Really? It's illegal just to run the test? (Or at least, too close to a gray area to even consider it?)

Wow, that sucks.

I've read the review, but not the book, but a key element seems to come down to "Maybe it's real, but nobody knows". It seems a fairly simple procedure for him to order some of it and have it tested, and then he'd know. Yeah, that's a legal gray area, but it would make his case a lot stronger to be able to say "Yeah, I ordered a bunch of Russian Viagra and it tested out as 75% as good as the real stuff".

I know that means taking a risk of being prosecuted, but isn't that something we commend journalists for? At least, better than making allegations about what corporate execs and government employees are thinking without evidence.

The anti-Russian astroturfers are out in force today. Say "Hi!" to the guys and gals in Washington for me.

Ah, a "Troll" vote! I must have hit a nerve there.

The timing of this article is particularly foolish. Less than a week ago Russia announced that it has cancelled its participation in the South Stream project to supply gas through a pipeline under the Black Sea to south-east Europe (which would include Bulgaria and Romania). The EU insisted on conditions that Russia could not meet - for instance, that the pipeline be owned by a different corporation from that supplying the gas. Rather than give up control of what is, after all, its own product, Russia will instead be running the pipeline to Turkey. So Romanians can frack away without any Russian interference, although as well as getting highly poisonous residues in their drinking water they will also have to pay higher prices.

The whole idea that Russia would bother to discourage fracking in order to maintain sales of its own gas and oil is ridiculous. For a start, the Russian products come from conventional wells, and thus cost less than fracked fuels. Also, they are far more sustainable, with vast proven reserves whereas most fracking projects quickly run out of economically-extractable fuels. Conclusively, Russia is in the process of giving up on supplies to Europe - in future it has committed to selling enormous amounts of gas to China and other Asian countries, which do not slander it or attempt to harm it.

Carewolf, your statements about chess engines are rubbish. As anyone with the slightest knowledge of them would immediately know.

"Hogan ended up going off the deep end, conspiracy theories..."

I do recall one of his books was set in a near-future world where the USA and Russia had changed places. The USA was a violent, locked-down military dictatorship while Russia was blooming with free enterprise, invention, and individualism.

Now that was scarily prescient - it's happening as we watch. (Those of us who are still capable of noticing what happens in the real world).

Thank goodness no other nation finances pro-fracking movements, either directly through government or indirectly through corporate-funded foundations. That, of course, would be unethical.

It would be still worse, of course, if any nation were to use actual military and paramilitary violence to secure sources of oil and other fuels. Thank goodness, that could never happen.

I really miss my iPod Nano, the 5th generation, the last one that was really a dedicated music player rather than an iOS device. It was very small and did one thing really well, which made it perfect for running.

But eventually I got a smart phone, and since I'd be carrying it on runs anyway... it's more cumbersome to use as a player, but at least it's able to update itself without having to go through iTunes. I suspect that iOS-based Nanos can as well, but I just didn't need a separate device any more.

I'd also like to see it controlled against a pepperoni pizza, which practically everybody seems to like. (Oddly, except for me. I'm just not into fermented sausages. Not into salami, either. I'll eat pepperoni pizza, but I'd rather have sausage.) Once you exclude the obvious failures (e.g. vegetarians) I bet you could get 98% approval.

If that 98% figure means that they can differentiate vegetarians from non-vegetarians just by watching their eyes with near-perfect accuracy... that actually sounds like an interesting result all by itself.

Thanks for the tip. I do have a stone, and get tolerable pizza out of it, but your physics makes sense and I may have to give it a try the next time I'm feeling flush.

Meantime... we've got a place that brought a pizza oven over from Naples, and their pizzas do in fact come out in 90 seconds.

There's a lot of great cuisine in England. It's got some amazing chefs, like Heston Blumenthal and Fergus Henderson. The "gastro pubs" are serving some amazing food. The influences of south Asian cuisine are incredibly creative.

OK, they're not the French, who make great food an extremely high priority, so there's a lot of great food and very little bad food. The English got a bad reputation in the mid 20th century, having depleted their agricultural system to keep from being conquered, but that ended a while back, and they're no longer tolerating bad food. English cuisine is now on par with anywhere else in Europe or the US. Even Italy (where I've had some surprisingly mediocre pizza).

You can still get crap, of course, but it's not at all difficult to find really good food in the UK. (I'm not a resident there, just an occasional visitor and fan of food.)

iTunes remains an astonishingly bad user interface. It wasn't originally an Apple product, which explains some of it, but they took it over a decade ago, and it's still incredibly bad. (Caveat: I finally gave up on my iPod, so maybe it's gotten better in the last two years. But given how abominable it was, with massive and obvious bugs being ignored, for so long, I doubt it.)

I don't know why Apple has a blind spot for an incredibly bad user interface for a flagship product (I mean the music store, rather than the iPod), but it does. So any accusations of bad design rather than malice seem credible, even though in general that's a bad heuristic when applied to Apple.

The Dunning-Kruger effect may very possibly help to account for people who cite it in their sigs.

"Does this have anything to do with AI self consciousness?"

And now it's you who are introducing external matters. No one had mentioned self-consciousness before in this thread.

" I know the Post Office is old news these days, but their hand writing recognition for hand written addresses was able to read addresses more accurately than humans".

And a fine achievement too - and very useful, I imagine. But it's quite one-dimensional: I bet that software couldn't tell a bear from a moose, for example. So if you wanted to produce anything that could even duplicate human intelligence, you'd need to make huge breakthroughs in generality.

"But when you start ignorantly citing the implementation details of different AI systems without acknowledging the purpose and goal of each design, then you are arguing irrelevant facts".

This is mere ad hominem abuse. I did cite implementation details; but not "ignorantly". If you read my post more carefully, you will notice that I listed the progressively less difficult goals that were adopted as one effort after another failed. The original idea was to create "strong" AI, and the timeline was a few years - certainly before now. That proved completely hopeless, as no one had the slightest idea how to go about it. So then they tried setting less and less ambitious goals, until they reached a level that could be accomplished: playing chess well, and recognising handwriting.