The year being 2015, some boffin in a flying DeLorean converted to Mr. Fusion just had to say it: https://www.youtube.com/watch?...

http://cdn2.hubspot.net/hub/13...

TFA: The results are intriguing—even a relatively simple neural network can be used to over-interpret an image, just like as children we enjoyed watching clouds and interpreting the random shapes. This network was trained mostly on images of animals, so naturally it tends to interpret shapes as animals.

Less intriguing: to consider that similar networks (especially once giving "recommendations" to unquestioning end users) might ascribe e.g. criminal propensity or lack of creditworthiness to the odd proverbial "innocent bystander" by over-amplifying distinctions they "think" to have learned.

The "Bad Blue sky" tank detector https://neil.fraser.name/writi... "might be apocryphal" (just like the Obstinate Lighthouse http://www.snopes.com/military... ;-)) but instructive nonetheless.

As someone astutely observed with respect to the picture of Clippy 2.0:

http://www.heise.de/forum/heis...

I thought we'd all suffered enough advertising on our keyboards since 1995 already?
Thankfully the glorious Model M remains unbreakable and unaffected... ;-)

Its slides are oversimplified, and bullet points omit the complexities of nearly any issue

So whatever split-second decision an overpaid high-level executive takes by not allowing anything the requisite minimum thought, s/he can later blame on (and get someone else fired for) having been given incomplete information as requested by demanding earlier on that every complex matter be reduced to a polished assortment of insufficient buzzwords in incomplete grammar. In short, PPTs institutionalize PHBs' hierarchical infallibility at the expense of underlings who have to use it.

If they had watched Back "2" The Future for a moment, they'd know the 2015 version isn't supposed to work on water yet. ;-}

So being able to demonstrate a vulnerability is criminalized just like in the old days: http://www.parodie.com/english...

When responsible reporting is deterred to uphold an illusion of flawlessness and corporate infallibility, blackhats are the only ones who benefit.

Dunning Kruger effect in action! This, guys, is what just may have killed IBM, from me to you. I am a former IBM employee.

Remarkably, Who Says Elephants Can't Dance? demands that "dealing final blows" be praised as "saving" (short-term "rescue" entrenching the long-term demise AKA "Historic Turnaround"). The sections measuring the merits e.g. of OS/2 (and over the years, pretty much any technological asset) by the same standard as consumer packaged goods are particularly saddening.

Statistics are a poor excuse to stop anyone.

All are significantly more expensive than traditional light bulbs, but offer significant energy and costs savings over the long run

...if they shine long enough to ever start saving - not so likely with all-too-tightly-packed cheap Chinese semiconductors that often fail within months, at least for much of the short-lived (and often annoyingly artificially-looking) light Europeans get to see since "their" ban on bulbs.

...seems to be as real as Rearden Metal, and to have found yet another target in Tesla after writing Segways to shreds.

How could anyone ever not get it?

A space-warring world forcibly united under a pax (versus bugs) (US-)americana, kept in check through brainwashing highschools (with a nod to Pink Floyd) and psi-ops staring at no goats at all, as well as gamified, interactive global military-state television (nicely imagined when few people had ever seen such things, Fox, or even always-on internet) - full of overidentification that probably even North Korea would recognize&ban, and not-too-subtle references to world events, history and plenty of other notably (anti-)war movies...

The big mistake (like for Highlander) was ever making sequels of it.

To teach use of a non-free program is to implant dependence on its owner, which contradicts the social mission of the school.

Bertrand Russell's The Impact of Science on Society (1952) should probably be given another read:

Fichte laid it down that, education should aim at destroying free will, so that, after pupils have left school, they shall be incapable, throughout the rest of their lives, of thinking or acting otherwise than as their schoolmasters would have wished [...] to produce the sort of character and the sort of beliefs that the authorities consider desirable, and any serious criticism of the powers that be will become psychologically impossible. Even if all are miserable, all will believe themselves happy, because the government will tell them that they are so.

Now consider when the http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bilderberg_Group met for the first time (1954) and who gets to attend... ;-/

My manager has my personal email address (I have hers). She has used it once: on the final day of a holiday last year she emailed to tell me that the office was shut to non-essential staff due to a problem with the water supply. That's the way it should be! She also has my mobile phone number, but she's never called it.

When and where are you hiring? ;-)

For the same reason that European rules would plant potatoes in a "guarded garden for the king" so neighbors would want them too: ;-)
There's no better way than artificial scarcity to ensure accelerated adoption.

Plus, replacing the Home screen and interacting with the system at a lower level than probably e.g. Apple on iOS would allow, given the wide variety of Android versions (and hacks) out there that might be incompatible in unforeseen ways, Zuck probably does not want his company to go down in history as the one that (at least temporarily for Joe Avg. Users) inadvertently bricked a hundred million phones or so.

when he manages to remove every trace of phone-home crap in there, then it's maybe news worth mentioning

Then how would it work?

As a "leech-only client to Facebook" for the few who do actually care about their own privacy, but are nosy enough to want to read up on everybody else's every move (from the phones of all those to whom it couldn't matter less as they use an unpatched very verbose version).