Well...I'm not sure how hidden it is. We know that they are Apple surveilance devices, and we know that Apple will roll over if the Feds ask them to.

That said, I'd be surprised if there weren't zero-day exploits that haven't yet been made public. OTOH, the same is true for EVERY smart phone.

We've also be informed that the NSA records 80% of all voice conversations. (True? False? No way to check.) This plausibly means that they have all cell phone towers bugged. So they probably rarely need to bother Apple for the information.

Siri clearly requires that the phone know where you are to properly understand you. (Also to communicate with you.)

Etc.

So whether they were intentionally designed for the purpose of being a surveilance device or not (I lean towards not) the capabilities are there. It has also been reported that the microphones and cameras can be remotely activated without signal to the user. Bug or feature? Or did it start out as a bug, but has not been documented?

Whatever, what Apple has been accused of seems blatantly true. But perhaps a result of feature creep than of malign intentions.

I thought they already had a couple, but perhaps those are from Tiawan.

You are embarassing. The GP was right about ONE of the messages being sent by this action. It's probably also intended to help a local company. And It's probably also intended to assist in upcoming negotiations with Apple. Etc.

Don't think that a government announcement sends only one message. Each one sends multiple messages.

Also, don't think that just because China has no problem spying on itself, that it wants anybody else to do so, no matter what it, itself, does abroad. The Chinese government is historically more insular and self-centered than even the US government, and with good reason. China holds most of the world's population, just as Africa holds most of the worlds genetic diversity (among humans). If Africa weren't so fragmented they would also be justified in thinking of the rest of the world as "insignificant tag-ends".

FWIW, you might consider that the current supercomputer speed record is held by a Chinese computer. They may have copied much of the technology from elsewhere, but they've certainly improved on it locally.

P.S.: Much of the information that you refer to as being stolen was actually transferred under contractual terms. I will grant that this isn't true of all of it, but if you look back a couple of centuries, you'll see that the North American colonies, and later the United States did a lot of technology stealing from Britain. As well as getting a lot of it via contractual transfer.

I simplified. The actual contractor subcontracted to a foreign subcontractor (with the appropriate requirements). Their actual failing was that they didn't test that the supplied parts met the specs. (This would have been difficult to do without disassembling the subcomponent.)

So, yes, I agree that it was criminal fraud. But I don't think it was ever prosecuted.

Personally I usually prefer geany or Kate. Vim is ok if you're already in a terminal environment, or if you're in a tight RAM situation, but that is a rare condition.

Note, though, if I'm working on Java, I prefer NetBeans, because I don't know Java all that well. So it's nice to have a tool that says "you need to include this particular library", or "that syntax is invalid". If I were to really learn Java, however, I'd probably prefer geany or Kate.

Bad example. The $10,000 hammer was because of the paperwork required to buy a single hammer for a high security project. Yes, it was extreme idiocy, but it WAS following the rules as specified, and the CIA wasn't involved.

If they'd been buying 100,000 hammers it would have made a lot more sense, and the increment in the cost wouldn't have been so absurd.

What's really sickening is that there was a project that carefully specified the particular alloys and heat treatment that the nuts and bolts were to have, paid for them, and the contractor supplied off-the-shelf nuts and bolts from a hardware store. This was determined after the cause of failure was found to be a split nut. The spec'd one wouldn't have failed. The cheap nut ended up costing a lot more than $10,000.

Well, since the current iteration is determining whether cancer is present, it's pretty clear that it's no simple process.

How intelligent would you be without your memory? Watson doesn't just link to Wikipedia (and various other web sites) it reasons about them.

I think your mistake lies in the word "initial". If I am correct, consciousness is a recursive process, and a break anywhere along the essential path keeps it from occuring. They've found one place where a break will keep it from occuring. I expect there are others. But you don't get consciousness until ALL the pieces are present, because consciousness requires recursion. So there isn't any "initial" piece. You can start at any of several different places, and if all the pieces are there, you get consciousness.

Please note that there are lots of pieces that aren't a part of the essential path. Late Alzheimers are conscious, even though they are separated from their memory. So is an infant. And it's separated also from intelligence. And from most sensory perception. (It's hard to be sure that consciousness doesn't require SOME sensory perception, but there's no evidence that it does. Helen Keller shows that certainly only minimal sensory perception is required.) Some trance states seem to show that it can be suppressed by certain paterns of thought...though I'm not sure, as it could be that they just reduce the level of memory formation until you can't remember being conscious. Are sleep walkers conscious? They don't remember what they were doing when they awaken, but this isn't really proof. Perhaps they are non-verbally conscious, and so the memories formed aren't indexed with verbal tags, but at the time they MAY have been conscious.

