My company's president complains about the commute and company pays for Limo and chauffeur, so he can be more productive. Elon pays to get the highway fixed up with his own money. I need to get my resume polished up, so I can find a position at SpaceX or Tesla.

The real Hypocrisy is the government and legal system of China. As someone who's lived in China. they have ZERO respect for IP laws. Just downstairs from my apt I had a better selection of western and Chinese pirated DVDs than blockbuster, DVD's of Movies that are still playing in the Cinema. I'd often see the local cops come in to BUY DVDs. This is not some backwards city. This is Shanghai and Shenzhen I'm talking about.

They only reason this law is being enforced is that it's Apple and the government is trying to "send a message". Any Chinese owned store, especially with Communist connections, these violations would be ignored.

Say what you will about Ubuntu, of all the Linux distros, it has the most polished out of the box experience. In my career, I’ve probably installed close to a thousand Linux images and Ubuntu has consistently provided best hardware compatibly and least issues over the years. When Unity was started, the Gnome 2.x panel, was completely broken and useless in vertical mode, necessary for 720p netbooks and widescreen monitors. Gnome 3.x was looking to be the next KDE 4.0.

So I can understand Shuttleworth's desire for something like Unity, but what I disagree with is how he went about it. Instead of going off on his own with Unity and Mir forks, He should have worked with Gnome and Wayland to fix what was broken. See the Mint MATE project for how Ubuntu should have proceeded with Unity. All of these unnecessary forks just weaken and already stretched thin open source development efforts.

"Where I live helium is ridiculously expensive. So I went with the much cheaper alternative, hydrogen. It’s also more buoyant, about 8% more. Which means a higher burst altitude as you can use less gas."

Bonus points for using hydrogen instead of helium. Hydrogen is not dangerous if handled properly and helium is a scarce resource needed for many medical uses like MRIs.

Wow! Back in 1999 after I purchased my first cellphone, one of the first things I did was to investigate how to connect it to my laptop to give me a mobile modem. Sure enough there was serial cable I could buy for it.

I don't care how early Nokia was to enter the mobile phone market. There is no way they should be able to patent any part this process. I'd rather have no patents at all than grant a 20 year monopoly to some company for tacking "on a mobile device" to some obvious idea like tethering.

We need real patent reform like:
* Eliminating Software patents
* Fix the "obviousness test" and throw out all the existing ones that fail to meet this standard.
* No patents granted to logical evolution of current technology like tethering
* Grant a theoretical patent (i.e. where invention has not yet been realized) for no more than 7 years
* Allow a patent extension/modification upon successful invention
* Mechanical and physics-technology patents should last no more than 15 years

I worked in an office that did a trial to migrate from MS Office to OpenOffice. Every issue we had was either a missing feature like lack of the ability to resize images or a bug in the import/export filters. Of the 7 bug reports I filled out, all of the were cross platform and cross versions. The problem with OO is not related to difficulty in verifying bugs. If someone did fix some of the interoperability issues, it would go a long way to making OO more appealing to small businesses that want to use open source software.

I'm an IT pro, and I have flashed thousands of devices in my career. Hundreds of MB'a and countless HDs, cd-roms, RAID controllers, and amd network devices like WAPs. The only time I have bricked a device is when I lost power in the process. Even then, I was able to recover the device with some googling.

Maybe I've been lucky or maybe just buy H/W from good manufactures like Cisco, Dell, and HP.

As someone who suffered with a laggy HTML5 based WebOS Pre, then loved his silky smooth 3GS, but left the walled garden for a Galaxy S2, I am thrilled about this. My S2’s H/W by all accounts blows my old 3GS out of the water, yet I still find the experience more laggy than my 3 year old 3GS. I’m sure much of this is the Java VM holding Android back.

Also, I really like the idea of a gesture based UI. So far the reviewers have loved the Blackberry gesture based UI.
http://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2013/02/review-blackberry-10-is-better-much-better-late-than-never/

If there is a build for the S2, I will definitely flash it. The chance to have the open platform of Linux/Android with the native speed of IOS is worth at least trying out.

The current system gives copyright protection for the life of author plus 70 years. I would propose that after 10 or 15 years, you would have to file for extensions that would be treated like a property tax. And limit these extensions to another 10-15 years.

That's exactly what I meant. If you don't renew and pay taxes, it would go to the public domain.

Publishers and the recording industry want people to think of IP like real property. If that's the case, then if they want extensions in perpetuity to their IP, it should be taxed or it should enter the public domain.

