You keep an old NTSC TV around to watch them on...

Or, you know, it will keep going down year after year.

Thanks for not understanding how evolution, or the mind for that matter, works.

We have facilities for communication and self-identity largely as a result of being hunters -- being able to "run a model" of our prey in our minds was massively useful. This structure then got applied to the self, and so the ego was born. (This is one of the currently en vogue evolutionary explanations for the rise of consciousness -- obviously not a subject you can create causal experiments to test easily).

What evolutionary pressures are there for creating self-awareness in algorithmic trading applications (given that it would necessarily be less efficient, and likely introduce errors)?

Then the algorithm corrects for that after seeing it once.

You, coming up with a "plan" 10 seconds after reading an article -- you can't outthink people who are employed to come up with ideas for improving how the computer thinks.

I'm kind of confused as to where google is going these days.

Is this just a side effect of hiring too many bored CS graduates -- put enough in a room together and they come up with their own languages?

I just can't see this being used outside of google -- Web Programming is largely a solved problem, and there are already a plethora of options. Since MS and Apple won't touch anything that comes out of Google, it'll only ever be relevant on the server side -- which is where there are already too many options.

Unless this does something radical -- and judging by what Go was, I doubt it -- this will probably be a niche thing they use internally.

Who was "we"?

Wealthy capitalists pretty much spent the first half of the twentieth century indoctrinating every western culture they could into believing communism and socialism are capital-E Evil. Some places the propaganda took better than others.

This is a direct factor in why the healthcare debate in the states is so broken. When a good portion of your culture genuinely believes that socialism is absolutely Evil, trying to build a modern system to help them is difficult.

The silly thing is, is that there are huge sections of the US that are entirely funded by tax dollars (and they aren't necessarily what you think), but to ever acknowledge that in public, and to try and make it better, given that it is what it is, is heretical.

I dunno, why don't you ask some Germans. Or Japanese.

How many games have been made about WWII?

Ahh, I see I now have the "Level 80" achievement. Nice.

It's not quite Insane in the Membrane, but it'll do.

What does the WoW toon registration thing do? Do I even get an achievement for that?

Yeah, they took some time out of their busy schedule of meetings with Bono to host BSG. At least it's a step up.

He must be traveling at relativistic speeds. The past decade would only look like a few weeks to him that way.

It's a quote from the play The Maid of Orleans (german) by Friedrich Schiller. It's likely being used as a signature here because of the Asimov book The Gods Themselves that used it as a title.

Well, no.

One of the unintended consequences of releasing a new model is that people will then proceed to buy up last years model, as the remaining stock has probably been reduced in price.

They do want people to buy their laptops for September -- they would just rather they buy them at the older, higher price if possible.

Thank you for pointing that out. I just reinstalled my box on the weekend, and I was trying to handle my music collection. Amarok2 is ugly as hell, and seems to have less features (not to mention the ongoing problems I've always had with it stopping and starting all the KDE services every time it loads). I installed Banshee with apt, but only 1.2 is in right now, and it did not impress. 1.4 looks to have all the things I was missing.

The XY zygotes could fail to develop into males (as described in other replies which actually understand biology), or they could simply spontaneously abort -- in which case, the parents would try again.

If XY has a higher failure rate, then from a demographic standpoint there is a batch of babies that "should have" been males, but were born females because the male embryos failed. In this case, it wouldn't be about one physical baby that should have been male, but was born female -- but one kind of "demographic slot" should have been filled by a male baby, but got filled by a female baby instead.