Oh good, this shit.

Now we've eliminated the majority of nuclear weapons, it's become irrelevant

Huh? Two countries both have enough nuclear warheads to comfortably annihilate all human life several times over. Six more have enough to put a significant dent in it.

It doesn't matter if you eliminate the "majority" if what remains is more than enough to get the job done.

(Not that I think that the clock thing is particularly useful)

It doesn't have to be nuclear annihilation - we're closer to "doomsday" is what they're saying.

Hard to say, I guess we'll find out what wording Slashdot chooses to use when a Westerner solves a Millennium Prize Problem?

Article says Watson, not AI.

Can we please stop treating the Roomba as a harbinger of the inevitable robot apocalypse?

It's just about the most trivial "robot" you can imagine, it's been around for over a decade, and in that time, there hasn't been a single new development in the "robotic home automation" market that it was supposed to usher in.

It's just a silly gimmick - it does a good enough job of vacuuming your Cheetos crumbs (though not nearly as well as getting off your ass for 5 minutes would), and that's about it.

From what I remember, yes, his work was slightly later, but he also published it earlier. Stands to reason that this would happen a lot - the only alternative is that different people discover something at the exact same time.

Not a nit that I would pick on any other site, but Leibniz invented/discovered calculus independently.

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Humans aren't special. Get over yourselves.

Don't see any chimps or dolphins wringing their hands/flippers over who has what rights. That seems to be a pretty special human trait.

What an idiotic thing to say.

I don't really care what people on the street do - programmers think in types.

So I'm picking between the US/UK/Canadian signals intelligence, and the Russian security service? I'll go with the sigint guys.

Spetssvyaz is the Russian communications security agency (part of FSO).

Apparently "knee-jerk response" now means "opinion I disagree with". Good to know!

In the US, 56.49 billion potatoes are sold per year. If potatoes caught fire at the same rate, we would all be dead.

They certainly don't use the word "baffled", but for all the scientist I know, the standard response to new data is "WTF is this shit?!"