Involuntary actions....triggered by MUSIC are the most relevant questions, surely you hear music when your not playing your violin? Do you NATURALLY react? BTW: my score was 58 - I can't play any instrument and I don't spend a lot of money on music.

AI suffers from continuously moving goal posts because nobody has a good definition of intelligence.. A computer (Watson) has already convincingly beat humans at general knowledge. Watson is an amazing technological feat however the general public does not recognise Watson as intelligent in any meaningful way, they have the same reaction as my wife when they see Watson playing Jeopardy - "It's looking up the answers on the internet, so what?". They don't even understand the problem Watson has solved, when the general public talk about AI they are thinking about robots that appear in modern movies and are basically indistinguishable from humans (eg:Terminator), something that is not only intelligent but also has also (nearly) mastered human social intelligence.

In a way they are right, emotions drive what the logical mind thinks about and AI cannot (yet) communicate, let alone reproduce, human emotions, I have long thought that this is partly because AI researchers in general concentrate on modelling the brain and more or less ignore the huge network of intricate sensors and actuators attached to it.

No - the current one tries to be "different". Mac OS is far more traditionally oriented than Gnome 3.

They didn't just shoot themselves in the foot with that release - they did so with almost the entire userbase screaming "Don't do it!!!!!".

Oh well. XFCE makes for a perfectly fine replacement.

Why not?

You see China trying to keep its rare earth metals for themselves, why would we not want to keep more of OUR own resources for ourselves?

So shortened Memes trump their long versions and they get reused in new places and new ways?

In other words, FB users are lazy and attention whores. You really needed a study to find that out? I'd have a few studies I could do, where's my grant money!

Taxes should NOT be used to try to regulate behavior, that is not the function of govt.

Taxes should only be used to fund the constitutionally mandated functions of govt (especially the Feds).

Government is NOT supposed to be there to try to define or guide my behaviors.

Your link doesn't support that. It merely talks about life living near those vents without any energy from the sun. Indeed, the presence of shrimp, crabs, etc indicate that the life indeed did start elsewhere and then slowly migrate down into those areas and adapt to them.

While the life down there doesn't need the sun to survive, without the sun the life might have never made it down there.

The easiest way to reduce demand is to just tax fuel - don't add $1 in taxes, add $5 in taxes phased in over 10 years.

I'm not looking to stop driving my car?!?!?

I'm wanting gas to be back to about $2/gal...I don't drive SUV's either, I love sports cars.

But I'm not interested in anything (taxes like you mention) to make my gas more $$$. Most people are not either...

I was posting to say originally that we could increase the regulations in the US, to keep our fuels harvested here from going onto the open market, and keep more for us and keep our prices low.

I'm not against research for electric or other types of vehicles, but they aren't gonna be viable any time soon, so I want to enjoy my combustion engine for the rest of my lifetime at previously low, affordable levels.

In my work life, however, I'm finding MORE and more, all meetings are taking place online...with teleconference and software such as Live Meeting or the like with someone or multiple people taking turns sharing their desktops.

You really almost have to have PP type slides there as that a chalk board really isn't a viable option there...

Both my dad and my sister are running Xubuntu without issues. My sister is ok with basic tasks on a computer but far from a technophile and my dad knows almost nothing. His only use is really for fantasy football websites.

Neither really plays games - both just do web browsing and not much else. Honestly as long as there's a Chrome icon on the desktop many people wouldn't know they were using anything different.

Keeping that on their systems keeps me from the headache of supporting Windows and all the associated spyware.

BRB got some photography to do. Think that's funny? You are disgusting. Hope the woman follows you, shoots you in the chest, castrates you, videos you as you bleed out and die, with her laughter in the background. Then puts that up online. THAT would be funny.

Wow...just wow.

I mean, some's privacy got a little compromised...a picture of someone's panties, and you balance that out with violence? You've posted this several times on this thread, and wow, you reactions are SO very out of line with the

Not even in the same ball park.

Good points. True 3 digiter. I can almost hear a boss adding, "can you make it a slide and email it to me? I am meeting budget committee next week".

Maybe we should work on fixing society so that people on welfare don't have two choices, work for less than welfare, or don't work and have more money?

How about...unless you are provably disabled, or elderly, you have a ticking time limit on welfare, and you need to get your ass a job before it runs out and you starve.

Light a fire under anybody's ass to get out and work if they are able bodied.

There was a time in biology when the movable type made it really cheap to produce books with lots and lots of words. But pictures were very expensive. Botonists everywhere needed an unambiguous way to describe the plants to do the taxonomy and create the cladograms and genus-species classifications. So they came up with tons and tons of terms, like striated, ligule, periole, orbiculer, pinnatisect, ... ( You can see the whole glorious set here ).

Then with the advent of lithography to replace the woodcuts, the price of including diagrams in books started falling. So one would think the botonists everywhere shouted hallelujah and thanked the providence. No. There was serious opposition to these line drawings of simple plant forms to describe the species. They railed that the pictures were a distraction. Pictures are ambiguous(!), Images do not have the clarity of description afforded by the precisely defined technical terms. Pictures are for kids. Not for serious scientists. It took quite a bit of time for images to become common in botony books.

Now a days other than providing a rich source of words to stump the adults and torture small children preparing to be the spelling bee and to weed out the slackers in botony 101, there does not seem to be much use for these terms. (Well, I am not a botonist, and I am sure an army of them are going to rise up and roast me here.)

Power point was a novelty, and suddenly every one can produce slides and make presentations. Most people suck at content creation, and no amount of transition animation and font choices is going to make them better. Good communicators will excel in using power points. Bad ones will suck even with the chalkboard.

I agree most power point presentations are a waste of time. Most of them have very little content. Most of them suck big time. Where I disagree is, blaming the tool for the sins of the tool wielder.

We need to crack down on this!!!

Let's keep all this oil here and try to bring the freakin' price of gas back down to what it was pre-Katrina at least.

But I'm guessing the tree huggers behind the Obama admin, won't want to lower prices back. I think they want to keep them high to try to kill off cars in the US.