Not quite. See, they were not selling. They were advertising. This is similar to Harley taking their new electric motorcycle around to events to show it off. There is no law against letting people drive your car. People who liked it enough could drive to buy it in the next state over.

I claim that I had photorealistic, real-time voxel graphics running on an iPhone 2 seven years ago. I just didn't release it for... reasons. Until they release a demo that runs on someone else's hardware, it's just a worm on a hook for investors.

I just purchased an NVIDIA card for my Linux gaming machine... I tried to get my AMD card to play games at an acceptable speed for months, but it's just not working out. AMD still is a bit ahead of NVIDIA for Windows (price/performance), but the ratio flips on Linux. My GTX 760 should arrive Thursday, whee!

Anand's consistent dedication to accurate and objective review metrics, as well as his crusade to put an SSD in every home computer, are both laudable. I hope the site will maintain the same lofty ideals without him at the helm.

This is ludicrous. He should get an A on the assignment... it was completely convincing apparently, despite the inclusion of a pet dinosaur. The school administration and cops were all convinced. The kid should put it on his fucking college resume: "Turned in a story that was so well written I got arrested for the fictitious deed."

Alternately, his college application could be, "I got this excellent ACT score despite being taught in a school that doesn't realize Dinosaurs are extinct."

I don't like Facebook. I don't use Facebook (despite pressure). But that doesn't mean I think Facebook's publicised test was abusive. It was a standard A/B test, done by website owners everywhere, all the time, from the smallest to the largest. If you reword it slightly, all the negative connotations vanish:

Users seemed to enjoy the newsfeed more when we adjusted the filter algorithm to prefer positive (rather than negative) content.

Said this way it sounds just like any other test (Google changing their rankings, an advertiser tweaking their wording), and that's because it is. Communication is about changing someone's thoughts and emotions... that's the definition of communication at the most basic level. Just because Facebook can quantify these changes and put them into numeric form does not mean that the changes they made are any more ominous that any other advertising message ever made since the dawn of time.

You may have read the article (dubitable), but you didn't watch the video or read the SIGGRAPH paper. They demonstrate a browsing tool that enables you to, for example, find an average nose nearly instantly. You can then filter the thousands or millions of images to find specific cat breeds, poses, situations, or colors in seconds.

The tool is called average explorer, and it allows a user to interactively explore a vast set of image data quickly and efficiently. The one picture you describe was a single click in the explorer.

You did the equivalent of saying "Wow, I can make a black dot on a white canvas. That's not very exciting." when presented a single click with a single tool in Photoshop.

The difference is in the prevalance. Scamware in iOS and Android exists on the fringes; some % of all software will always be illegitimate. But Microsoft has so little legit content that the scamware rises to the top way more often than occurs for the other stores.

You are conflating 'understandable' with similar but different terms like 'reasonable' and 'rational'. Their superstitions and fears are understandable, but they are not based on reason.

They did a report on Too Many Games, which was really about bad store UIs. Steam is the 'least bad' of the biggies, but that's not saying much.

What frustrates and upsets me is that before Snowden, I would have looked at this as a fluff piece about technology, with some mild nagging doubts about how it could be misused.

Now I see them as NSA whitewashing propaganda, with mild nagging doubts that maybe the original poster had no agenda and it really is a tech fluff article.

I thought that we had too much Lithium to match the prediction, that observed amounts exceeded predicted ratios.

I choose to remain optimistic that it does NOT happen all the time because they do not look at the contents of your email all the time. In other words, someone was diagnosing an algorithm (say, how to choose advertisements using the content of attached images), the images triggered the offensive filter, engineer took a look, and reported it.

Perhaps I am naive, but I simply think that Google does not do this frequently because I don't think they look at email frequently, or scan for naughty pics on purpose. As a sysadmin, I generally don't give a fuck what's in my user's email. I doubt they do either, except to advertise to it.

The three laws of robotics is not very practical (as evidenced by Asimov himself; his fiction is essentially a long list of all the ways the laws fail). In fact, ethics classes themselves are complex enough that it's difficult to imagine any simple, cogent way to summarize ethical decision making into a sound bite. But do you believe it is possible at all to codify into the behavior of future complex systems? Personally, if we ever do get strong AI in my lifetime, I'm betting it'll be as screwed up and erratically ethical as we are.

Works for you as well, if you can hire an attorney to talk to a judge and convince the judge to grant a court order to... nevermind, your phrasing is shorter and means the same thing.