3) Go to the drug store and buy a deck of cards...

Next time you go to fix Grandma's email, bring along a deck of cards and ask her to show you some solitaire games. In fact bring four decks -- some of the old games required more than one.

When faced with a tricky question, one think you have to ask yourself is 'Does this question actually make any sense?' For example you could ask "Can anything get colder than absolute zero?" and the simplistic answer is "no"; but it might be better to say the question itself makes no sense, like asking "What is north of the North Pole"?

I think when we're talking about "superintelligence" it's a linguistic construct that sounds to us like it makes sense, but I don't think we have any precise idea of what we're talking about. What *exactly* do we mean when we say "superintelligent computer" -- if computers today are not already there? After all, they already work on bigger problems than we can. But as Geist notes there are diminishing returns on many problems which are inherently intractable; so there is no physical possibility of "God-like intelligence" as a result of simply making computers merely bigger and faster. In any case it's hard to conjure an existential threat out of computers that can, say, determine that two very large regular expressions match exactly the same input.

Someone who has an IQ of 150 is not 1.5x times as smart as an average person with an IQ of 100. General intelligence doesn't work that way. In fact I think IQ is a pretty unreliable way to rank people by "smartness" when you're well away from the mean -- say over 160 (i.e. four standard deviations) or so. Yes you can rank people in that range by *score*, but that ranking is meaningless. And without a meaningful way to rank two set members by some property, it makes no sense to talk about "increasing" that property.

We can imagine building an AI which is intelligent in the same way people are. Let's say it has an IQ of 100. We fiddle with it and the IQ goes up to 160. That's a clear success, so we fiddle with it some more and the IQ score goes up to 200. That's a more dubious result. Beyond that we make changes, but since we're talking about a machine built to handle questions that are beyond our grasp, we don't know whether we're making actually the machine smarter or just messing it up. This is still true if we leave the changes up to the computer itself.

So the whole issue is just "begging the question"; it's badly framed because we don't know what "God-like" or "super-" intelligence *is*. Here's I think a better framing: will we become dependent upon systems whose complexity has grown to the point where we can neither understand nor control them in any meaningful way? I think this describes the concerns about "superintelligent" computers without recourse to words we don't know the meaning of. And I think it's a real concern. In a sense we've been here before as a species. Empires need information processing to function, so before computers humanity developed bureaucracies, which are a kind of human operated information processing machine. And eventually the administration of a large empire have always lost coherence, leading to the empire falling apart. The only difference is that a complex AI system could continue to run well after human society collapsed.

Yes, they do. A person may be a good creator of characters, of settings, of situations, and of dialogues, and having the four abilities, produce a full original novel. Another person might be good at three, two or one of the four, and therefore unable to exercise his creativity except by means of appropriating respectively one, two or three of those from another artist.

Case in point: fanfic. I read a lot of fanfic, some of which better than the original. And why is it better? Because while the original author was good at, say, two of the above four, he wasn't very good at the other two, while the fanfic author complements this weakness, the end result being a fully realized work of art that wouldn't exist otherwise.

Under your scenario however, the fanfic author is in the wrong "just because", no matter how much this harms other artists, and the cultural development of a society as a whole.

Your workaround to the question of glyphs show you yourself wouldn't accept the full implications of your conceptual framework. This here is another example, because you actually require this very thing from, among others, house painters. Do you pay monthly royalties to the artist who painted your living room? No? Why? Just because he did a minimalist, one-color private installation? Why is this relevant?

And how about the engineer who projected the road over which that person you photographed the other day stood? Did you get a license to make copies of his artistic project which you unconsciously appropriated in your own artistic endeavors?

The silliness you think you're seeing in the above examples is the exact same silliness those who oppose copyright see in the arguments of copyright defenders. And the arguments you use against these examples are also the arguments copyright opposers use. And any difference you'd pretend to find between these positions, thinking your own reasonable, and that of copyright opposers unreasonable, is an arbitrary line drawn in the sand with blurry edges, no more and no less.

Yup so far, in windows 10. There are 2 folowup settings that I've felt the the need to after turning everything off in the customize privacy screen.

1) Turn off messages about smart screen. (You can turn off smart screen during install, windows evidently thinks this is a security risk, so it's an alert in action center. So you effectively turn off smart screen, and then follow up by turning off messages about smart screen being off. Not a huge deal... since smart screen *is* a legitimate A/V feature. And some non-tech people probably should have it on; despite the privacy implication. Its a standard feature of all modern A/V software. So its not omgz ms is evil.

2) Turn off forwarding windows search to bing. Again, another easy to access setting, but an extra step.

I prefer windows updates on for my personal desktops so I don't worry about that. The risk of a bad update screwing me over has proven to be less than the risk of not having them. In my opinion.

