Wouldn't avoiding eating ghosts mean it just never got smart enough to know that you could eat power pills and then pass through them? That new optimal paths would arise when the power pill was active? If their algorithm added score for lower time or for points, I think this behavior would change.

"IBM Researchers Teach Pac-Man to Avoid Ghosts Even When It Is Advantageous To Eat Them" might not have the same ring to it.

So, I'm at work, and a lot of sites are normally blocked (not even worth clicking on half of them), but how do these plugins work? Are they user-friendly torrent interfaces? So they're torrents under the hood? Do they troll through newsgroups? Or are there illicit http sites out there providing the data? Or something else entirely? I couldn't figure it out skimming TFA... did I miss something?

Not cost $500.

I feel like there's a huge market missed. I really want a computer screen on my face. I want all the real estate of a 60" screen, but with something more portable.

VR wastes a lot of time, money, effort, parts, power etc. on motion tracking, gyroscopes, external trackers and everything. Then there's the programming to make it immersive. What if I could just put one of those little screens on my face (minus some weight!) and then watch a movie on a bigger appearing screen than what my TV looks like? All that power and plastic wrapped up in big screens is wasted.

A 20 year old e-mail program is just as useful as a new one, while a 20 year old browser will probably crash once you try to open google.com.

I admit I lose track of time regularly, but a 20 year old e-mail program -- Eudora, Elm, what have you -- had no ability to parse HTML e-mail. I spend most of my time checking my e-mail with my phone and occasionally with a web browser and I use a desktop client every other month or so. I did find myself inspecting the source a few times last month, and I did have a few e-mails without the plain text equivalent. My conclusion was that there are e-mail clients or companies who send HTML only e-mails. This means old e-mail clients from 20 years ago would not be useful.

Email is changing, but far more slowly.

And then merchandising.

Each of my three kids has a Minecraft Creeper hoodie, my 10 year old has a half dozen books, my 13 year old has a bunch of paper models, there are at least two battery powered "torches" wandering around, and both of my older kids have a bunch of small plastic models.

We're in for two copies of Minecraft for Mac, another one for Xbox 360 and WiiU. If we've handed over less than $200 all total, I'd be surprised.

The only thing this looks like it has going for it is the smartphone-based setup. But then again I haven't dived into RetroPie in a few months so maybe that's just some open-source/free software project they've forked or modified.

Either way RetroPie is a bit of a pain in the ass to setup. If these guys have made it easier than it may be worth the slight markup.

If this product can fix some problems with Google Glass, I'll buy one at twice a reasonable price.

Google Glass never looked comfortable or stylish. The camera made everyone uncomfortable. The battery wasn't great, and the resolution was terrible.

If Apple can come in and make it look reasonable, omit the camera, take advantage of some recent semiconductor technologies like fin fets or fdsoi, and make a 800x600 or 1024x768 screen, they have a blockbuster on their hands. I want to be able to access my digital world (Facebook, games, email, texts), and I want it to evolve into something better than what I've got. Already I barely use my home computer daily, no longer multiple times a day. My cell phone is my current tether to the internet. I'm not particularly enamored with it, but if it becomes a secondary device for my glasses -- cellular modem, hi def screen for necessary tasks, GPS, CPU and whatever chips eat the most power -- that's a great benefit.

For me, visual displays are "complete" when they can use a laser (or whatever) to project onto my retina a fully focused image that's of a "normal" brightness, taking the same arc size of a 24" screen a foot away, with a resolution better than I can detect. Glasses are the next logical step to this panacea.

For them to have a fully loaded semi on the freeway and the driver to get in the back seat was blatantly irresponsible. This experiment should never even have been legal.

According to TFA, they've been preparing for this one run for 6 months. Mapping it out, training the AI on the dynamics of loaded trailers, sending humans down the road to see when the safest time is, etc. You can bet more than a few lawyers were consulted during the course of this work between two companies.

AI cars have such a low safety requirement, they're going to have to swerve around them to avoid tripping over it. In cars, they have soccer moms with screaming kids and middle managers gabbing on cell phones, distracted driving accounts for half of the traffic out there. In the case of a commercial trucker, we're talking overtired and bored. An AI with an adequate vision system can easily out perform the most distracted drivers on controlled roads in perfect weather. We talk about self driving cars as though they only win the safety game with 0% accidents, but if safety concerned moms and wealthy business people buy them, I think tail end of the safety curve is going to get chopped off, bringing the averages up. Hell, I'd chip in for a retrofit on a BMW I keep seeing on my commute.

What is more important is verifying that no-one is running the red light when you enter the intersection. Which in the US is an all too common occurrence.

Where snow is common, the first one or two seconds of a green don't count anyway. You've slid through a just-turned-red intersection once or twice yourself, you know somebody else can too. So you learn to pause just a moment. This habit doesn't completely clear during the summer, but it comes back come winter time again.

"Cooper, who lives in France, told Artforum he’s consulted a French lawyer specializing in intellectual property. He told me he’s considering suing Google"

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Oh would you look at that ...

What do you think would Clinton "shake up?" She is the epitome of the status-quo!

There are several shake ups coming in November / January.

Let's look at the Senate. It's likely to swing Blue. This alone won't mean much because the House is likely to remain Red, but it's certainly going to change legislative agendas, which are important. Speaking of the House, with Trump at the top of the ticket, there will be downballot implications, some Republicans are going to have turnout trouble leading to Democrats taking some seats. I haven't seen any polls I believe in, but I think the House stays Red but with a bigger percentage Blue than before. That's a change that means more bipartisan cooperation will be necessary for anybody to get their personal agendas to see the light of day.

I can't see a Hillary executive changing much in terms of foreign policy, so full credit for "status-quo" there. Despite my preferences, she's likely to continue to antagonize Russia with anti-ICBM batteries and unified exercises close to Russia. She stands a chance of using executive orders to continue to shape the immigrant and minimum wage debates. And her ability to sign into law what the new Senate and the increasingly bipartisan House is important.

On the topic of Hillary being status-quo. Based on the rhetoric of the Republican Party for the last 2-3 years, a status-quo is in fact a shake up. All the stonewalling that's been done in Congress, all the scapegoating, all the blaming, and they can't get the American people to put them back into power. Heck, they need to tend to their own house as they realize 12 candidates can't make it through the primaries without a crazy making it out as the candidate. Then if you count that Hillary is almost certain to name at least one Supreme Court Justice in the next 4 years (with some guessing up to three!), this is going to be a "status-quo" that remains in place for a long time. Even if it's only Ginsberg and Breyer getting replaced with younger equivalents, that's a big deal. There's a 54% chance of a conservative justice kicking it in the next four years, so that's an even bigger deal.