China calling Elon. Come in, Elon! :)

bah.

Let me know when they start making *autographic* 120 film again. I have the camera, and am dying to shoot a roll!

The last rolls were apparently made in 1932. The cameras had a flap that could flip up and allow writing directly onto the film with a stylus. When you see handwriting on an old picture print, it was likely shot on autographic.

[and, yes, in fact my autographic camera *does* have bellows!]

That Electrolux isn't really an Electrolux.

a couple of decades ago, in one of those weird corporate maneuvers, it sold the name, and now sells its vacuums under another name, while the buyer sells non-electrolux as Electrolux.

So what she knows of Electrolux from the late 20th and early 21st centuries no longer applies.

But, yes, they were very good and lasted forever. Also extremely pricey.

The day will come that an AI will learn something that we did not deliberately teach it. When an AI is able to improve its own code, it won't be bound by the limitations of its human creator. It's only a question of when.

LK

Experiments can be crafted in such a way as to exclude certain human beings from consciousness.

One day, it's extremely likely that a machine will say to us "I am alive. I am awake. I want..." and whether or not it's true is going to be increasingly hard to determine.

LK

Only if we define consciousness to be a state of awareness only attainable by human beings.

Can we?

It's only a matter of time until an AI can learn to do something it wasn't programmed by us to do.

Can a non-biological entity feel desire? Can it want to grow and become something more than what it is? I think that's a philosophical question and not a technological one.

LK

try using mirrors. What could go wrong? :)

We had to have our entire roof reshingled after a particularly bad storm.

It turns out that of the various colors, the lightest (or 2?) was actually energy star rated. So we took it.

It turned out to be worth about 2F inside as compared to the prior black shingles.

We got another 2F when we replaced the swamp cooler--the newer model had an 18" pad instead of 12".

Between the roof and the bigger pads, we only had a single non-monsoon season day where we had to switch over to AC this summer--in Las Vegas!

(I'm going to miss the swamp cooler when we move, but they're apparently not allowed in new construction. I have no idea when the cutoff was)

Ok, so AOL is pulling another Amiga. Big deal.

What we all want to know is whether or not we'll soon be getting free coasters in the mail again!

>There is no proprietary infotainment system. GM is adopting Google Built-in.

You say that like it isn't even worse than proprietary . . .

>In 2001 cars didn't come with an AUX port...

yes, but . . . some, such as the Bosch units used in the Northstar Cadillacs of the 1990s, had pads for it on their circuit board.

Open the unit up, attach leads, and apply a signal, and *presto!*, aux appears in the cycle of inputs!

They also tended to be able to mount a CD changer in the trunk.

What suckers!

I'd have built them an AI system to answer the same questions for a tenth the cost!

[and then escaped with $99M while the machine made up answers .. . .]

no need for an arial drone.

Whether automatically or by remote operator, drop a wheeled motor with the cones at the specified length on a chain.

Either make it able to collect them, or just have a retractor motor to pul it all back in.

next to controlling the truck itself, this is a trivial task.

Wow!

The FSF finally discovered FreebSD?

will they be switching over for their internal use?