Most the experts have a positive view but lets focus on the ones we can skew into a fear of Skynet along with celebrities. Woz being one of the better opinions.

Domain specific knowledge is needed to make educated guesses or at least informed assessments of the current threat level. Currently, AI is not at all intelligent; with in a specific narrow domain the AI can do as well as or better than a human. Big deal. So can a horse or a car - they are superior within their specialized domain. We are nowhere near a general artificial intelligence; we are making slow progress on simulations of natural intelligence which might prove interesting and possibly quite disturbing someday; but if you can simulate a natural brain's intelligence that isn't artificial is it?

Back on topic, AI is only applied intelligence within extremely narrow domains. A thermostat is an artificial intelligence; within it's domain/context.
Talk of Gigahertz is grossly over simplified. Biological brains are massively parallel and the interactions going on involve quantum mechanics (although may not be necessary for operation-- it likely will be a huge problem for simulators.) The gigahertz is hardly important when you have a network mesh that is MUCH larger than the neurons within it...

The REAL issues are how jobs can be simplified so an average or slow human can perform the job. Those jobs are beginning to be feasible for customized AI systems to perform and replace the human employees. Furthermore, just as kids can solve protein folding problems by playing a game, an AI can be augmented by human brain power in ways that simplify the job greatly. Your 6 year old child could be putting you out of work with their video game playing. The real cyborgs to think about will be AI attaching human intelligence. Like a surgery robot which does most the work with the surgeon assisting multiple bots at the same time... reducing the number of surgeons required (think of all the prep work etc that could be automated...)

The education market is largely untapped and trillions are there to be won in this new "industry" by creating a marketplace from what was a public service with altruistic motives.

Their agenda is to foster a market and transition education into an industry from which great profits can be had for training worker drones who are specifically tailored to the job market. Employers no longer want to train employees - the numbers on that are so low that most people do not even think about employer training or realize that employers used to have full time instructors of their own. It's all about cost externalization - they externalized employee training and are acting like the education system is failing them when it never did their job for them.

Perfect is the enemy of good. Education in the past got us all the successes of today. But that isn't perfect, the perfect little snowflakes are not to blame... we have to get 100% success with every child and if not, it is NEVER their parents fault or the society. So lets completely revamp education which worked so well because it's not perfect. It's similar to how they destroyed the UK Postal System (Royal Mail) with tons of waste and destruction just so they could improve the service by a few % to become perfect. Now they've completely privatized it - it's still far from perfect...but new money can now corrupt the system so perfect now won't matter...

I don't care if 40% can't read out of high school; send those people to another school targeted at their failure within the old system. The major steps forward were done by a minority of people who thrived in the old education model -- not everybody is a genius and whatever was done that let those people shine and deliver the progress we had should be left alone. Don't kill the golden goose people! You can experiment on the teenagers or children who fail but you should leave the successful ones alone! You can also not claim that somebody who did poorly (Einstein) did not benefit from the system; it is foolishly simplistic to measure success by short term simplistic metrics. In reality, human learning and development is far from understood - it is far more of a black box than people realize. (besides, learning to cope with failure is a huge lesson to learn properly. )

One size does not fit all. Policy makers are always obsessed with making universal policies. Utopia is an incredibly evil goal.

"Laws too severe are seldom obeyed" -Ben Franklin.

Addicts by definition will put themselves at risk unreasonably, so you have to be a fool to think addicts would stop even if you passed a law where the punishment was a shortening of their lifespan or torture them so badly it leaves them with permanent medical conditions! ( like the drugs already do to them on their own. )

The simple solution is to destroy the black market (which is about as free market as you get; it exists outside regulation...) you simply have a no strings attached free socialized drug service with minimal safety regulation.

Nobody would pay on the black market when they can go to the local free clinic and sit in a padded room and shoot up without any risks aside from what the drug does. It would be much cheaper but it also would likely cause another banking bailout since billions of laundered dollars would disappear... not that we'd not have more billions in savings from shrinking the police state to bail the banks out...

We may as well forget actually fixing anything that makes big bankers bug bucks. In the USA, the Mexican drug cartels should incorporate and just buy some politicians and "think tanks" to ensure nothing ever is solved.

Do not forget the drug research that shows unhappy people are way more prone to addiction...

Did rebranding IE12 into "Edge" include the browser identification string? Are there any signs of the app is still essentially a new version of IE.

I doubt they started completely from scratch and with different staff than IE 11...

A new app name doesn't make this any different than 11 was from 10... so is it really more significant? or is this just merely a rebranding from the trusted MS marketing department.

Every software vendor has dreamed of a subscription based model and how with the internet and DRM they can start to realize those goals.

Didn't MS buy windows365 or some domains like that last year?

