I'd agree. In my experience, as well as in lots of news stories, the reaction of most companies to ai "failures" would be to threaten prosecution of anyone (especially employees) who releases the information to the public. They and probably the courts would all agree that such info is and should be trade secrets and proprietary.

Oh, jeez; they did it again. The preview even showed my text as paragraphs, exactly as I'd typed them. Then when I submit it, my text appears on my screen as one giant paragraph. Anyone know how to reliably get the paragraph into through to a /. reader now? The method I was using before has totally failed.

My question would be whether they'll help solve an ongoing problem for performers: It can be very difficult to learn who wrote a tune or song, who owns the rights to it, etc. The "business" sources for this info are often incomplete, or just wrong. To see the problem, try searching for the composer of songs. You tend to get links to sites that say things of the form "[Song Title] by [Person]". But when you investigate, you find that "by" usually means "performed by" or "recorded by". They rarely distinguish this from "composed by", and very rarely is the actual composer mentioned. The main problem is that song and tune titles are often different, and over the years different songs/tunes have been written with the same (or very similar) titles. If they were written in different countries, it can be very difficult to straighten out the mess. Sometimes a title belongs to dozens (or hundreds) of different musical works. A slightly less important problem is that several composers may have the same name. One of the fun conversations I've had with a number of publishers is asking them how I can figure out which tunes (or songs) they own the publishing rights to. When they say I can look up the titles in their indexes, I have to point out what they certainly know, that most of those titles are not unique to them, and other companies have published different works with the same titles. Their final answer is always the same: All I have to do is buy a copy of every (musical) publication in their catalog. Yeah, and when I've done that for every publisher in every country, and bought a new house big enough to hold them all, I'll have the info. But I'll have a slight problem: Each answer will be inside millions of printed books, which will take me years to search for each title. But this does get across why the system is so messed up and unusable: Publishers (and composers) have a financial interest in making the information difficult to find. The only way that's actually workable is to publish your own version of a musical work, and wait until someone sues you. This has some subtle problems of its own, of course, but it's what maximizes the actual publishers' incomes. ;-) Somehow, I sorta doubt that youtube will ever figure out how to put correct composer info with every song in every video. Or even in a minority subset of them. They certainly won't get the correct names from many of the people making the videos; they'll just get "by [Performer Name]".

Yeah, it used to be the beavers' job in the ecosystem to impound and preserve the world's fresh water. But we humans killed most of them some time back, so now it's up to us to do the job. Too bad we're generally not as good at it as they were. But give us a few million more years, and maybe we'll get better at it. ;-)

In the decades I've worked as a software developer, I've almost never had a boss who cared at all for "perfect". OTOH, I can think of many times when I was explicitly ordered to not implement something correctly. Normally, their only concern is getting deliveries to customers, which involves satisfying sales people and customer people who usually have no clue at all about software quality, and are primarily concerned with money issues.

Granted, I have had a few cases where, years after my job was terminated, I received some nice messages saying that nobody had ever found a bug in any of the sofware that I wrote. But this is after the fact; while working they were never particularly interested in high-quality code. And they had no way of judging it except by waiting for years and counting the reported bugs.

So I'd predict that most educators and employers will be pleased by the "hour of code" concept, and will push for its adoption. Then they'll work out the bugs in the approach in the future, as the bugs make themselves known.

Not always. For example, I've been experimenting with portables to see how usable they are for displaying music. (Not playing music; I'm talking about readable "sheet" music".) Scenario: I'm going to an event like a jam session, my phone/tablet/whatever may not have Web access there, so I'd like to pre-load a lot of likely pages that I and a lot of other musical friends have put online.

But when I get there and wake up my gadget, most of the browsers instantly attempt to reload all those pages, find they can't, and display their "not available" message instead of the page they were showing. The buttons showing never include a "show the previous version from cache" choice; the info is just gone. I do a lot of web testing, so I have at least a dozen of the most "popular" browsers loaded on each. So far, the only browser I've found that doesn't fail this way has been Firefox, which just simply wakes up and continues where it was. So it's the only one I use to pre-load things for an event.

