You're right. There's absolutely no need for humans at the baggage drop, except perhaps one person offering assistance if people have problems.

Flew from Gatwick to Tromsà with Norweigian in December. It was fantastic! Self check-in machine printed off a sticker for my luggage. Placed it in an automated bag drop, and the only queueing I had to do was at the security theatre.

KLM has something similar. BA at Heathrow still has manned desks but the kiosks print out the sticker so it is just a case of dropping the bags/

For most websites, I really don't care. Here I use a dictionary word. If someone logs into my /. account the limit to the damage they can do is to pretend to be me. Hell, with this one they don't even get a valid email address.

My bank accounts and email address each have their own password based on out of date information that inexplicably stays in my memory.

I actually use a different password for facebook, nit because I'm particularly concerned about someone haking into that. More because I don't trust facebook with the password Iuse for everything else.

I think it's more common for it to be for shows that are nominated for awards. A full time movie reviewer is able to fit going to a cinema and watching a movie into his schedule, but the judges for the awards tend to have other jobs.

Well, you do suffer from a disproportionate part of your population wnting the Bible to be a science book. Sorry. It's kinda hard to remember that a lot of you guys are perfeectly reasonable when your national idiots make so much damn noise.

Last time I remember the public being involved in a name, we ended up calling a whale Mr. Splashy Pants.

So, perhaps we'll end up with a name like Gassyball of Frolics or something, but I'm sure the combined might of B3ta and 4chan will manage better.

It will be mostly for suborbital flights and non-equatorial orbits though, so the earth's spin is of limited use.

I bet department stores and gas stations do much more than that portion of their business by plastic. I bet sweetshops and toyshops deal with a lot of cash, because a large chunk of their customer base doesn't have plastic. Also greeting card shops, newspaper kiosks, and other institutions that deal with a lot of small transactions, because cash is more convenient for small purchases.

What does an Islington estate agent have to do with this?

Yes you're right. I didn't read that properly.

Although I think the summary oversimplifies things a lot. Skimming the actual paper, it looks like the Lovelace test is not a test in itself but a means to critique tests for AI. It could apply to a chatbot or a story writer or anything else.

So if I ask a chatbot "How many legs does a horse have", it would fail if it just looks up the answer in a database that contains "legs", "horse" and knows to give the answer "4" (because can trivially explain that), but if it has learned from earlier conversation what a horse is and what a leg is and comes up with a correct answer, it would pass, because I have no way of knowing the exact inputs it used. Something like that anyway.

You could use the fact that you regularly share driving duties as an explanation of why you don't know who was driving. this has been accepted as a eason for dismissal in the past., although it might be helpful to be rich.

What else, within the purview of the EU, does need to be solved and isn't being actively addressed?

What's a "program" ("anything")?

A deterministic sequence of instructions that could be converted to work on a universal Turing machine. I don;t htink this is really a valid criticism.

What does it mean to be "engineered to produce" one?

Presumably we're talking about a specific condition and expectation that is part of the specification. Although since a lot of specs are informal this does need to be clarified.

What's a "hardware fluke"?

Not sure on this one. My initial thought was that this was just a requirement that it not produce pure randomness and get a valid result statistically.

What constitutes "explanation" of how it was done?

I think this one is the main problem. It's very subjective what an explanation is. It's also somewhat dependent on the programmer.

I think game playing is a better illustration of AI than chatbots. Good systems need to plan ahead and estimate probabilities on limited data, which have obvious parallels to human cognition.

The point is that we need a new untested aircraft with its own unique maintenence issues.

Who's talking about a PC here? I'm talking about consoles.

XBox Live is a single service that integrates the entire online functionality of an XBox. Online gaming, chat, high scores, and all the rest.

would it need to have shipped as part of what was then the monopoly PC operating system, or would third party matchmaking frameworks count as well?

I have no idea what it would need to do. Tell you what; solve that problem and then I'll agree you're innovative as well.