PS: Apparently "Looney Tunes" teaches kids to be violent, I and most of the people I know must have been slow learners. ;)

Every character in the show is the butt of a joke, including Penny and her ape-man ex-boyfriend. As a kid, "Looney Tunes" introduced me to classical music, it's good to see science presented in a similar way with shows like the Simpson/Futurama/BBT, all of which are light entertainment and a good laugh for young and old.

Disclaimer: I don't have a youtwitface account and the characters in the show are from my children's generation.

Nah, but your post makes it clear that you may have a sociopathic lack of empathy, or perhaps a strange affection for people like the guy in question - you know, the guy who deliberately raped, tortured, shot, and then buried alive the woman he was using for entertainment. Your pleasure at preferring him alive but in a cage for decades is, Mr. Coward, a surer sign of someone who needs help and some introspection.

Precisely. Watson is already good enough to pass an oral exam for a GP's licence, it's now being used as an expert assistant for medical research, having devoured the medical text books and journal papers of mankind, it can find relationship and patterns that humans have failed to notice. It won.t be long before someone teaches it how to develop software, more importantly it will learn how to extract the broad requirements for that software from the companies archived emails and documents.

Better tools means more leisure time, but that's not really how it worked out when robots took over heavy manufacturing, banking, mining, insurance, the typing pool,....all the way back to when the original human computers were made redundant during WW2. People still work 40+hrs a week, just like my dad di in the 50's. What has happened during this takeover is that people who have jobs can fill their home with more stuff made by both robots and humans, those who don't have jobs are less likely to starve to death due to modern social "safety nets".

Assuming we don't fall into an Orwellian future or suffocate in our own waste, the future employment market will be mainly baby-sitting robots and each others children. Which pays the most will expose our true priorities (as it does now).

No, the banks don't have to cover the cost of fraudulent credit card transactions (although I bet they love basking in the warm glow of the widespread misconception that they do). It's the retailers who get screwed when that happens, both in the US (I assume that reference to Newegg means it's American) and in the UK.

As I posted in this comment, the banks don't give a **** because they don't have to; they're not the ones paying for it. Fraud report? Yank the money back from the retailer (even if they've performed reasonable diligence (*))

Even though chip and pin is very common in the UK (I can't remember the last time I used a swipe-and-signature terminal), credit card fraud still exists and it's the retailer that gets screwed.

(*) In fact, as far as I'm aware, retailers- in the US, at least- are suposedly *prohibited* from checking ID, which makes this even worse

Stop projecting. I didn't say anything about "closure." I'm talking about whether or not someone who has made the conscious decision that other known to be innocent people do not deserve to live their lives, and who seeks out an opportunity to rape and torture them to death (and showing no remorse whatsoever, and every indication that he'd do it again) should be the recipient of any of your day's labor or mine, let alone that of the family of the person he decided to rape and torture and murder in front of the shallow grave he made her watch him dig. Keep your pop-psychobabble "closure" crap for people who like to ruminate about such things.

This is about whether or not to reward someone like that with continued life after they've decided that you, or your daughter or wife, don't themselves deserve the same. And that since she doesn't, he's going to end it after some recreational violent rape and torture before blowing big holes in her with a shotgun.

If you can't see that feeding and housing someone like that for decades and asking his victims - among others - to pay the ticket day in and day out ... if you process that in your head and arrive somehow at that being a good thing, then you're the one that needs some help. Because you've got a seriously bad case of mixed premises resulting in toxic moral relativism.

Don't confuse Gandalf/Tolkien's admonishment about eagerness with ruling out that ultimate punishment when it's appropriate. Not to mention the concept is a little muddled anyway. Of course we can't "give life" to some innocent who was, for example, killed by a violent sexual predator. Our inability to do that sort of magic doesn't mean we should let cruel, predatory violent killers carry on with life, either. Such people have stated - often verbally, but always through their actions - that they consider any social contract regarding the value of other's lives to be out the window. He has said, "I get to decide on a whim - and without any consideration of how you live your life - if you live or die ... and when you die, if I get to rape you to death in the process before choosing my next victim."

Our inability to "give life" back to you after he's raped you to death isn't a sign that we're unable to realize he's waived his own claim on life. We don't have to be "eager," in Tolkein's parlance, to deal with such a person. But nor should we nurse him along in a cage for the next 50 years.

It's called justice. Imagine your (for example) daughter was raped and murdered by this kind of guy. Every morning, you wake up and he wakes up. Your daughter will never wake up, join you for breakfast, or carry on with life. You, on the other hand, get to go to work and spend a little of each day earning some money that will be taken from you and used to feed your daughter's rapist HIS breakfast, clean his teeth, put clothes on him, and the rest. You get to think every day about how the guy who shows no remorse for raping your daughter to death gets to re-adjust to a lousy but very alive new life. He can watch the TV shows she'll never see, read the books she'll never read, correspond with and get visits from family members and other things that your raped, dead daughter will never get to do. Your never to be born grandchildren won't get to do them, either.

A guy who raped her to death, on the other hand, shows every sign of being happy to do exactly the same to the next person that comes into reach, and has no moral qualms about considering the people around him to be fair game. His moral code is that other people's lives are disposable, and that he is entitled to end those lives with his deliberate, purposeful cruelty and violence while getting off on that sexually. Your raped, murdered daughter is just one of his amusements, and lacking physical restraint he'll just do it over an over again. Whole teams of people will spend their waking hours, on your dime, making sure he can't carry out his chosen hobby on the next person's daughter or wife or mother. He will be kept in that cage, alive when your dead sexual plaything of a daughter is not, for decades and decades.