I've found it fairly easy to demo this at home. I just load up a few pages into a few browsers, show people that they all work when I switch between the browsers, etc. I suggest that others do the same on their cell phones. Then I invite people to join me on a short walk. When I get about a block away from home, my home wifi is out of range, all the other wifis have passwords, and I show them the screen, which shows an error message rather than the music it had a few seconds earlier. As we walk, the others also show the same thing happening in the browsers on their screens.

The vendors (especially Apple) reply that we should just use their apps, which can be set to not screw up that way. But to test my stuff on all those apps, I'd have to get a whole pile of cell phones and tablets, and also pay for service for all of them, which would cost me more money than I have. So I only test with browsers, which the vendors have (knowingly and with malice aforethought .-) set up to fail this way.

It's weird that Opera also fails this way. You'd think they'd be different. And maybe Opera and/or other browsers have a setting to turn off this automatic reloading. If so, I've never found it. Or, in a couple of cases, I found it in an early release, but it was gone after an upgrade.

Anyone know a general way to turn off this automatic reloading? I do suspect that it's possible with some browsers, but they do a good job of hiding it or renaming it so it isn't very recognizable.

In any case, notice that none of the "pages" I'm talking about are "live". They're just pages of sheet music, that stay the same until edited by a human. So there's no need to reload them at all. And discarding a page because there's no wifi service is inexcusable in any case. It's just pure user-hostility on the part of the vendors.

It's probably not that meaningful, anyway. Somewhere around 20-40% of the info in these documents will turn out to be wrong or misleading in some critical way. Mostly, it'll just be a case of "name files", with info about different people with the same (or similar) names entered in the wrong place. People will learn pretty quickly to deny anything they don't like. Of course, others will believe whatever they want about you, especially if it was in some "secret" document. But they too will learn that the info about them is also full of errors. More importantly, your friends and relatives will learn the same thing.

I've yet to see any official document about me (including medical records) that didn't have some bizarre thing with unknown origin. The people who keep the records just respond with a grin and a comment starting with "Yeah ....".

Actually, my favorite example, which my wife loves telling other people, is one of those "not even wrong" things that a nurse wrote down after a routine exam, saying that I was 5'13" tall and weighted 135 pounds. I am in fact about six feet one inch, but 135 pounds would make me one of the scrawniest six-footers on the planet. She'd used one of those old-fashioned scales with sliding weights, and had forgotten that she'd slid over a third 50-pound weight. But I've since then seen several personal histories that include that 135-pound weight back then. Once such things get into the database, they're almost impossible to correct. This is especially true of medical records. This can be really annoying to those that've had a "false positive" diagnosis somewhere along the line. But such things are pretty good at teaching you how much you can trust the "official" data about other people.

(I sometimes wonder if official records in other "advanced" countries are as screwed up as they are here in the US. I'd guess that they probably are.)

Not really; according to the US Census Bureau, there are about 1800 Americans with my (first+last) name. And probably a whole bunch of them have the same middle name, which is also one of the top 10 men's names in the US. My parents didn't have much imagination when it came to baby names.

OTOH, my wife continues to use her birth name for most purposes (which is fine by me). She likes the fact that, as far as she can determine, she's the only living human with that name. (And it's not even some unpronounceable "foreign" sounding name. She also likes to point out to people that her name is a syntactically correct English sentence. She has even found archived newspaper images that have her name at the top of a story. ;-)

But anyway, most of us don't "have" our names in any meaningful sense. We're just one of many who are using the name for a few decades, until we drop out of the crowd that are using it.

In college, I had a friend who was a member of the Bill Smith Club, whose only membership criterion is that you be named (or married to someone named) Bill Smith (or William Smythe or Wilhelm Schmidt or anything else that maps onto the name).

Actually, the same could be said about every generation/cohort. Most of the population are usually the anti-thinking sort who contribute nothing much to our knowledge. The advances have always come from a tiny minority who are typically not much respected by their cohorts. There's a tiny minority of "millennials" who are involved in making the advances that most of us won't live to appreciate. They're not hard to find if you hang out with the right crowds, but most people (including the /. crowd) would never bother with that.

