Yeah, I wonder what the machine thought of "The Forester and the Lion", and "The Boy Who Cried Wolf". They seem strangely appropriate.

What's the benefit in using LEDs to grow something for fuel? Surely the LEDs can't cause the algae to "produce" more power than they consume. The power from the LEDs has to come from somewhere, right?

Doesn't using electricity to grow algae for fuel kind of defeat the purpose?

Can anyone give a brief rundown on what HDR is? I know it stands for "high dynamic range", but as someone who knows nothing about photography, it means nothing to me. What it has to do with overexposure/underexposure (to which the video refers)? Why is it harder to do with video than still images?

Yes, you're absolutely right. According to Wikipedia, the non-registered one's are called "common law marks" in the US.

IANAL either, AFAIK.

Is there any way in which this is not a textbook correct application of trademarks?

Don't trademarks needed to be registered to be enforced?

We're talking about professional software engineering here, not hiring some guy to "write a program" for you.

That you didn't have any processes in place for quality assurance says a lot more than anything else in your little anecdote.

I'm not saying we shouldn't test. I'm certainly not saying our code shouldn't be independently reviewed. I am saying that having your programmer run manual tests of his code after writing it is a waste of his time and your money. He should have tested it before he wrote it!

We can't possibly test as well as a professional tester. We develop systems based on our imperfect understanding of the requirements. There are massive classes of bugs that we simply can't find, otherwise we wouldn't have written it like that to begin with.

Does anyone have any tips on how I can make non-automated testing a little bit more stimulating so I can at least begin to form a habit of doing so?

No, I don't. I strongly think you're directing your effort the wrong way, and duplicating work if you're spending too much time on non-automated testing.

Software Engineers are not good at poking holes in their own work, so you should have someone else doing the bulk of that kind of testing anyway. You obviously need to do some cursory testing to avoid wasting someone else's time, but there are much better ways of directing your testing effort.

Focus on developing unit tests both before and during the development effort. Avoid developing your unit tests after writing the code though - your mind will be tainted with your approach, and you'll miss the obvious stuff. Not only do unit tests reveal bugs, the act of writing them will also help you get interfaces right, and help ensure a better overall design for your code.

Nice idea, but I can break it trivially with my Android phone: Open "goggles", point at screen, click, and "Similar Images" gives me the answer (or a multi-word answer containing the answer you're looking for).

I have to keep my hand really still as I take the shots though, so perhaps a bit of image distortion would be enough to work around that.

As a number of others have stated, the reCAPTCHA server only knows the answer to one of the words it's giving you. You only need to get the "easy" one right to be passed as a human. Getting the "hard" word right makes no difference in terms of passing the test.

If this were getting 30% accuracy on the hard words, then that would be *real* news.

I suspect this is getting slightly lower success than they're reporting, as that 38% figure is assuming they're only getting the easy words right, but in actual fact they're bound to get only the hard one right every now and then.

> everyone would think it was cool and stuff

You mean, just like Uranus?

Flamebait? Has a mod been smoking crack again, or does this comment have some other level I'm not getting?

> Until they invent a machine that can travel back in time and compare the suspect's claims against the facts, there can be no lie detectors

You're talking about a "truth detector". A perfect lie detector would just need to be able to direct read access to a person's memory. While Atomicdevice has some really good points about manipulation of memory, that shouldn't discount a perfect lie detector (if one ever existed) being used in all cases. The manipulating memory thing is a problem with witnesses, not with a hypothetical perfect lie detector.

If such a detector existed, and I were accused of something I hadn't done, I'd expect to be able to use it to show that I had no recollection of commiting the act, and that I remember being somewhere else. At least I only have to worry about a jury questioning the quality of my memory rather than questioning if I'm just protecting myself. Of course, if such a thing existed, juries might start questioning why some people weren't using them...

Probabilities are a bit like temperatures. Would you say that the weather on a 60F day is twice as warm as a 30F day?

By your logic, a perfect system would only be "twice as good as guessing". What does that even mean? "50% better" starts to sound pretty good when you look at it like that!

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bioplastic

The only law I've ever had to deal with similar to this (see my nick for a caveat here) says that for certain things to pass, you need "not less than a two thirds majority". That's pretty cut and dried. Two thirds of 206 is 412 / 3. 136 is 408 / 3. Seems pretty clear to me.