"Can't I just be a programmer and not understand math?"

Did you mean: "Are there any search engines left that try to think for me?" Try one of the following:

https://google.com
https://bing.com
https://duckduckgo.com
https://dogpile.com

Indeed. Unfortunately, the prosecution of crimes committed by the federal government is a decision that is typically up to the federal government, and they almost always decide to give themselves a pass. The NSA's history of sabotaging public security standards and overreaching in their spying is (if not legally then at least effectively) protected by sovereign immunity.

And now some people are estimating how many billions of dollars the US economy is losing as the world shops elsewhere for cloud computing due to the NSA's excessive and unjustifiable cybercrimes. I'd love to see a bunch of people fired in Fort Meade, but I'm sure they'll just continue to blame it on Snowden.

The NSA has been hacking pretty much everybody in the world and their little sister, so nobody should be shocked when the same thing happens to us.

The real kicker is the perennial lecture from clueless politicians about how we should put back doors into all our private sector encryption so law enforcement can take a peek whenever it likes. Because our information will be safe with the government. *snort*

Counterexample: I've frequently been called a denier and modded down with what I refer to as "-1 (disagree)" over AGW. I don't post as AC. I enjoy the discussions, and wish for a bit more civility and less ad hominem.

I wasn't expecting people to actually answer my question, but it's pretty awesome that some did. Cheers! :)

*snort* :D OK, that was funny. Here's one that leaves it politely ambiguous whether this scaling is verified in actual user base or simulation: http://savas.me/2014/04/reactive-computing-at-the-heart-of-cortana/

Not sure what you mean by this, my dear AC. AplSiri / GNow / MSCortana work the same way and can be used to create similar demos. Heck, there are a lot of similar products out there -- the Amazon Echo is even more Star Trek-like since it's always on & listening.

Have you really never played with Siri before?

1. This demo was likely created by an engineer or sales person with SoundHound. More impressive would be a demo by a third party journalist or reviewer without a vested interest.
2. The impressive speed probably won't scale to the millions of simultaneous users Siri, Google Now, and Cortana support (assuming audio is processed in the cloud, which I admittedly don't know for sure).
3. Obviously the demo uses phrases that work. I guarantee you an ordinary person will often get "Sorry, I didn't understand the question" or whatever SoundHound's equivalent is.
4. While it sounds impressive at first blush, nobody really cares how many days it is between next Tuesday and Christmas of 2025. And that happens to be not only useless, but also pretty easy to special-case in your expert system / AI logic. So how about a demo that answers the question: "How can you make a mushroom omelette without soggy mushrooms?"

Especially read the Amazon comments about that book, including the one that claims that right there on the Amazon page are patterns of manipulation of reviews and ratings of the book that suggest he is cynically trying to manipulate people to make a pile of dollars, and hasn't actually:

What you're saying is technically true, and is true of all sting and entrapment operations. What we saw in the videos was technically not ACORN facilitating crime, because the undercover persons were only posing as criminals. And since there was no crime, nobody was prosecuted.

ACORN was still defunded/shamed out of existence., and this was perfectly appropriate. It's the same as with DPR and the Silk Road -- Ross Ullbricht thought he was hiring hit men to commit murders, but because it was all fake, he wasn't prosecuted for those specific actions.

I disagree. The people running ACORN were caught on camera showing willingness to facilitate really bad things, like human trafficking and child prostitution. You can blame the messenger all you like, but the (unedited version of the) video is clear enough that there's no getting around it. That's why the ACORN organization was shamed out of existence.

Your statement that ACORN is defunct is misleading, since the same people who had been running/working for ACORN immediately launched a bunch of similar organizations with different names after its demise, and of course got funding from the same channels. That's the bigger irony in that story.

The ethics of nations maintaining nuclear arsenals is a debate not likely to be resolved soon. However, the nasty things our defense research scientists did to the people living on the Marshall Islands is hopefully something everyone could agree is not OK.

Nobody here is saying the whole field is a crock, and of course many things of substance have been found wrong. How could it be a major field of study and not get things wrong from time to time?

Unfortunately it looks like some people took me literally, and are modding down kenh for expressing an unorthodox opinion. To me that's unfortunate, since climate science is ripe for the same sorts of criticisms as the humanities -- mostly surrounding questionable claims based on statistics and data analysis. Not saying the whole field is a crock, just that criticism and audit are always scientifically desirable, even -- no, ESPECIALLY when major practitioners in the field are so thin-skinned about it.