Or, he can be put out of everyone's misery like the savage, deliberately evil, remorseless animal he actually is, and you don't get to think - as you drink your first cup of coffee every morning, missing your murdered daughter - that he's down the road in the facility cafeteria you're buying to feed him, having his morning coffee, too. You're both thinking about your daughter. You, how you miss the life that was stolen from her, and him, how much he enjoyed raping her and taking it away from her and her family.

That's why we have the death penalty.

There is no moral equivalence. The state, in removing that man from existence, isn't preying on some randomly chosen innocent stranger with rape and murder in mind. That you find the two to be equivalent removes you from the pool of people who should ever weigh in on such subjects.

Why? I've spent time around farms and I like pigs, very similar to dogs, smart animals with highly developed personalities and social structures, will gladly eat their own vomit. They are often reared in horrendously cruel conditions and their minds certainly deserve better treatment, but I don't feel the slightest twinge of guilt when enjoying a bacon and egg breakfast, so I'm sure as hell not going to feel guilty about powering off the PC. - If the screams of the dying PC bother you, turn the speakers off.

IBM's blue brain project has been simulating real brains by painstakingly mapping slices of rat/cat brains onto their software model for more than a decade now. IBM's "Watson" appears to me to be an spin off from that project. The Jeopardy "stunt" proved Watson is indisputably superior to the best humans at general knowledge questions (an open ended problem domain). IBM have developed similar 'brain on a chip" technology and have been using it for a while now. The hardware that won the Jeopardy games a couple of years ago required "20 tons of equipment", IBM are just now starting to lease instances of Watson to "development partners", last time I checked each Watson clone runs on a 50kg "bar fridge" server.

The Blue brain project is primarily aimed at medical research and I believe it's now part of the EU's larger and more ambitious Human brain project.

Here it comes: Hate to say "I told you so" but..... I said "it's here" when I saw the Jeopardy stunt, my SO looked at me and said "It's looking up the answers, what's the big deal?". The "big deal" of course is that it finds the correct answer from the mass of unstructured textual data returned by a simple web crawler, which from a black box POV strongly implies it "understands" the question. Further, when Watson falls for bullshit he reads on the internet or lacks context, the developers correct the misunderstanding by "teaching it" new facts. As one of the developers puts it, it the computer knows everything there is to know about human anatomy how do you get it to correctly interpret the phrase "Noses run and feet smell"? Systems like Watson can do this themselves, essentially they are finding meaning by reading unstructured data! Which at the end of that day is conceptually no different to what any other "brain" does.

prophecy/
Anyone who wants a software dev job in the not too distant future better start thinking less about programming them and more about training them.
/prophecy

I'm 10yrs from retirement I dropped our of HS in 1976 and have spent the last 26 as a degree qualified developer. Before my degree I spent 15yrs as a labourer, I did a stint as a brickies labourer, spent a year in a remote Aussie sawmill, farm hand, deck hand, concrete formwork, and many more "strong back, weak head" style jobs, I married young and had a wife a two young kids, I'd willing have done pretty much anything people were willing to pay me to do....

- The most physically demanding was deck hand on a fishing boat in the notorious "Bass Straight" although the sawmill comes a close second the boat involved working 36hrs straight (30 min break every 5hrs), plus 30hrs travel time where you were either on 2hr watch in the wheelhouse, or hanging on to your bunk for dear life. The visual and auditory hallucinations from lack of sleep on the boat were a bit concerting at first but mine were the comedic variety, about 1 in 4 new deck hands have the horrific variety and quit after the first voyage. Oddly I look back at both of these with fond memories, possibly because it's when I was at peak fitness and surrounded by wilderness and good mates. There was "something good" about those jobs that you just don't get in an office building, I have never been to war but I imagine the comradely found in a foxhole is a more extreme example of what I'm talking about.
- The most stressful and mentally draining job was 12hrs behind the wheel of a city taxi.
- The most unhealthy and socially isolating job was 5yrs rotating shift work in a nylon factory
- The most ridiculous, sweeping a 5 acre concrete slab with a yard broom. (2 days, if you're wondering).
- The most uncomfortable - empting one ton bags of lime into a hopper, under a bare tin roof, on a 45degC day.

Software development - "find a job you love and you'll never have to work again".

http://postalnews.com/postalne...

If nothing else, TFA doesn't sound like a particularly unbiased source.

(Still don't know if you're the same guy/girl/whatever that posted the original comment, it's hard to have a conversation with an AC...)

The whole point of an analogue-modelling digital synth like that is that it's designed to replicate the sound of an analogue synth by mimicking its operation! If people want to buy digital synths that imitate classic analogue models (without their unreliability!), I'd say that proves that most buyers think there's a clear difference in sound between analogue and "classic" digital (FM/wavetable) synths that the latter can't entirely bridge. And vice versa, but that wasn't the point.

The original complaint was that analogue synths were allegedly preferred purely because they were "analogue" and their "warmth" was spurious romanticism. Well, "warmth" and preference for sounds is in the eye of the beholder, but it's pretty obvious that the two types sound different!

Whether that's true or not, it says bugger all about the quality of the synths they made and/or whether analogue was better than digital, which is what was being discussed.