So it's quite difficult to determine from commonly available data what parts of the mind are necessary for the presence of consciousness. Even the definition is a bit fuzzy. If you don't remember being conscious, does this mean that you weren't? I don't think so, but many common uses of the term seem to imply this. E.g., the common proof of unconsciousness under general anesthesia is that you don't remember being conscious. But anesthesia commonly interferes with memory formation even while you are recovering from it to the point of asking questions. And I think that if you are asking "How did the operation go?", then you need to be counted as conscious, even if you can't remember either asking the question or what the answer was.

IIRC, there was an article today about the location of the origin of consciousness having been located. It's probably an overstatement, as I expect that there are many essential pieces, but it's not utter mystery any more. It's a problem that's being worked on. And there are at least some partial answers.

You are making assumptions about the way the process scales. They *may* be true, but we don't know that.

The thing is, the Google Car driver isn't a general intelligence. It's quite specialized. Watson, OTOH, is a much more general intelltigence. But it still doesn't have a hierarchy of goals that allows it to override what it is told to do. I'm not sure, however, that that counts as intelligence rather than something else.

FWIW, AI programs come up with ideas all the time. But they are designed to prune them to match their goal structure. (So are you, but your goal structure is much more self-centered.) Coming up with idea is not a problem, coming up with appropriate ideas, and knowing that they are appropriate is still a problem. Watson appears to be addressing that problem. Currently an incarnation of it has learned to diagnose cancer better than most doctors. An earlier incarnation learned to play Jephrody better than most humans. (Lots better.) And the hardware requirements have been shrinking. (I'm not sure how much is hardware improvement and how much is program improvement.)

I expect that a near-term target of Watson will be middle-management...though I also expect that it will be presented as offering advice rather than as replacing them. Basically what it will do is allow one manager to directly manage an increasing number of workers efficiently. This will prepare it for a career as an advisor to politicians.

Do note, however, that this isn't what he was talking about. He was talking about Cyborgs. These are held back by two things: The lack of a long term neural connector that won't destroy the neurons that they connect to, and the fact that installing significant Cyborg modifications requires surgery. I expect the first problem to be solved within the decade, but as for the second...

Well, my estimate for the first "human equivalent" AI is still 2030. But I'm using a very rough estimate for "human equivalent", and I'm only talking about the first iteration.

He's talking about cyborgs. That depends less on AI than on a few crucial inventions that haven't quite happened yet, and are difficult to predict, though lots of effort is being put into them. One is a long-term neural connector that keeps working and doesn't kill the neurons that it connects to. Until that's done, we can't make cyborgs that use neural interfaces. There's also a bit more work needed on decoding the "machine language" of the brain. Parts of it are fairly well understood, for loose meanings of fairly well understood. Without the long term neural connections we can't try it out in people. And other parts are still pretty much terra incognita. But a built in calculator wouldn't require any really advanced understanding over what we already have. Recording memories, however, is a lot more difficult, much less replaying them. Still, not everything needs to be solved at the same time, and something that would automatically prompt you in response to key phrases isn't much of an advance over what we already have on cell phones. What's really missing is the long term neural connection. And you want it to be good enough to play an immersive game on, so it will sell, but it's got to be useful enough to justify the operation...unless someone comes up with a way to just avoid the operation, but that's pretty much guaranteed to be low fidelity and slow bit rate.

OTOH, to some extent we're already on the path. Consider cell phones, and the way people can no longer find their way around without using GPS. That's a totally external kind of proto-cyborg behavior. We think we understand vision and sound well enough that if we had a good neural connector, a built-in cell phone wouldn't be unreasonable within a decade...outside of FDA approval.

Other reports also say, however, that Qualcomm had released that code under the GPL.

It's going to need more than a post on Slashdot to convince me that they were acting legally, much less honorably. (Given other reports, I think it's probably impossible to plausibly argue that they were acting honorably.)

That may or may not be technically correct, but I don't know of a single case involving DMCA takedowns where that actually happened.