I recall some talk during the lead-up to the Afghan war about the potential for a draft. It wasn't clear at the time just how big that particular conflict would get. It wasn't impossible to imagine it turning into World War-sized scenario against a lot of Islamic countries. The resulting conflicts were small compared to that, but we had to scale up the military substantially and if they'd grown any bigger we'd have had to have a draft.

Now that women are allowed access to combat positions, it's going to be very hard to exempt them from a draft should one be necessary. I can't conceive of the legislature passing any such bill right now (I can't imagine this Congress passing any non-trivial bill, and I don't see that changing), but a wise legislature would want to do that ahead of need rather than after the fact. If women are going to be drafted, you'd need to start registering them now.

I sincerely hope that it's never necessary. And if a war of that scope does happen again, we'll probably be a lot less selective with our weapons of war. (Afghanistan and Iraq were fought house-to-house, because as bizarre as it sounds that was a way of reducing civilian casualties, at least compared to just flattening entire cities as was done in World War II.) So we may well not have a draft even in a bigger conflict. But I think that, while it's politically impossible, a really good pragmatic case could be made for starting to require Selective Service registration for everybody right now.

To me, this seems to cut to the heart of it. AI is commonly conceived of as trying to mimic human intelligence, while there are cognitive tasks that cats and even mice can do that prove too hard for computers. A cat can recognize a mouse with essentially 100% accuracy, from any angle, in an eyeblink. No computer would come close, and the program that came closest wouldn't be a general-purpose object matcher.

Vertebrate brains are pretty remarkable. Human brains are an amazing extra step on top of that. We don't know exactly what that is in part because we don't really understand the simpler vertebrate brains. IMHO, we won't have a good mimic for sapience until we've gotten it to first do sentience. We don't have to rigorously follow the evolutionary order, but it seems to me that conversation-based tests are rewarding the wrong features, and even if they get better by that definition they're not getting us any closer to the actual goals of understanding (and reproducing) intelligence.

I did read the fine article, but I'm afraid I just don't get what's going on here. Are the players contributing something in some kind of crowd-sourced "Yes, that blob is a star, and its center is here" kind of way? Or are they using players' computers as a distributed processing system?

It's nifty either way, but I don't the New Yorker's audience has the same kinds of questions about the technology that I do. Can anybody in this audience (more like me) help me out?

"Rocks for Jocks"

90's? Nope. Their software has always been utter crap.

They promised.

You might as well call DNS itself shady. 98% of malware networks use it to hide their tracks an keep their networks up.

They are always attacking the problem from the wrong end. They must. Once upon a time they did the right thing and tried to migrate to trusted repositories, but then they lost their nerve at the last moment and saved legacy app compatibility. Not that we trust them to fairly run the trusted repository either. They have not solved the problem because to them it is an intractable problem. The only effective solutions lead to Microsoft's demise.

Well, that is where the instruments are.

IFR isn't an automated landing. The pilot is still flying. They're just using various beacons and displays instead of their eyes to see where they are.

So wait. You're saying China's most secure spy bureau does not subcontract their sysadmin duties to Dell, to be filled by an unvetted and frankly suspicious temporary worker? Not Iran, nor Syria either?

God made humans rational beings.

Telling people who collect stamps they're idiots could be a hobby.

At this point all a new nuclear plant creates is a jobs program for lawyers. It would be more effective power generation to hook the lawyers to a windmill directly.

The main purpose of government is to deplete the surplus productivity.

Our future does not hold hovercraft. It holds hoveround.