Can we please stop treating the Roomba as a harbinger of the inevitable robot apocalypse?

It's just about the most trivial "robot" you can imagine, it's been around for over a decade, and in that time, there hasn't been a single new development in the "robotic home automation" market that it was supposed to usher in.

It's just a silly gimmick - it does a good enough job of vacuuming your Cheetos crumbs (though not nearly as well as getting off your ass for 5 minutes would), and that's about it.

From what I remember, yes, his work was slightly later, but he also published it earlier. Stands to reason that this would happen a lot - the only alternative is that different people discover something at the exact same time.

Not a nit that I would pick on any other site, but Leibniz invented/discovered calculus independently.

2
1
5
3
6
4
7
8

Humans aren't special. Get over yourselves.

Don't see any chimps or dolphins wringing their hands/flippers over who has what rights. That seems to be a pretty special human trait.

What an idiotic thing to say.

I don't really care what people on the street do - programmers think in types.

So I'm picking between the US/UK/Canadian signals intelligence, and the Russian security service? I'll go with the sigint guys.

Spetssvyaz is the Russian communications security agency (part of FSO).

Apparently "knee-jerk response" now means "opinion I disagree with". Good to know!

In the US, 56.49 billion potatoes are sold per year. If potatoes caught fire at the same rate, we would all be dead.

They certainly don't use the word "baffled", but for all the scientist I know, the standard response to new data is "WTF is this shit?!"

And no, this is not a troll or flamebait - it's justified, rational criticism.

Just saying it doesn't make it true.

It just plain cheats. Or did you mean it cheats in a highly technical manner?

Heh, "barely 6 year old computer" is somehow both adorable, and also really sad.

Yeah, 7 and 10 are tablets - they're using the number for both size and version (for the phone at least), it's kinda weird.

Don't really know what to tell you regarding the Old Man Rant - that's the hardware that phones have nowadays, and yes, they do more than your old computer.

You're so clever!