You joke. But the names are probably going to go through some sort of machine filtering that'll eliminate Fuckeroo, Sexoid, or Goatse then vetted by a panel of religious and cultural sensitivity "experts" and everybody else with a loud mouth or a big stick to eliminate names likely to get on somebody's goat like Tiananmen, Bin Laden, Zion, etc. Only then does the Internets get to vote to short list of approved names, pretty much like a Slashdot poll.
The corollary here is that intelligence isn't always an advantage. Or else all chimps would have evolved human class intelligence. The question I'd like answered is, what natural advantages does innate stupidity confer upon a creature that enables it to spread its just as efficiently or even bettera than an intelligent creature. Maybe the neurons required to be good at puzzle solving and the like are subtracted from the total needed for street or jungle "smarts".
"Rockchip RK3288 is coming, should be affordable, and the company is spending a lot of effort making sure it's well supported in mainline."
Citation needed. Mind supporting your statement with a link? AFAIK RK has one of the poorest FOSS support among Chinese SOC makers (compared to Allwinner and Amlogic). The RK source code floating in the net tend to be "leaks" or in any case releases that aren't official supported by the company. Also for a long time there was no official way to flash firmware onto the embedded flash storage of an Android device unless you use RK's Windows only firmware tool. (This changed recently with the appearance of a binary only Linux upgrade tool.) Opensource RK flash tools are quite limited in that they are unable to partition the flash storage or to change the bootloader, needed when upgrading between incompatible Android versions or loading desktop Linux.
Well, no human alive today in any case. All so-called "original" works produced today are derivatives of older works (Shakespeare, folklore, etc) or quirks produced by the artist's mental state. Among deceased artists Van Gogh and Edgar Allan Poe are famous examples. Another reason why we should stop this "all rights reserved" nonsense of the traditional copyright system, where the artist is presumed to be a god that produces unique worlds out of nothing.
Engineers don't do things accidentally unless they fuck up. So unless we can prove the whales know what they're doing, they're acting more like the pre-agricultural humans who accidentally spread seeds wherever they spit and shit. Not quite agriculture.
"Back in the 1960s after the moon landings, people would have expected we would be well past Mars by now. Probably Jupiter, Saturn or other stars."
Your example and the frequently quoted one about flying cars is the wrong analogy to make. There's a reason to be more optimistic, or pessimistic (depending on whether you view machine intelligence as threat), with regard the progress of AI.
Up until now, nobody has been mass producing man-rated spaceships, or flying cars and warp drives for that matter. On the other hand, computers and computer parts have been mass-produced since shortly after Jack Kilby invented the transistor. This is the reason for the so-called Moore's Law.
Now, unless you can prove that the very idea of AI is impossible, then the development of increasingly powerful computers as an aftereffect of Moore's Law and similar technologies (massively parallel computing etc) will result in systems exponentially more powerful than IBM's Watson. At some point a future Watson or Google AI system will make "decisions" indistinguishable from a human's.
Now, if Boeing and others are mass producing rocket parts at the same volume that Ford, Toyota, and their suppliers, etc are producing automobile parts (or Samsung and Foxconn smartphone parts), I'd say we'd not only be on Mars right now, we'd have a space colony on Pluto, if that's an interesting enough minor planet.
So it's free because the product isn't the app but the user who supplies the data for Big Data to crunch.
You should blame Google, Facebook and other Big Data companies for making indiscriminate surveillance somewhat palatable to the masses, who'll be thinking, it's okay for Google and Facebook to spy on us merely for profit, so it should be okay for the government to spy on us to prevent (omg) TERRORISM.
"Microsoft isn't implying that. They trying to convince customers they don't have NSA backdoors."
Yes this smells more like a PR move than anything else. Any government serious about security will roll out its own software stack, which unlike hardware costs practicallly nothing after the initial development. This will limit the attack vector to rogue chips.
Maybe China had something to do with it? I'm too lazy to search for it now, but I remember reading a story about the Chinese government banning upgrades to Windows 8 for their ageing XP machines.
"Stallman has announced that it should be called gnubitcoin."
While ESR countered it should be called gunbitcoin.
This is like locking the door after the cow has bolted the barn. If there's something nasty about you that got out into the internets, the better solution would be to have Google downgrade the search results. Or maybe just mark it the way Google flags malware or hide it behind some sort of "Safe Search"-like filter.
The way I see it, Google's compliance gives it less of a right to object to a government, such as China, pushing for Google to censor its results in the name of something supposedly more important, social stability because those nasty dissidents are harming the reputation of the Party bosses, who we all know are models of virtue until purged and officially denounced.
It is easier to write an incorrect program than understand a correct one.