There is some rumbling about some telemetry features that can only be turned off with enterprise. I'd like to know more about that.

You can turn off the nags about smart screen in Action center. (simplest way to get there is to click the flag in the system tray.) but its also via control panels.

The option is literally called "turn of messages about smart screen".

Nagging about the cloud? I setup a local account, the only time i see messages at all about 'their cloud' is when i add new "metro" apps -- which i don't do much. (Same as windows 8.0/8.1).

Contrariwise show me a form of telecommunication that does *not* involve computers. Even plain old telephone service. Even if you discount the digital switching equipment, the PBXs at business locations are computers.

The overriding principle in any encounter between vehicles should be safety; after that efficiency. A cyclist should make way for a motorist to pass , but *only when doing so poses no hazard*. The biggest hazard presented by operation of any kind of vehicle is unpredictability. For a bike this is swerving in and out of a lane a car presents the greatest danger to himself and others on the road.

The correct, safe, and courteous thing to do is look for the earliest opportunity where it is safe to make enough room for the car to pass, move to the side, then signal the driver it is OK to pass. Note this doesn't mean *instantaneously* moving to the side, which might lead to an equally precipitous move *back* into the lane.

Bikes are just one of the many things you need to deal with in the city, and if the ten or fifteen seconds you're waiting to put the accelerator down is making you late for where you're going then you probably should leave a few minutes earlier, because in city driving if it's not one thing it'll be another. In any case if you look at the video the driver was not being significantly delayed by the cyclist, and even if that is so that is no excuse for driving in an unsafe manner, although in his defense he probably doesn't know how to handle the encounter with the cyclist correctly.

The cyclist of course ought to know how to handle an encounter with a car though, and for that reason it's up to the cyclist to manage an encounter with a car to the greatest degree possible. He should have more experience and a lot more situational awareness. I this case the cyclist's mistake was that he was sorta-kinda to one side in the lane, leaving enough room so the driver thought he was supposed to squeeze past him. The cyclist ought to have clearly claimed the entire lane, acknowledging the presence of the car; that way when he moves to the side it's a clear to the driver it's time to pass.

Walt Disney isn't creating any new art since he died.

By the way, how much are you willing to pay the descendants of the inventors of the 200 or so glyphs of the extended Latin alphabet? You aren't an evil and greed consumer of texts who wants to avoid paying your due for every single usage of A, a, B, b, C, c... {, [, !, @... 7, 8 and 9, or are you?

The motorist in the video committed a crime -- several actually. But the cyclist committed an indiscretion by chasing down the motorist to give him a piece of his mind. That's not illegal, it's just a very bad idea.

Many years ago I heard an interviewer ask the great race driver Jackie Stewart what it takes to be a great driver. He said that a driver ought to be emotionless. I think this is very true for any kind of driving -- or cycling. Never prolong your reaction to anything that anyone does on the road beyond the split second it takes to deal with it. Let your attention move on to the next thing. Never direct it to a driver because of something he *did*. Keep focused on what's happening now.

Nobody watching TopGear should take anything they do as a serious attempt to evaluate anything.

Actually, I don't think it'll be as common as automobile road rage. The reason is that exercise is an excellent stress control mechanism. You just tend to take things in stride more readily when you're biking than when you're driving -- at least in my experience.

I'm sure all those happy Baidu Browser users agree. Their free choice of Chinese governmnet backed spyware should be respected.

Myself, I'll simply change the setting when installing Win10, or set Firefox back as the default afterwards.

This is certainly not the case.

Actually, yes, 8.x is better. It's noticeably faster than 7, and it allows one to use those few actually useful Metro apps (yes, there are a few ones). Fixing the annoyance of the lack of a Start menu is a matter of installing a small application, of which there are several choices available. In return, you get an OS that does everything else much better than 7 did.

I wouldn't go back to 7's slowness even if someone paid me to do it. Rather, I much prefer to pay $5 for Start8 (which I like more than Classic Shell) and get all of 8's benefits. Similarly, once I upgrade to Windows 10, if I don't like its new Start menu, I'll be upgrading to Start10 too. There's absolutely no benefit in sticking with 7 other that that one rare application you absolutely depend on that doesn't work in 8+. If you have one of those, well, keep 7. Otherwise, move up. There's no downside.

When you download Chrome, it has a check box (yes, in the download page), checked by default, by means of which you select whether you want your Chrome download to become your default browser when installed. Guess what? You didn't uncheck it when you downloaded Chrome. Whenever I download Chrome I uncheck it. And my Chrome never makes itself the default browser by merely updating itself. My default is and continues being Firefox.

Now, there's probably an option somewhere to disable the behavior you describe. If this bothers you, maybe googling it would be a good idea?