality.

They aren't that smart if they think machines could ever be sentient. Machines are deterministic. They do what you tell them to. We might be able to make extremely complex machines that give the general appearance of sentience, but they will still only ever be deterministic.

Anyone with enough insight and humility knows there's still an extremely large piece of the puzzle missing in our understanding of life. And you need to understand how something works before you can create it.

For apple maybe. Will they do the right thing for you? I highly doubt it. And if Mr. Snowden thinks they will, I would advise him to brush up on his history of that company.

Agreed. Mob mentality rules at reddit and the community that makes up that mob is of the worst kind. Selective censorship is quite usual for their kind. This story is no surprise.