The Turing test is usually presented as something that a machine either passes or fails, but since no machine has yet passed it, contests have focused on how long a machine can withstand questioning before the interviewer decides it's not human, or what percentage of interviewers it can fool for, say, ten minutes. So you can say one machine is more intelligent than another, even if you don't have a definition of intelligence apart from "intelligence is the ability to convince a human that you are human". To use your GPS analogy, it's more like the GPS tells you how far from the destination you are, but not in which direction.

I agree the Turing test isn't very useful in its own right - or at any rate, attempting to build machines that can pass it isn't very useful. We already have 7 billion entities that can pass it, and making more of them is a very low-tech process. I'd rather we figure out how to build machines that can do things we want to do but can't, or aren't very good at.

Too lazy to RTFP (read the fine PDF), but I assume the point is that some humans can pass the Lovelace test, whereas few or no machines currently can.

Because that's how the sale of every other product to the consumer works - the manufacturer or publisher tells the retailer "we'll sell you a crate of widgets for X dollars apiece" and the retailer is free to sell them to the consumer for whatever they think the consumer is willing to pay. Usually it's some function of X, but it doesn't have to be.

Agency pricing (so-called because the publisher sets the retail price and the retailer acts as an agent of the publisher, taking a fixed percentage of that as his profit) removes the ability of retailers to compete on price. Apple liked it because they don't want to compete on price anyway. It doesn't matter so much when you're talking about their hardware - plenty of people are willing to pay a premium for an Apple computer or phone or tablet because they perceive them as better or cooler than cheaper products with similar specs from other manufacturers. But if you're talking about ebooks, it's hard to see why you should pay $12.99 or $14.99 for the latest Stephen King or James Patterson from Apple when you could get exactly the same thing for $9.99 or less from Amazon. But if it's the same price at Amazon, you might as well get it from Apple.

The publishers liked agency pricing because it meant Amazon couldn't price ebooks at a point where it would cut into the publishers' print business. The publishers know that print is going away anyway - they're just trying to prolong it as much as they can because they know that when Barnes & Noble goes bust, there won't be anyone else they can play off against Amazon. They also know that print distribution is the last advantage they have over self-publishing. Self-published ebooks now compete on a level playing field with ebooks from the big publishers, but it's still very difficult for a self-published book to sell a lot of copies in print. (The ones that have managed it were usually picked up by a publisher after doing well as ebooks.) Everything else a publisher can offer an author can be bought from freelancers for a one-off fee, instead of most of the revenue for the life of the copyright.

Having said all that, the lawsuit was never about agency pricing as such. US competition law cares very little about protecting retailers. What was illegal was that Apple and the publishers colluded to raise prices, thus harming consumers. The fact that they used an unusual method of pricing to do it is neither here nor there, really.

Mercury and Venus don't have moons either, and I don't think anyone would seriously argue that we shouldn't call them planets.

Publishers might say they want everything electronically nowadays, but I imagine they'll make an exception for an author who brings in as much money as GRRM. (I wonder how much they'd have to pay someone to retype one of his books?)

You're stil going to get to the same place at the same time as the other passengers.

True, but you have a nicer seat with more room, and everything before and after the flight runs faster and smoother. You have your own check-in desk and security line, so you can arrive at the airport an hour later than the economy-class passengers. You have a bigger baggage allowance, so you might not have to put anything in the hold - and if you do, it'll probably come off the plane first. All that can make the difference between a day trip and an overnight stay, or turn a trip of n days into n-1 days.

Actually, no. That accounts for between 15% and 20% of the retail price. Most books don't make a profit for the publisher, so the costs are dominated by the overheads - the author's advance and the cost of employing everyone who's involved in making the book ready to be sold. It doesn't seem to have occurred to the major publishers that if they lowered the prices of ebooks, more titles might sell enough to make a profit. (Indie authors and smaller publishers figured it out a long time ago.)

Apparently they also do passes that are good for 30 days, which cost $96 (see the comment a few places above). The scam was to buy lots of $1 tickets and reprogram them into 30-day ones.

I didn't know the shuf command existed until now. You just gave me an easier way to pick my lottery numbers -

seq 1 49 | shuf -n 6 | sort -n

Thanks for that.

gcc does warn about it, but the extra parantheses around the assignment suppress the warning. It's part of the language specification, so the compiler can't forbid it - at least not by default.

Most mediaeval cathedrals took that sort of time to finish.

It depends on the contract the author signed with whoever bought the film rights, which is usually a function of how badly he needed or wanted the money, and how good his lawyer was in comparison to the other side's. It used to be common for the publisher of the book to buy the right to adapt or convert the story to any other other medium, so they wouldn't need the author's permission to sell the movie rights. And of course, once the author is dead, his heirs, assuming they still own the rights, tend not to be so fussy about maintaining the integrity of Daddy's or Grandaddy's artistic vision...

About two million years at the current rate. Of course, if the rate of uploading continues to accelerate as it has been doing, they might get there a bit sooner.

"Zero day" refers to a vulnerability for which no patch exists, presumably because the vendor wasn't aware of it. It's the amount of time between when the vendor becomes aware of the vulnerability and when the black hats can start exploiting it, not the amount of time that it's existed.

See Prof Wikipedia for more details.