The population of Slashdot hasn't aged that much. They're going to think Top Gun, where they used, you know, missiles.

Really? I'm curious how your bell curves work. Please share.

Passenger jets didn't have HUDs for a long time (maybe most still don't). Fighter jets got them pretty much as soon as the technology was practical. HUDs were designed for providing information in circumstances where the pilot is very much in control, and under a heavy workload.

I remember reading about HUDs in the nineties though, and the design was critical. What you presented, and how, made the difference between a valuable tool and a worse than useless distraction.

I teach sailing. I've noticed that almost all students are nearly incapable of switching their attention among multiple things. They fixate on what they're doing with the throttle when backing out of a slip and forget about watching where the boat is. Or they remember to watch off the stern and forget about the bow. Actually sailing, they watch their heading and forget about the wind, or vice versa. If they get distracted, it all goes to hell. But, with practice and a teacher reminding them, they learn. Sometimes we chat so they get practice having a conversation (and more importantly, ignoring a conversation when necessary) and sailing at the same time.

I remember my driving instructor doing the same thing. Do you know what's behind you? When was the last time you checked your mirrors? How fast are you going? What did that sign say?

You can learn to deal with distractions, but you have to specifically practice, and it doesn't hurt to have a teacher.

Smoking (and regular cell phone use) also tie up a hand. If you've ever driven under less than ideal circumstances you know how helpful a second hand on the wheel is. Most people hesitate to drop their burning plant matter or expensive cell phone in an emergency.

When I first moved to Quebec I was shocked at the number of drivers who would just blow through a stoplight. I mentioned it one day, and someone said "it's not surprising, most of them can't tell what colour the light is anyway."

That's why you get a free phone when you sign a two year contract.

That particular plane is designed the way it is not because they thought it looked cool, but because the realities of solar power require it. All the methods of harvesting solar power are heavy and bulky per kilowatt compared to something like aviation fuel. That means you need to have a plane that is slow (for energy efficient flight), very large (lots of area for solar panels and big wings for slow flight), and has a small cargo capacity for its size.

Even with improvements in solar panel design, the amount of sunlight that reaches the plane is limited.

The best design for a solar plane with the capabilities of current planes might well be a regular solar farm powering a conventional fuel synthesis plant.

Implement it as a k-d tree and see if any of the examiners can follow your solution.

"Working programmers" don't need degrees in computer science. They need diplomas or certificates in programming.

Even so, it's not a bad idea to know something about the tools you're using. Perhaps knowing something about how those vertices are stored might help write efficient code for manipulating them?

The summary is summarizing a tweet. If releasing results like that in a tweet wasn't dumb enough, summarizing it is.

Yes, it does. Among many other things. Thanks for taking the time to mention it.

by "some ideas" you mean "some theory".

Yes, of course. What else did you think I meant? It's an idea. It's not a certainty. I'm not sure what your point is. Care to elaborate?

When I say "no idea" I mean literally we have no demonstrable understanding of any one single cognitive function of the brain. Any brain

You might have meant that, but writing "no idea" didn't (and still doesn't) actually say that. The statement was made that we have no ideas. We do, in fact, have ideas.That was the assertion, and that is my answer.

Human brains? We've got nothing.

Human brains are not what are at issue here, but even so, that statement is incorrect. We have made progress at the small scale (see Numenta's work) and there are multiple ideas out there that presently have significant merit. Personally, as someone working in the field and conversant with a lot of what's going on in the technical sense, I have a fairly high level of confidence that we're much closer than the popular narrative would have us believe. Am I right? We will see. :)

Understanding how humans store and recognize images primarily is not a barrier to AI. It's not memory or image recognition that's the hill to climb; The fundamental algorithmic/methodological challenges are thinking, along with conceptual storage, development and manipulation (these things incorporate memory use, but aren't a storage problem per se.) Hardware needs to be able to handle amounts of ram and long term, high speed storage that can serve as a practical basis for the rest as well. Right now, we're getting close, but it'll be a few more years yet before anything really smart can be instantiated. That's even if we were to figure out precisely how to do it right now.

It is possible -- though I consider it doubtful -- that we would implement human style vision neurology in hardware for an AI, but frankly our abilities are so poor compared to what can be accomplished I really don't see why we'd cripple an AI that way. It'd be abusive. "We could have made your visual recall incredibly acute, but... instead you're like us, and really don't have much more than a general idea what was in a scene after you have seen it." [AI nukes silicon valley] (Mods: that's humor. HUMOR.]

Also, check out Numenta's work.

Of course, understanding how humans store and recognize images is (very) important to our understanding of human physiology and disease, and it's wonderful that we're working on it.

Humans have no idea how the human, or any other brain, work

We do have some ideas. This, for instance