So you don't? You have my sympathy ... ;-)

I think this is the first time I've ever seen or heard the phrases "intelligence community" and "in good faith" in the same sentence.

Huh? Just this morning, I bought a 7-pound bag of sugar. Granted, that's about a year's supply for the two of us. (And it's mostly an artifact of my local reputation as a maker of good margaritas. ;-) It isn't at all hard to find sugar packaged in 2- or 5-pound bags hereabouts; most of the food stores that I frequent sell it that way. Coffee I've always bought in sub-pound packages, mostly because the taste tends to decay slowly, and it's more noticeable the larger the package is. The advent of home and in-store coffee grinding machines was the main cause of the switch to smaller packages, rather than the price. (The real coffee connoisseurs buy the beans green, and roast and grind it themselves, but their numbers are too small to seriously affect prices. ;-)

Yup, and I've used the same explanation for why I'd prefer coffee to plain water. Water is just boring; adding a bit of flavor (with or without the mild stimulation of the caffeine) makes it more palatable. Any tasty plant material will work. I've also run across the same explanation for why soups of various kinds are so common in most of the world. They have fewer nutrients than their ingredient, so why not just heat up and eat the meats and veggies? Well, you need a good amount of water in your diet, and you want it boiled to make it safe to drink, so why not take some of the tougher cuts of meat , mix in assorted other tough and/or tasty ingredients, simmer them for a while, and consume the result? It adds variety to your diet, and is a good way to use up the odds and ends from other meals in a way that's a lot more palatable than just drinking water.

Actually, if you have a good whetstone (and know how to use it), you'll find that a small knife works just fine for trimming nails, both finger and toe. I've used my Swiss Army knife's small blade for just that purpose a few times while on vacation without a nail clipper. The small knife blade actually works better than the small scissors that are part of the package. You do need to be a bit careful, of course.

People will no doubt laugh at this, but it's actually a good observation (though we should include wine in the list). The reason is simple: We humans need to ingest a fair amount of water each day to stay healthy. But historically, water itself has been rather dangerous stuff. Consider all the other people and animals upstream who have been using it for both bathing and disposing of waste of various sorts. Do you want to drink that water? Not if you want a long, healthy life.

Part of the year, our ancestors could get some of the needed water by consuming fruits, which are high in water. But they mostly don't keep very well, and they spoil. Fermented juices have their sugars partly converted to ethanol, which is toxic to most of the spoilage micro-organisms, so the resulting wine or beer is much less likely to spoil. (If it does, the result is often vinegar, which is another way of preserving the juice in a way that's safe for humans to consume).

It's pretty well understood among historians, anthropologists, etc., that fermentation processes were a significant part of our ancestors' development into a long-lived species that eventually dominated much of the planet. Yes, it's fun to get drunk, and to joke about getting drunk. And some other animals can get drunk, since ripe fruits often contain around 1% ethanol. (I've read some funny stories about groups of elephants getting a bit tipsy from the consumption of ripe fruit. Imagine a crowd of drunk elephants partying in your neighborhood. ;-) But the fact is that ethanol-laced liquids are historically an important part of our history, because ethanol provided a way to make those liquids safe to drink.

There was a fun study some time back, in which some researchers traveled around the world, stopping in various eateries, ordering food, and taking it back to their hotel room to feed to the lab equipment they'd brought along. They were testing it for safety (and ate the food that passed their tests ;-). Their main summary of their results was that, if you want a simple rule for ordering something safe to drink, no matter where you are, order beer. They didn't always like the beer everywhere, but their tests never found beer that was unsafe for human consumption. Wine was in second place, but they did find contaminated wine in a few places.

The explanation seems to be that, as anyone who has tried brewing beer knows, you have to be really careful about cleanliness during the brewing, or you get an awful-smelling glop that nobody will drink. With wine, the process seems easy, and you can get good-smelling wine by just letting the fruit juice (with perhaps added yeast) ferment, but sometimes the result has contaminants that aren't obvious. But with beer, this doesn't work; you have to boil it all to sterilize it, add a yeast culture, make sure that stuff floating in the air can't get into the containers, or everyone will know that you've failed the instant they sniff it. So beer probably is the most significant brewing achievement in human history.