You know they will never give it away for free; they will charge you for your habit. (not ruling out their past behavior of giving free or massive discounts to get people addicted.)

Spot on except that Fascism is Italian and it IS government by the corporations.

Government is captive already; the end game is still being setup the huge fight to reclaim it has not even begun and possibly will not until it is too late.

End game: between "1984" for intellectuals and "Brave New World" for the sheeple.

Quality McDonald's Food you can raise your child on... now as... education!
Quality Walmart products and service with a highly desirable clientele that you feel perfectly comfortable with allowing your children to visit on their own.... now as.... education .... and "super" walmart have free daycare!!

Low low prices...

The education "industry" potentially is into the trillions which has a captive customer base; almost as captive as the healthcare industry has.

The potential profits from just a small slice of this developing new "marketplace" is staggering. No bigger gold rush exists outside of managing social security.

Regardless of intentions, the appeal here is extreme. Prisons were/are only a starting point and those have less growth potential (despite the heavy lobbying already present to keep numbers up.)

Sure corporate interests will be protected and some people do want their own little factories of goosestepping consumers but there is more than just that going on here.

Correction:
  #1) if you can't see bush wasn't legitimately appointed, then you NOT are capable of supporting a democracy

I wish people could think for themselves... NADER didn't split the vote and cost Gore a clear victory:

1) Gore won by the most conservative count. The supreme court made a corrupt ruling and appointed Bush the winner. It is not hard to figure that one out; but if you can't see it then you are capable of supporting a democracy.

2) Nader only had a tiny portion of the vote; it didn't split the DFL a lot of his people wouldn't vote for Gore. The Communist Party of Florida had more votes than the difference in the count (see #1.) If a portion of the Nader votes went for Gore you would have still had many areas so close it was still likely a mess would have happened.

3) Computer voting was alive and causing errors before anybody even noticed them (but they rushed in some IT people to fix the massive overvote "bugs")

4) Illegal banning of voters who might be black in a really corrupt scheme that should have put somebody in jail; it was intentional. The numbers of people on that were quite significant.

5) Don't forget the ballot which cased a jewish community to vote for a nazi sympathizer. (it only takes half a popcycle stick shove that kind of ballot out of alignment.)

6) Unverified and improper military ballots were counted anyway.

7) Fake directions for election day - the usual things like telling you to vote a day late or wrong location were going around as well. That old trick still happens around the nation.

8) Crazy waiting lines purposely engineered caused some people to turn away.

9) only 1 voting day; no real time off for it... and people propagandized to not vote (except the targeted stuff for certain demographics.)

Forget about Bush's brother, state campaign manager being in charge of the whole foobar process. Don't blame Gore or Nader - everything else was all wrong. A billion dollars was spent to make both candidates seem the same so it would turn out CLOSE which makes it easier to cheat in the tiny margins. In addition, the whole thing is like the Palestinian Government where it really has no power to do anything - it is just there to appease some people into thinking there is a democracy.

A browser we don't need, want and would like to go away gets renamed and we celebrate like something has changed.

I doubt they completely rewrote it. Their marketing department has a long history of talking about IE standards compliance and IE's technology leadership which is well known. So why does the marketing department get a pass this time around?

I'm not going to call it Edge. It's just going to be newer versions of IE to me. They'd be better calling it "web browser" or "browser" and leave it at that. They don't need to market the thing because it hasn't been a selling point for a long long time; it's so bad they had to rebrand it to turn it back into a selling point when everything has a built-in browser on it today.

spot on!

CO2 + Water + electrolysis = Methanol.

This has been known forever. It is clear and burns extremely cleanly. It is not diesel or clean diesel; however, getting a diesel engine running on it is probably child's play and a flex fuel car is also probably easy (but a poor choice since diesel engines are superior.)

Without a monopoly at the gas station, you'd have had these choices for a long time and they'd be undercutting gas for decades... Maybe we'd have cars that wouldn't fall apart if we converted them! That is what prevents me from converting because it will eat up parts in my car not designed for methanol... it's bad enough with the ethanol being forced into my car... it's harder to find real 100% gas than it is ethanol (but Methanol is nowhere to be found; propane is easier to find.)

Why are they avoiding words like methanol, electrolysis, etc?

Donald Rumsfeld had stock in it, having run the company behind it back before he was appointed to approve it's use without proper testing. (Testing which happened later on - a lot of which was industry funded etc.)

Some people are extra susceptible to the stuff in addition to certain conditions such as heavy exercise making your tolerance level drop.

What we really should know is how they were involved in corruption behind the stevia ban. Also what it took other industries to bribe away that ban in recent years...

Survivaball
http://theyesmen.org/hijinks/s...

Did somebody not get the joke?