The Turing Test was not passed, and the only people who claim it was are ignorant reporters looking for an easy story with a catchy headline and tech morons who also believe Kevin Warwick is a cyborg.

The test was rigged in every way possible:

- judges told they were talking to a child
- that doesn't speak English as a primary language
- which was programmed with the express intent of misdirection
- and only "fooled" 30% of the judges.

And, even after all that, Cleverbot did a much better job back in 2011 with a 60% success rate.

This Eugene test outcome was a complete farce -- something to remind everyone that Warwick still exists and to separate the ignorant and sensational tech news trash rags from the more legitimate sources of information.

Web workers, local storage, JIT is more than good enough, and there are typed arrays for anything that matters.

Its good enough to make 3d game engines, its good enough for a mail client.

No, not particularly. I think that people will learn to exploit the weaknesses, though - and that is why I feel that constant change is necessary.

I'm sorry, I just read through that paper, and nowhere in it does it say that a decline in Antarctic ice is a forecast of AGW. That's one of the worst examples of "proof by ghost reference" I've ever seen. Not to mention that the paper is mainly focused on the Antarctic Peninsula, the one place that actually gets melt on more than super-rare occasions and juts into a different climate zone.

I tend to start twitching a little whenever our neighborhood geek starts talking long and loudly about his "plausible deniability."

The denial is there, in spades. I'll give him that.

The plausible, not so much.

I agree with you on unlearning java before doing an anything meaningful in javascript...

However, there's only one thing worse than C#/Java dev trying to apply what they know to Javascript, and its a C++ dev trying to do the same. I've had to deal with a few, and its completely deplorable. Overengineering and premature optimization (that actually slow things down in one place), underengineering and total lack of optimization where its easy and count.... try to do classes the same way without trying to understand the various inheritance patterns javascript can use... trying to reinvent the wheel everywhere...

Its just painful.

You don't need the IDE though. Sure, its nicer if you do, but when doing javascript its not rare to use Sublime or some other similar ones, if you're not using the holy war editors.

Sublime has packages for Dart, so well...

Go right ahead and point me to where a decline in Antarctic ice was a forecast of AGW.

You do know that - below freezing - there's an inverse correlation between temperature and snowfall, don't you? And I really hope you know that it's very rare that temperatures rise above freezing in the vast majority of Antarctica, whether you add a couple degrees to the temperature or not, right? Or did you not know / ever consider that?

Just because you didn't realize something that should have been really bloody obvious to you doesn't mean it was a scientific prediction by your straw-man scientists.

AEI, for one. $10k for any paper that attacks the IPCC reports. There's other public offers out there, too. And I'm sure they're outnumbered 100 times over by not-so-public ones.

Love how you just can take a single message, completely out of context, quote a bunch of text which is perfectly true, and claim it says anything about your use case.

It was a release announcement, it wasn't out of context, and it was entirely relevant.

Your bullshit is old, has been debunked multiple times over

How could you debunk the point I'm making when all I have to do is link to their own release announcement and point out what it says directly disagrees with you?

nothing but hot air from the camp of the other, abandoned desktop

Nope, I was using KDE from the 1.0 betas all the way to the 4.0 betas. I only switched to GNOME after the KDE 4 debacle, and I found that even worse and ended up moving off Linux altogether.

Didn't New York flood last year? http://www.nytimes.com/newsgra...

"Complex" is not for laymen. There is only so much that you can do with any "appliance". Beyond that, you actually have to know what you are doing. This "problem" has nothing to do with programming.

This. Thinking about the web apps I've written, most of them required fairly deep knowledge in the area of the app -- auroras, photography, specialized group management, history, genealogy, measuring instruments, Chinese, retail procedure -- all areas an interested party could potentially bring to the table.

But the tools to instantiate, manipulate and present those ideas? Those simply don't exist in "amateur" form -- I had to create them. And in doing so, I used knowledge starting with HTML and CGI and CSS, but which extended well into Python, (replaced Perl), C, SQL, a fair bit about the underlying structure of the host OS(s), knowledge of how to structure an application in the first place, and to wrap it all together, a fairly deep knowledge of what's efficient and what isn't.

Now I will admit that I am particularly resistant to Other People's Code, partially because I am unwilling to be subject to other people's bug fix schedules (or lack thereof), and permissions (or lack thereof) and functinonal choices (or lack thereof); and partially because the more stuff I write, the more handy tools of my own I have to bring to bear on the next problem that depend on no one but myself and the host language(s) -- which frankly is quite enough dependency for me anyway. Plus it's been writing all this stuff that's made me a decent programmer in the first place. So even if there *were* a library out there to generate general purpose readout dials, I wouldn't have used it; the result would have been the same. All my own code. Not the least bit reluctant to reinvent the wheel.

Still, the idea of making all that stuff both available and trivially usable (and that's what we're talking about here, because a non-programmer will have to hit this at a trivial level) seems to me to have been tried multiple times in multiple venues, and to have failed every time. Personally, I think it's because as programmers, we underestimate the complexity because we've internalized so much; we can't see the actual level of difficulty very well, because it starts out relative to our own skills. This has resulted in quite a few attempts to "make it easy", and none of them have hit any serious stride. The best any of these can boast is a small following making very limited applications, if you really want to stretch what "application" means.

I don't think the idea is ready to fly. The only context I can visualize this actually working is where you have some *very* smart software that can take an abstract description and write code *for* you. That software would have to be (a) very damned smart and (b) conversant with an enormous range of general human knowledge. Right now, as far as I know, that's the precise description of a competent applications programmer. And nothing else.

Ideas don't arrive in convenient order. Interruptions occur. The world is not a smooth surface, it's full of bumps, pits and detours. Sometimes (as here) there are even reasons to top post. Such as, so someone will actually see it. So get over it. Notably, the AC comment you're objecting to contributed more to the conversation than yours (or mine) does. There's a lesson there.

No, it does not. It is not a view, it is fact. When the Earth's atmosphere has a higher partial pressure of CO2 it retains more heat. That is the essential point under consideration, and the exact value of the partial pressure is irrelevant and was not mentioned. We're not talking about the political issues, or the history of the planet, only cold hard measurable facts about [a] the relationship between irradiance and re-radiation, and [b] the absorption spectrum of CO2.

However, on the separate subject you have noted, while we are indeed two orders of magnitude away from the highest CO2 levels, and the highest rates of emission, the previous atmospheric changes happened over the course of millions of years and are usually associated with mass extinctions. We've already been doing pretty well on the mass extinction front; this may not be a good time to rock the boat.

If, as I have been told, conservatives are against change, can we maybe try to not pollute every square inch of the planet? I'm from rural Alaska, and it's getting a bit melty up there. It's not a place that I really enjoy living, but the glaciers were fairly pretty, and have you seen what permafrost does when it melts? Clearly this isn't a problem where you live, but please let's not pretend that it isn't an issue elsewhere. Pollution of any sort is ugly.

Corr: That should read "doesn't lose much IR transmission as a consequence of neutron bombardment like happens in higher frequency bands" - accidentally lost that middle part. Fused silica and fused quartz (especially the latter, but also the former) blacken under neutron exposure, losing transparency; it's even done intentionally to make jewelry. But the papers I ran into when researching the topic showed that this effect isn't very pronounced in the IR band.