I'm not sure why this got downvoted. This is a fundamental problem. It's the same problem Google faced in China with Search years ago when they actually did pull out and watched Microsoft and everybody else hurry in to fill the void.

Here I can understand to an extent: the workers are UK citizens (presumably). If you were a UK citizen, I'd imagine helping the USA advance its military capability (especially when you might not like the current administration) is a problem for you. But DeepMind is also its employees. What's Google supposed to do? Force them to move to the US and renounce their existing citizenship?

And I agree with other responses to this, as well: the US has made its own bed here over the last 40 years. If it was good policy to export all of this technology to distant corners of the world in the name of higher profits, while still relying on it for fundamental functions of government, where was anyone assessing the national security risk?

The only thing that the US can do is force Google to make their employees behave. The only way to do that is either by citing some national security concern (unlikely) or shop somewhere else (easier and much more likely).

Precisely as much as you're paying to host your videos 24x7 on an infinite bandwidth pipe with no regard for how much storage they take up. Maybe even more, if you're selling ads through them.

I have this same problem -- there are a lot of interesting languages out there that I'm interested in trying, but I always keep going back to languages I already know because:

1. I have work to do; and
2. it's hard to objectively compare language merits in the short term or for trivial projects.

I was thinking that the solution to this is to have one program that I understand very well implemented as well and completely as possible in a language that I feel proficient in, and have that be my reference. Then, over the course of a couple of weeks (a month?), re-implement the same program in the new language and strive for the implementation to be as idiomatic of the new language as possible. After all, if you're still thinking in the old language but just using the new one's syntax, what's the point?

I feel like this would give you a lot of data to make a reasoned decision -- you can compare language features and how the implementation works in one versus the other; time to implementation (LOC, maybe?); how much of a mental shift the new language requires; the toolchain around the new language; etc.

The problem is figuring out what the reference app is, and having the stomach for implementing it over and over again. Tetris, maybe? ;)

But, back to the resolution (and partially touched on) -- I don't think a week is enough time. A month is even cutting it close, IMO.

C

(transliterated because Slashdot apparently doesn't allow input in other languages) "boroun na" ==> "are able to"

It's a typo in the article; basically it's saying the laser can pull objects from far away.

Haven't they played any of the Metroid games? We're all doomed!

C

It seems like you don't know the right Christians, then.

Or, maybe, that these people are the same people as everywhere else -- generally rotten, hypocritical bastards.

In my personal experience, the Christians that I've known have been good and bad, same as everyone and everywhere else. I've been especially lucky, on the other hand, that the authority figures (priests) in the Church that I was raised in were good, well-educated men who had no problem with reconciling real life with what was written in the New Testament (I personally can't get over Christians that can quote the Old Testament better than they can the New Testament, but that's a different gripe altogether). In fact, the way that they managed to live what they preached -- one priest, for instance, donated a sizable sum of money to the Church when it fell on hard times, even though he makes a very small salary himself -- was truly inspirational to me. I would like to one day be as good a Christian as the example they set in front of me, but I'm not hopeful (I'm afraid I'm one of those other "normal" people).

I think you're guilty of the exact same kind of behavior, unfortunately, that you rail against from the theists -- a sense of moral and intellectual superiority that lets you separate them from yourself and subsequently dehumanize them in order to do them harm (in this case, social ridicule). Granted, some of the ideas are very bad, and especially can't be reconciled with modern scientific thought, but in my mind the way forward isn't to establish entrenched camps of intolerance and start firing at one another.

C

Now, now, the Canadian government has apologized for Bryan Adams on several occasions!

Likewise in Southern New Jersey (and Philadelphia before this -- the very heart of Comcast darkness)

I get OpenDNS error pages for nonexistent domains.

Or after we've actually gone through the trouble of figuring out that the solution we came up with fixed the problem at hand and caused many others due to the Law of Unintended Consequences.

Asbestos for everyone!

Seriously, though, if there are better solutions available today than terraforming and introducing pesticides that wipe out indigenous species (read: medicine and vaccines) and the only barrier to entry is the cost of said vaccines -- which are themselves artificially inflated to preserve drug company profits by trade agreements and intellectual property laws that effectively kill thousands of people around the world yearly -- don't you think the rich people that own the companies profiting while people who can't afford their products are dying should get an earful?

C

I thought C compilers had gotten to the point where C was just a convenient syntax for assembly anymore?

I'm only half-kidding here. I'm sure the main reason is for portability across different chipsets, as well as ease of debugging. But, as I said, I think a lot of current C compilers can generate code that's not appreciably larger than hand-written assembly.

Compiler writers, please educate me otherwise.

C