If they dont have evidence they dont know they are criminals.

Normally, I'd recommend Scratch, but in this case, I recommend: MMF2, by François Lionet and Yves Lamoureux. They really get it, and your son will learn a ton about programming, without deviating from working on games themselves.

I don't know that there ISN'T a von Neumann probe in our solar system. How would we know? The solar system is huge. The probe could be tiny. Again, how would we know? Have we tried communicating with it? Would it try to communicate with us? Or would it report to a nearby star, first, and await instructions delivered after centuries?

I've heard that the radio emissions from Earth are actually really, really weak, and distribute radially. Nobody can hear us out there.

The entire galaxy could be teeming with life, that's communicating point-to-point. Why waste energy in radial communication, when you can just draw a straight line from star to star?

Sometimes, I think, all we need to do, is point a big powerful laser at a nearby star, and request boot-procedure handshaking instructions, from the nearby access point, and then just wait for the signal that inevitably responds, with instructions on how to maintain the communications link.

That's incorrect. The A-Team were Social Justice Warriors. MacGuyver was a Social Justice Engineer.

Uh, backing down when threatened with violence does not make one like a troll. It might be cowardly or it might be sensible, but it certainly isn't troll-like. It's the people who _threaten_ violence who are usually the trolls, since they don't have valid arguments to back up their stance.

Someone threatening violence if a debate takes place isn't "things getting interesting", it's someone trying to shut down a debate they can't win within the context of the debate.

Most sensible geeks get incensed when the government passes a law about "Doing X, but on a computer/the internet" or when a company tries to patent "Doing X, but on a computer/the internet". We quite rightly point out that there are already laws or patents covering the same thing and doing it on a computer or the internet doesn't make it magically special.

Well this is part of why the government sometimes keeps trying to pass "Doing X, but on the internet" laws. Because some jerk is always willing to try getting away with something and then when they get caught argue "but it was on the internet, so it doesn't count!"

Part of that sentence is definitely wrong and part of it is definitely misleading. Because he skipped straight from the Atari 2600 to the NES, and then to the Super NES, and then to the N64. No Coleco, no Genesis, etc. So not all the consoles, and from what i can tell not even all the games for each console. And i can't see any indication that they're being played strictly in order either.

So it's a heavily curated list of games, which is a good thing because the full list would be impossible to do, and it seems to be in strict chronological order in terms of consoles but only vague order within each generation.

This from Jason Cornwell, who decided to "allow" us to write shorter emails by "allowing" us to use a tiny little non-resizable compose window in Gmail.

Okay, that's not 100% true. You can switch to "full-screen" mode, which enlarges it to a size that is neither all of the screen nor even just all of the window. But it does "kindly" grey out all the GUI elements that the "full-screen" window isn't covering up and disallows you from interacting with them without minimizing the window.

But i guess it make senses. If he can just make Gmail unappealing enough then of course we'll all switch to Inbox, right?

I donâ(TM)t blame /. Its hard to have insightful commentary on our society any more.

Who would have figured Wall Street and the The City would rape the global economy in 2008, and instead of going to jail the central banks rewarded them with free money for six years and theyâ(TM)ve tripled their money as their punishment.

There was a brief glimmer of protest in the Occupy movement and it was crushed like a bug. The Department of Homeland security has turned most small town police force in to something resembling an occupying army you would see in Iraq, and they seem to be spending much of their time arbitrarily confiscating cash and cars for profit, no judge, no jury, no trial.

The Five Eyes are not just spying on some stuff, they are spying on EVERYTHING and we all know it and there isnâ(TM)t really anything anyone is gonna do about it. To stay on topic, 60 minutes had a shill do a great peice on the nice kids that work at the NSA.

We figured the Republican brand was destroyed as of 2008 and we elected this hopie changie President. It turns out heâ(TM)s pretty much as bad or worse than the previous clown and nothing changed. There is a high probability the next one is gonna be worse than the last two. In six years the Democrats have laid such waste we are welcoming the Republicans back. We donâ(TM)t really want either of our parties any more but they arenâ(TM)t going to allow us an Option C.

Its hard to find biting satire or piercing commentary that does it justice and you know it isnâ(TM)t gonna change a God damn thing. After everyting thatâ(TM)s happened over the last ten years, there should have been change, our civilization was ripe for it. There just wasnâ(TM)t any. The man seems to have his jack boot on our necks and heâ(TM)s got us down.

*sigh* Someone doesn't understand the Singularity theory. Based on the title i'm guessing it's the professor, but since i can't actually read the article at work it's possible it's the Slashdot editor who conflated lack of AI with lack of Singularity.

The basic premise of the Singularity is that over historic time periods the rate of knowledge acquisition of the human race has increased at a geometric rate.

The reason this has happened is because acquiring knowledge allows us to develop tools that allows us to build upon the pre-existing knowledge to make new discovers that allow better tools, and so on. (Although it's far from a perfect simulation, anyone who's ever played Civilization or any similar strategy game should know that process by heart.)

There are two possible outcomes to this progression, either we hit some rate limiting factor sometime in the "near" future, or the rate of knowledge acquisition over time will approach a mathematical singularity, at which point we will be discovering things so fast that our current minds can not comprehend what will happen. Obviously proponents of the Singularity believe that it is the second possibility that will happen.

However the theory of the Singularity makes no prescriptions about _how_ we will obtain that rate of knowledge. Certainly Artificial Intelligence is one such way. However direct augmentation of our brains is another possibility. Whether that will be via cybernetic implants, biomedical alterations, genetic tinkering, or something else we haven't, and possibly can't, think of is impossible to say at this point.

Up until now of course tools have allowed us to indirectly augment out brains. Writing lets us record information. The internet lets us retrieve information. Now Watson helps us interpret that information. Yes Watson isn't doing anything, Watson is just a tool we use. But tools that help us accomplish things we couldn't before are exactly what moves us along the path towards the Singularity.

As has been pointed out, there was just recently news about replicating a worm's mind in a mechanical body. Yes it's very interesting, but no, it isn't a perfect recreation of an actual brain. But maybe when that paper gets scanned into Watson 2.0 it will make some connection to some other paper on artificial neurons or some such and Watson will let the authors know that they really ought to talk to each other. And boom, we're suddenly creating real artificial minds. Or maybe something else happens. The whole point is we don't know what the next step will be, we're just observing a trend.

If you want to argue against the Singularity you can't just pick a hole in the prospects for AI. You need to explain why the current trend in knowledge acquisition won't continue.

Must it be a car? How about a motorcycle? HUGE modding community; Long history. Also, helmets like the Skully AR-1.

So sarcasm aside, it sounds like you're annoyed that people got diverted from talking about the science to discuss the politics of a shirt? In fact you were so concerned about the issue you decided to write a post diverting us from talking about the science to discuss the politics of discussing the politics of a shirt. After all, it's of dire importance we raise awareness about people trying to raise awareness about the shirt since none of the people complaining about it were kind enough to complain about it here first where we would be aware of it.

Well speech is free, and it's not like we can't discuss both issues (or all three issues?) And I am glad you care enough about justice in these kinds of social issues to fight for your beliefs!