Generally, they'll try really hard not to actually answer that question. You can also just ask "Am I free to go?" and if the answer is "no", or anything but "yes", you should assume that you are under suspicion and are being detained. That's a big clue that it's time to Shut Up.

Thanks for the deeper reading. I looked through it quickly, just for the numbers, did my calculation and said "In other words, not much", and left it there. But clearly the article was far more deceptive than I had realized.

Some people have the idea that discoveries can be patented because of the U.S. Constitution. Article I, Section 8, clause 8 reads:

"To promote the Progress of Science and useful Arts, by securing for limited Times to Authors and Inventors the exclusive Right to their respective Writings and Discoveries;"

  So inventors can be given exclusive rights for a limited time for their discoveries. Or at least, that is what English grammar says.

You forgot to mention another component: The internship is a 3 month-long job interview. If they do well, and enjoy their time with you, not only are they more likely to come back, you'll know that you want them to come back. If they don't do so well, you know you don't want to hire them full time, which is good because getting rid of mediocre people is damned hard.

I should mention that I thought it rather... sneaky... of the journalist to present annual values for all of the other elements, but a multi-year aggregate number for the industry donations. It seems like he was trying to make the industry donations look far larger than they are.

Notice that the $38.9M figure is a total for the years 2005-2011. I assumed those donations were spread evenly over the six years, giving an annual figure of $6.48M. 6.48/228 = 2.8%, which I rounded to 3%.

The gun industry provides approximately 3% of the NRA's annual revenues.

http://www.theatlantic.com/business/archive/2012/12/whom-does-the-nra-really-speak-for/266373/

Er, I meant edges and vertices, of course.

Do you actually need general stimulus input? I don't think so. I think what you describe can also be achieved by providing the system with a general knowledge map so that it understands all of those things and the relationships between them. Even better if you can then personalize the knowledge map, strengthening and weakening nodes and vertices based on what the human knows and doesn't know.

I concede. That would be better than voice :)

Only if you have to talk to it like you're giving input to a computer.

Imagine instead that you're talking to a person, and not just any person, but a person who has the world's knowledge at his fingertips and knows you as well as a highly competent personal assistant. Rather than asking for your team scores, you'd say "Giants?" and you'd get back the most interesting points (to you) about the game. Follow that with "anything else?" and you'd get a rundown on the rest of the sports, focusing on the parts that most interest you.

Voice input with contextual awareness, understanding of the world, and personalization will blow away anything else in terms of input speed, accuracy and effectiveness.

You're conflating two issues here. One is input, the other is output. Nothing is likely to ever be as efficient as voice for input. I'm a pretty fast typist and not a particularly fast speaker, but I talk a lot faster than I type, even on a nice full-sized keyboard. Output is a different issue. Text and imagery has much higher information bandwidth than voice. However, you can't always look at a screen, so being able to use voice output at those times is still very valuable.

Even now, I find my phone's voice input features to be extremely useful. Earlier today I was a little late picking up my son from karate. While driving, I told my phone "call origin martial arts". Now, I don't have an address book entry for Origin, in fact I've never called them before. But my phone googled it, determining that the intended "Origin Martial Arts" is the one near my home, and dialed the phone number for me. That's just the most recent example, but I use voice queries with my phone a half-dozen times per day because it's faster and easier than typing or because I'm doing something that doesn't permit me to manipulate the phone a lot.

Voice is the ultimate input mechanism for most humans. Right now it's pretty good (especially if you use Google's version of it; Siri is kind of lame), and it's going to get much, much better.

Nah... we're mining it for ideas.

My team has some interns showing up in the next couple of weeks and we're already thinking about putting them in teams and giving them ridiculous challenges to compete, then having them do a stack ranking of each other and whoever comes out on the bottom will get sent home.

Well, either that or we'll give them some code to write. Probably that.

No movement to outsource the management of the machines to outside cloud services? That may or may not happen where you are, but there's a lot of it going on, and it invalidates much of your list.

You can get conductive gloves that work with touchscreens. Very handy for Ingress portal hacking in the winter.

FYI, you mean "copyrighted".