Last week in my country, a new political party overrun the previous party in charge of the municipality for about 30 years (yes, those thing happen in Europe sometimes).

The day the new government took charge, the displaced party dug out some four-year-old tweets containing a silly joke about nazis (the kind that would gather a +5 funny and some grammar nazi "corrected for you" replies around here) when the man had not even a politician. The same day, all the traditional media were reporting on their front pages as if it was the man's true opinion instead of a joke, reaching international press and forcing the councillor to resign (you may have heard about it as the "communist politician supporting the holocaust").

As long as the public falls for such obvious tactics, and until politicians learn to trim their twitter and facebook timelines when they run for office, this is bound to happen again and again.

Uhh, precedent. Double the resources, double the ability. This is well known.

That is magical thinking. It has no place in proper engineering practice.

There are zillions of reasons that interfere with ability to work faster in larger problems - yet they can be summarized with the words "non-linear growth". Try solving the Travelling salespeople problem twice as big with merely twice as fast hardware, it will slow to a grinch.

It's not like AI is going to run on some unknown substrate.

We know the substrate of brain power, gray cells. This doesn't mean that we understand the way they work together to create intelligence. If we ever create an AI, it will be so complex that we'll likely be in the same situation with respect to how it works.

"We" don't have to make one. All we have to do is set an AI towards self improvement/production of better AIs. THAT is where superintelligence comes from. All we have to do is make one that is an idiot savant geared toward AI design.

We do that with every new generation of babies, and it hasn't produced a super intelligence yet. What makes you think doing it ON A COMPUTER would make any difference?

Let me guess. It involves the hunch of the elephant, the baking temperature of the refrigerator and the airspeed velocity of the unladen plane?

There's no need for it to be abused. Just tag each POI with an <unconfirmed> tag and hide them on the map by default (but show them in searches) until they get reported by multiple users.

I couldn't care less about the TV except that it has to be diverting resources from improving the browser.

Does it? Improvements required to run the browser on a TV will necessarily involve making it more lightweight and portable, i.e. less dependent on the quirks of specific platforms.

> Pixelated graphics do NOT look good.

Say what again?

No one else can because it will cause Google's CTS tool to fail verifying which won't allow you to ship with Google Play.

Conversely, if someone else built such system and it worked to keep all vendors updated, it wouldn't matter much that it failed to validate in Google's CTS. In that situation it would be relatively easy to migrate everyone away from Google Play -developers first, and users would follow- to an alternate app market supported by the maintainer of such successful system.

Now that I think of it, that would be the most likely way a strong contender might use to take control of Android from Google - in fact, that may be precisely what Microsot has in mind for their recent partnership with Cyanogen - the old Embrace, Extend, Extinguish.

I don't want a nanny-search moving the things I'm looking for down the page. Just give me what I searched for, nothing more, nothing less, no "judgment" about what I want to see.

So you'd rather have a complete database dump of all the web pages that contain your search terms, in random order, to do your own filtering among petabytes of data each time you look for "what you searched for, nothing less"?

'Cause any time you use a web search engine that provides just a few results, there *is* a judgement involved of which ones should appear at the first page; and Google is in the place it's now because their judgement was much better than any other search engine at the time. Including "mobile friendly" is only adding one more criterion to their ordering that they think will work well for a majority of their users.

the only reason people use Google is that it provides better search results

See my other comment above - the only reason it provides better search results is because they have more people using it, so other players can't provide a better nor cheaper product with respect to search.

That is not inherently bad as long as Google remains a monopoly by having better quality and limiting it to web search. But if they use that advantage to compete at other markets (such as advertising) not by having a better/cheaper product, but by exploiting all those users achieved through their natural monopoly, applying anti-monopoly laws makes sense.

First mover advantage plus the effect that having the majority of users can improve the quality of their results (in fact Google was *not* a first mover in the search space, but now they are entrenched). In the internet, code is law, and Google has a good amount of defining many technologies in widespread use - and more importantly, the way to learn about them.

A few weeks ago I read an analysis by a Mozilla blogger (which I can no longer find) of how, now that pagerank is less and less useful due to link farms and spammers otherwise attacking their algorithm, search quality depends largely on analysis of search terms introduced by users and the results they find interesting. This is a chicken-and-egg situation for any competitor: you can only improve your results by having more users, but they won't come if your results are not better than the market leader's. This is a natural monopoly, but one created by network effects and thus of the kind that can only be displaced by a disruptive process, not by regular competition.

And there's a similar effect for advertising - if there's a natural monopoly over the space were all users reside, then you must advertise in that platform in order to have enough eyeballs. It's the same mechanism that produced a lock-in for Facebook and Microsoft platforms back in the day - you go there not because the product is better, but because you need to interact with everyone who is doing the same.