One quibble with your reply. The rules of chess are not complicated. Yes, the pawn has several special cases, and castling is unlike all the other moves in chess, but these do not complicate the game that much. It's more complicated than checkers, but not by a lot. A complicated game is something like Star Fleet Battles or Squad Leader. Those games have hundreds of rules.

The complexity of chess is in how to play well, not how to play by the rules. That was another factor that made chess so attractive to the AI community.

Some people seemed to feel that we could take a good chess playing program and just apply it to any old problem. The techniques can be applicable to other problems, but it sure isn't as easy as some hoped.

Meh. A simple error in the writeup, which I'm sure is not present in the scientific papers.

http://lunarscience.nasa.gov/?question=3318

No, not particularly. I think that people will learn to exploit the weaknesses, though - and that is why I feel that constant change is necessary.

The screams... it's all about the screams. And dinner. Think of it as the psychotic version of dine-in movie theaters.

I got my pitchfork right here. Let's go!

How are we going to get there, again?

And one that is generally frowned upon by religious people. The names are essentially anti-religious, not religious, in nature.

If the state of Utah is theocratic and makes funding decisions based on particle names, choosing blasphemous ones is not the path to big research bucks. Mormons take the prohibition against taking the name of deity in vain pretty seriously.

I mean, the smallpox was there, why not the plutonium?

The mistake I was referring to was smallpox's occasional error in failing to leave a few survivors.

"Application Programming" is today done in things like Excel spreadsheets. You don't need to write a COBOL app* to keep track of interest payments and such. I'd argue that computers are more accessible than ever, and thanks to Google routine coding often becomes this exercise in searching for already-solved problems and applying the solutions to your similar problem.

* Ahhhh, dear God, "app"? Why did I type that?

Are you arguing that they can keep their security procedures static because the results are good enough? I'd argue that you need to keep changing along with the threats.

I will respond with data.

Most, maybe. But there are a substantial number that do demand a degree, and the non-degreed will always have at least a small handicap, because given two otherwise equivalent candidates, the one with the degree is likely to get the job, and after 10 years or so the extra four years of experience aren't going to mean as much as the formal education.

In addition, if at some point in your career you want to move into another career track the degree may well become even more important -- though the choice of major may become much less important.

Well, everyone makes mistakes once in a while.

They do comply with OBDII. Some of the bits are different, obviously. I have an OBDII scanner I use regularly with my LEAF. It extends the spec to allow reporting on some EV-only parameters, such as the state of each of the hundreds of cells in the battery, but it also reports lots of the same data reported by an ICE.