Maybe initiatives such as these increase the audience's awareness of anonymous P2P.
That would be not completely unfunny.

The summary (and TFA as well) seem to be committed to the following two points:

1. Finite state machines will be unrealistically simple when simulating emotional responses.
2. Behavioural-feedback is a necessary condition for realistic emotional displays.

Point number 1 is unwarranted. Finite state machines may elaborate their input at an arbitrarily high level of complexity -finite may still be very large. Part of such an elaboration, of course, may be inner transitions between states that effectively amount to behavioural-feedback. There is nothing intrinsically un-dynamic to FSM.

I love Wii; actually, I'm currently giving my life away to Super Mario Galaxy. But, having said that, I think this initiative is a clear case of overgadgetting. When playing Wii Fit, one already feels stupid when "jogging around Wii island" - that is, running on the spot with the Wii Controller in your pocket- but, making it part of a corporate health package? Come on. There must be some better use for that money. Better dental coverage, for instance, or whatever.

Why do you people assume that drilling is our best shot against an asteroid? Despite Armaggedon, it is not.

Somewhat more likely, apparently, we may send an aircraft to travel near the asteroid and try to use its small but constant gravitational pull to modify its course.

Galileo discovered the law of inertia and formulated the equations of uniformly accelerated movement, helped improve the telescope and the microscope, described the orbits of Jupiter's satellites and, apparently, drew a map of the Moon.
On the other hand, Thomas Harriot drew a better, earlier map of the Moon.
In conclusion, and given that we know who Galileo is, it is a historical injustice that we don't know who Thomas Harriot is.

Somehow the conclusion does not seem to follow, does it.

The note only says that if you are familiar with Blue-ray rips found on BitTorrent sites you will instantly recognise Matroska + H.264. No "automatic equality" is involved in this (largely correct) claim, that I see.

And, yes, anyone familiar with BitTorrent will instantly recognise pirated software -some prefer to talk of software being shared, what with no pirates being involved in the activity.

I think you are right, and I made my point in a careless way. I stand corrected.

It is nevertheless still the case that scientists tend to think these days that computer simulations do explanatory work of the other kind. It is still an interesting question: do computer simulations provide evidence at all that some events in the real world have turned out one way or another?

There is something wrong but interesting about the idea that a computer simulation can explain what happened in a real-life incident. In the normal usage of "explain", only causally-related events can explain other events.

There is undoubtedly something to the contention that a computer simulation does some explanatory work, but it must be in a roundabout way. Maybe this: the computer simulation provides evidence to the effect that some prior event was able to cause the known outcome; but then it is the prior event (the bad choice of spin rate in this case) that explains the loss of the Beagle 2, not the computer simulation.

Those myths are useful because teachesr, just like doctors, are way lower in public appreciation and social status than they should be.

Both these occupations I've just mentioned -and a bunch of others, to be sure- are fundamental for a society to get going, but somehow we have managed to hold in greater steem Procter and Gamble Brand Managers and (until recently, at least) Wall Street brokers.

Doctors prevent people from dying; teachers teach people how to read. Some praise of their jobs is simply a small step towards setting the record straight.