Back in 1985 -- before most present-day Netizens were born -- Mentifex jacked into Cyberspace and launched a technological Singularity as described in a self-published AI For You textbook of artificial intelligence. If you self-publish, you will say what _you_ want to say in _your_ own words. You will leave your mark on the world. You owe it to yourself to self-publish your oeuvre.

if he cares about details... he will need to have the tripod positions known, lens type known, and take pictures of reference items of simple geometry to verify the stitching and other perspective errors.

He can recreate the lens/ camera / geometry structure in a 3d studio type application, and reverse it to make a relatively distortion free copy.

You should record the type of lens used, the type of camera... and set up a tripod over the map, keep it consistent, and take a few pictures of reference items.

Recording the lens type and all of the exact settings would make it easy to use software to correct for distortion. The reference... grid of say 1cm by 1cm squares with some other simple geometry to test your math.

Look, if somebody has made their computer totally nasty by using it as an ashtray,
1. That should void the warranty because customer gross negligence damaged it... you don't blow particulate matter into a computer!
2. If the computer has fine soot all about it, don't touch it.

I suspect that the computers were saturated with cigarette smoke, and There should be a way to charge the customer for rediculous clean up... 40 dollars an hour plus materials for Personal protective equipment.

Some goggles and a mask and a special cardboard box with venting -- vacuum attached...

I do feel sorry for the people who contaminated their computers...
1. They are such dumb asses
2. They probably are about to loose a lot of data, and should have an option to pay to have the damn thing cleaned.

Apple should make a note in their legalese... unless they already have something that covers it...
certain Exposure to particulate matter may void your warrenty, and or have a break-even cost to clean price associated with it.

1. Museums for AI Mind Exhibits

• Ask your local science museum if they have an AI Mind exhibit. If they do not, volunteer to install MindForth as an AI exhibit.See which museum is the home of the oldest living artificial intelligence.Albuquerque NM -- New Mexico Museum of Natural History and Science
• Baltimore MD -- Maryland Science Center Berkeley CA -- Lawrence Hall of Science Bloomingtown IN -- Wonderlab Museum of Science, Health, & Technology
  Boston MA -- Museum of Science
• Brantford, Ontario, Canada -- Personal Computer Museum
• Charlotte NC -- Discovery Place
• Chicago IL -- Museum of Science and Industry
• Columbus OH -- Center of Science and Industry (COSI)
• Detroit MI -- Detroit Science Center Jersey City NJ -- Liberty Science Center Kansas City MO -- Science City at Union Station
• Los Angeles CA -- the California Science Center
• Louisville KY -- the Louisville Science Center
• Manchester UK -- Museum of Science and Industry (MoSI)
• Mobile AL -- the Gulf Coast Exploreum Science Center
• Mountain View CA -- Computer History Museum
• New York City NY -- the New York Hall of Science
• Norwich VT -- Montshire Museum of Science
• Philadelphia PA -- the Franklin Institute Science Museum
• Pittsburgh PA -- Carnegie Science Center
  • with RoboWorld exhibit showing how robots
    • sense;
    • think (see MindForth AI with KB-traversal);
    • act.
• San Francisco CA -- The Exploratorium
  • Mind exhibit at The Exploratorium
• Santa Ana CA -- Discovery Science Center
• Seattle WA -- The Pacific Science Center
• Shreveport LA -- the Sci-Port Discovery Center
• St. Louis MO -- the St. Louis Science Center
• Troy NY -- the Children's Museum of Science and Technology
• Tyler TX -- Discovery Science Place
• Winston-Salem NC -- Sci-Works

When the first true artificial intelligence, MindForth by Mentifex, went operational in January of 2008 and started thinking after a decade of arduous development, there was a companion program in JavaScript called Mind.html that ran directly off the Web in the Microsoft Internet Explorer (MSIE) browser. All a user with MSIE had to do was click on the link to see the JavaScript artificial intelligence (JSAI) flit across the 'Net and take up residence in the Windows (tm) computer of the human user. It was so simple -- no programming involved, no set-up, no security worries, no need of expert help -- like, for instance, a docent at a museum.

But the JSAI tutorial program remains very limited in what it can do and in what people can do with it. It is not suitable for installation as the mind of a robot, because a JavaScript program is not allowed -- for security reasons -- to control anything but the Web browser on its host computer. The JavaScript AI program also runs so slowly that it tries user patience. The user waiting for a response from the JSAI does not see the intensive computation going on behind the scenes as the artificial Mind races through its memory banks to think up a response to an input from the user. Nevertheless the Mind.html JSAI is very good at what it is intended to do. Since JavaScript is a flashier, more visually appealing language than staid old Win32Forth, the JSAI serves its tutorial purpose admirably. It shows graphically how an AI Mind thinks. It also includes clickable links to other resources, such as the User Manual, the more difficult to install but intrinsically more powerful MindForth, and potentially to any science museum where users may visit MindForth. Thus the Mind.html AI -- which is ridiculously easy to make copies of and install on a Web site -- is out there on the Web, inviting users to visit science museums in search of the real thing -- MindForth.

In order to achieve SuperIntelligence an artificial general intelligence (AGI) needs the superfast speed and the massive parallelism of a Supercomputer.

Although the idea of development standards in Artificial General Intelligence (AGI) or AI Standards in general is something of a misnomer for an explosively evolving phenomenon, there are still standards of excellence to be applied in the creating and coding of an AGI. One optional standard is the choice of 64-bit computing platforms as an ideal environment for a machine intelligence requiring random access to a practically unlimited memory space.

Part of the approaching Technological Singularity will be the dislodging of Big Pharma and Big Physics and other traditional supercomputer users from their station as the overlords of High Performance Computing (HPC). AGI will assume its rightful place at the summit of supercomputer usership and ownership. "All your supercomputer will belong to us." The new AGI overlords will not tolerate jonesing among nations for bragging rights to the fastest or biggest Supercomputer on Earth.

Mount St. Helens is close enough to Seattle WAC USA that I used to watch eruptions from the shores of Green Lake in North Seattle. A superuption from a supervolcano could take out the Microsoft campus in Redmond WA USA and the Mentifex AI Project in Seattle. Then maybe the world would be better off without either of them.

Open-source robotics hardware is all fine and dandy, but ultimately worthless without artificial intelligence.

Artificial intelligence is Open-Source and needs Robot Bridgeware to connect open-source hardware devices to open-source AI Minds.

AI has been solved for open-source hardware in need of open-source intelligence.

Speaking as someone who majored in ancient Greek and Latin as both an undergraduate and in graduate school at U Cal Berkeley, IMHO computer science is now at the cutting edge of philosophy.

Now that AI has been solved, the philosophy of mind has switched from theory-mode to practicum-mode, just as AstroNomy switched from theory-mode and observation-mode to practicum-mode when ManKind ventured into SpaceTravel in the nineteen-sixties.

Even NeuroScience is moving into computer science, as a Theory of Mind for artificial intelligence gets implemented in Open-Source AI SoftWare.

AI Funding is now available for philosophers-turned-computer-scientiosts.

macbook air in an interdepartmental env?