The use of the word "predict" is for ease-of-understanding for the business market and those not familiar with machine learning. Many of the comments here are getting lost in that word. The algorithms behind the API are most likely the same basic ones that have been around for a long time: naive bayes, svm, knn, etc. The actual novelty of this service is that it puts these methods in easy reach for people who otherwise wouldn't know where to start looking, or wouldn't know how to use one of the many available libraries already around, or much less implement something themselves.

See also: http://mlcomp.org/ for a service that allows you to try out different classification algorithms on your own data sets.

That query (albert einstein's birthday) worked when I tried it just now:

Albert Einstein — Date of Birth: March 14, 1879
According to http://www.brainyquote.com/quotes/quotes/a/alberteins148864.html

yep, that's why I said "at the moment". buzz feels pretty isolated right now, we'll see how/if it opens up.

Not 'closed' in that sense. Closed as in finite (in comparison to the other services where anyone with any email address can use). To be able to use buzz, one needs to sign up for another email account, something not many people will do easily.

At the moment, there are a number of things holding buzz back from widespread usage:

* buzz has a userbase /ceiling/: the number of gmail users; the userbase may be large but it's closed and entry is a large hurdle for many
* complicating the adoption is the number of those gmail users whose friends also use gmail and would be likely to use buzz, lowering the actual ceiling further
* when people see that not many of their friends are using it, but are/have been using other services, that makes buzz adoption difficult

there are advantages to buzz of course (mobile/geo-loc/post length/etc), but the question remains whether those advantages will eventually outweigh the challenges to more widespread adoption.

Apply this patch to see if the machine is infected by some seemingly-unrelated rootkit.

Those comparative shots of the Carina Nebula are showing the difference between "visible light" and infrared, not colors. The visible light image has false color.

Exactly, it's really a combination of engineering and fortune. If not for the fortunate wind storms these rovers would have frozen long ago, and if not for the good engineering, even with clean solar panels, the rovers would have broken/quit before now.

modded Troll?? I love my C64! That was a comment of endearment!

I know I was always free to get a sandwich waiting for a program to load I had foolishly saved at the end of the cassette tape.