This is another good example of abusive DMCA take down requests circumventing due process. RIAA and MPAA abuse the law to suppress our creativity
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tk862BbjWx4
  and are destroying our cultural heritage.
http://www.wired.com/culture/lifestyle/news/2001/11/48625?currentPage=all
To top it off, their outdated business model unfairly reimburses the artists for their hard work.
http://www.salon.com/2000/06/14/love_7/
Copyright needs to be reformed. Some changes that I'd like to see are:

  * Abolish the Digital Millenium Copyright Act.
  * Intellectual property should be taxed like real property. http://www.latimes.com/news/opinion/la-oew-weaver20feb20,0,1675278.story It is an asset with a value, right? If you no longer make enough to pay your taxes on it, it goes to the state.
  * Copyrights are supposed to be an incentive to create. One that lasts unto your grandchildren are a dis-incentive, because not only are you not creating any more once you are dead, neither are your descendants. Copyright should last half a working lifetime (20 years), so that you have to get off your ass and make new stuff.
  * Someone who makes copies without permission should pay a fine, but it should be at the regular royalty rate for the item x copies made. So upload a song, it's iTunes price x number of downloads, with perhaps a factor of 3 penalty to discourage doing it, not $150,000 per copy.

If you feel the same way, you can make a difference by donating to the EFF
https://supporters.eff.org/donate
or at least signing this petition urging reform.
http://www.fightforthefuture.org/fixcopyright

"Those who deny freedom to others deserve it not for themselves."
-Abraham Lincoln

I agree. With a sufficiently powerful computer, we most likely could simulate a brain. However, even today's fastest computers struggle to simulate thousands of biologically accurate neurons, nevermind the 100's of millions required to simulate a brain. So we resort to the simulating the boring old perceptron that can't even change its own behavior.

Fortunately the field of Neuromorphic engineering has recently made great progress. Having the right hardware could shave 10-20 years off the goal of achieving strong AI.

I have java installed, but it's configured to run only when I click-to-play. I need java for my stock trading platform and also to access some old PIX firewalls. I cannot disable it completely.

Native Android? Hell Yeah! I would love to flash this on my S2. I suffered with a laggy HTML5 based WebOS Pre, then loved my silky smooth 3GS, but hated the walled garden, so moved again to a Galaxy S2. My S2’s H/W by all accounts blows my old 3GS out of the water,and yet I still find the Android experience more laggy than my 3 year old 3GS. I’m sure much of this is the Java VM holding Android back. I can’t wait to have an Linux phone with the native speed of IOS.

Before buying one, I'd want to test out this swipe based UI. If I was happy with it, and the all of my critical Apps were available, then yes, I would buy an Ubuntu phone.

Geoffrey Hinton’s work in back propagation and deep learning are an incremental improvement over the overly simplistic neural networks of the 90s, but "real progress", not even close. His focus on Bayesian networks has failed to deliver just like the symbolic AI that preceded it. Until AI researchers like Hinton get over their obsession with mathematical constructs with no foundation in biology, we will never have true AI. To succeed, we will need to will need to borrow from nature's engine of intelligence, the neocortex.

This is exactly what Kurzweil argues in “How to Create a Mind”. He describes the brain as a massively parallel pattern recognition machine. At the core of the neocortex are millions of hierarchically arranged pattern recognition modules working together to model and predict our environment. By using the neocortex as a model for new AI systems Kurzweil has a chance to make some "real progress" at Google.

This is a great move for Google's AI research, since their current Director of Research,Peter Norvig, comes from a mathematical background and is a strong defender the use of statistical models that have no biological basis.[1] While these techniques have their use in specific areas, they will never lead us to a general purpose strong AI.

Lately Kurzweil has come around to see that symbolic and bayesian networks have been holding AI back for the past 50 years. He is now a proponent of using biologically inspired methods similar to Jeff Hawkins' approach of Hierarchical Temporal Memory.
Hopefully, he'll bring some fresh ideas to Google. This will be especially useful in areas like voice recognition and translation. For example, just last week, I needed to translate. "We need to meet up" to Chinese. Google translates it to (can't type Chinese in Slashdot?)
, meaning "We need to satisfy". This is where statistical translations fail, because statistics and probabilities will never teach machines to "understand" language.

Leaders in AI like Kurzweil and Hawkins are going to finally crack the AI problem. With Kurzweil's experience and Google's resources, it might happen a lot sooner than you all expect.

[1] http://www.tor.com/blogs/2011/06/norvig-vs-chomsky-and-the-fight-for-the-future-of-ai