There are two main theories about Alzheimers. The dominant theory is that it's caused by beta-amyloid protein which forms plaques. The minority theory is that it's caused by tau protein which forms long filaments called "tangles"; these tangles gum up the neuron and eventually cause it to burst. http://taurx.com/tau-tangles-i...

My father during his PhD discovered that a common dye, methylene blue, causes those filaments to untangle. He formed a small pharmaceutical company to pursue this idea. They tweaked the chemical a bit, including with heavy duty computer number-crunching to simulate its 3d structure and mode of interaction. They had great results in Phase 2 trials, and their Phase 3 trials are currently underway. Fingers crossed.

That said, Alzheimers disease is a graveyard of pharmaceutical funding. $18+ billion dollars put into drug trials so far (not just "foundational research"), primarily on the beta-amyloid hypothesis, but with nothing yet to show.

I wouldn't call it a metaphor, nor would I say that Asimov's point is that you can't codify morality. His point is more subtle: a code of morality, even a simple one, doesn't necessarily imply what we think it does. It's a very rabbinical kind of point.

This would actually be true if all companies currently could evade taxes. Since most UK based companies simply cannot do that, all the anti tax evasion legislative will do is level the playing field.

A bit harder to transport to a client's office, though.

These machines are obviously aimed at a particular niche that full desktop workstations can't cater for.

I nominated "dingleberry".

Takes one to know one, huh?

SUNDAYsundaySUNDAYit'sDUSTSLINGINROVERCRASHINACTION

You'll pay for the whole spacesuit but you'll only use the pants! BE THERE (by telepresence) OR BE SQUARE. etc.

If that's the price of actually developing space industry to the point of having a Wal-Mart of outer space, so be it. Then I can buy me a space ship and fly... past the sky.

I disagree strongly with this. Let's think about the case of industrial or governmental espionage. 50 years ago, saboteurs had to physically remove documents (or whatever they wanted) from the target. There were quite genius inventions--small (for the time) cameras, hidden canisters of films, briefcases with hidden compartments, etc., but ultimately there was a very physical component. Today it's possible to remotely infiltrate an organization and exfiltrate more "documents" than could previously have been removed in a lifetime, all with perfect fidelity.

A slightly more immediate example might be identity theft or credit card theft (as in your Target example). 30 years ago, did any company of any size have to worry about losing 50 million credit card numbers (or any similarly sized data set, for that matter!) in a data breach? 20 years ago? This is a new concern.

The article says you have have Win 7 Pro with this one instead of Win 8.1 if you want.

The article does mention that a 91Wh alternative battery is available when you configure the device, which presumably makes battery life (somewhat) more competitive.

Sometimes I really wonder if we as a society have really screwed up by largely adopting sans serif fonts like Arial. This kind of confusion would not happen if we only used fonts with very strong serifs.

Spin, sure, but it's a waay bigger minority than I expected. I'd even say even shockingly large.

The genius of Asimov's three laws is that he started by laying out rules that on the face of it rule out the old "robot run amok" stories. He then would write, if not a "run amok" story, one where the implications aren't what you'd expect. I think the implications of an AI that surpasses natural human intelligence are beyond human intelligence to predict, even if we attempt to build strict rules into that AI.

One thing I do believe is that such a development would fundamentally alter human society, provided that the AI was comparably versatile to human intelligence. It's no big deal if an AI is smarter than people at chess; if it's smarter than people at everyday things, plus engineering, business, art and literature, then people will have to reassess the value of human life. Or maybe ask the AI what would give their lives meaning.

These things are going to need some sortof centralized control, anyways. That's what stuff like nest, etc are for. That one thing should have the webserver, etc. None of the other devices should, at all.The other devices should be very simple and dumb send data/receive data. I don't need my thermostat to have 32MB of RAM to receive a signal that says "As soon as you register 72F or lower from all sensors, stop the AC and not kick back on until 76F is shown on all sensors."

Indeed. With all of the stuff that we have no clue about there in our solar system, why spend so much time on the second-best studied body on the solar system? I'd take a single Titan-exploring tiltrotor VTOL craft over a hundred new lunar rovers.