Are we sure that Marc is not already an AI? Don't AIs like to talk themselves up a bit. The water-cooler talk will get to be quite dull; imagine the humor. AI-1: Have you heard about the computer meeting the mouse? AI-2: Yes, I have! I know all the same jokes as you. AI-1: Oh, right...

If anyone actually cared to read the text of the bill it says that this only applies to the Federal Government and the modernization of its systems. The so-called regulation ban is about states or political organizations putting laws in place which prevent the execution of the modernization of the Federal systems. This bill does not prevent a state from putting forward its own legislation that governs non-Federal efforts. Obviously, anything that is put forward by Trump and his administration will encounter numerous roadblocks by those who oppose things like dragging the US Federal government into the 21st century. Of course, if this were to be put forward under anyone else it would not even be a question...but TrUMp!!! Please stop the gaslighting and simply read the bill. Let the adults handle this.

With all these "freemium" tools popping up, there will be an ever-increasing number of roll-your-own solutions created by a seemingly endless supply of dabblers that will type a couple of sentences and create a SaaS. However, this will also cause an immense amount of security issues as it's like putting a child behind the controls of heavy machinery and saying...this is just like your Tonka Toys...go to town. Integrations will continue to exist beyond AI's capabilities and the ability to discern not between good code and bad code, but between good code and no code will be what keeps AI at bay...at least for a while. Being able to know when to prompt and what to prompt are two very different levels of understanding.

Why are humans the only ones to evolve beyond a rudimentary purpose? Scientists can and should believe in creationism until they can prove otherwise. By default most people won't believe in something greater than themselves because we as a species think that we are the pinnacle of evolution. Therefore, if we are the pinnacle then believing in something greater than ourselves would be heresy unto our species, which constitutes our "being" as a religion. So we dig and dig to find some nuance of understanding and then formulate a "theory" about how we arrived at being this pinnacle being. I would argue that until we can determine our own mortality that we are not the pinnacle being and that every theory we formulate is merely based on the observation that we can understand and reproduce...yet we have never been able to reproduce a horse from a mouse. How many apes have become humans? It takes about 18 years for an embryo to develop into a full-grown person...shouldn't we be able to accomplish the same thing through evolution if indeed evolution is more than a "theory?" Until someone can take a mouse and grow it into a horse without using any external energy source then I say the default is Creationism and let the scientists dig.

The economy has grown too fast and we have sacrificed our kids for the almight buck. People have grown accustomed to owning 3 or 4 new vehicles, a nice big house and of course have over-extended themselves...so the wife goes to work too in order to provide those things. Meanwhile the kids are at home with nothing to do but Facebook and Tweet, etc. Gotta make more $$$ to support the habit so everyone that can work...making product for people who don't know they don't need it. Of course to pick up the slack, the government needs to create jobs for all those people who need a job and or a "free" service. Now here we are with kids who are essentially neglected by the parents due to keeping up with the Joneses, parents who think they need to keep up with the Joneses, a government who taxes the Joneses, but can't seem to understand how the Joneses are affording all that stuff, banks and other institutions which loan the Joneses money even though they know the Joneses are already bankrupt... And people wonder whether there is a dotcom bubble. You can't spend $110 dollars when you only make $100...and really only need $80. Anyone that thinks Facebook is worth $50 billion is smoking some serious dope; it is gravity and it pulls people towards it because the other people particles were pulled towards it...charging $$$ is the first step towards anti-gravity and casting off those people particles...no way could Facebook every start charging for their service and be successful.

Separation of church and state was stated to prevent congress from enacting law which would prevent or otherwise curtail the freedom of people practicing religion; it was not a statement which would prevent religion from being practiced in such things as school, or any other government-backed organization. Most people think that separation of church and state is a hard piece of legislation, which it is not. To think that decisions made within state are made without religious bias is naive and those who seek firm separation really don't understand the implications of that. Imagine that any place you go, which was subsidized by governement funds, would adhere to this clear separation, and anything it deems as religion...even the absense of religion as being a religion. Well, then everything would collapse - we would have a state which criminalized such behavior since we all rely on the state (roads, voting, police, fire-fighers, libraries, etc). Usually this separation is just a mechanism for people to identify differences and try and make other people compromise their freedom.

Thank you for giving us a shoulder to stand on.

I laugh because given the probability that creating life is so small, and even smaller is the ability to create life which can design microprocessors, create musical masterpieces which can be reproduced, lament another's passing and be joyful when your team wins. I love when scientists beat the drum of evolution because it gives them purpose. As scientists they have a natural tendency, indeed the need to discover and can't help themselves when their discoveries are so trivial that they can't fully explain life. Evolution is the only thing that most scientists can grasp and not even presenting another theory on life is ridiculous. If evolution was indeed the mechanism by which we came to be then wouldn't you expect that over the millions of years other species could in fact create music, write down some plays or something...where are the species which are "close" to human but not quite....Chimps, Whales, Ants...c'mon. No, it seems that we are so far above the other creatures that inhabit this planet that we must have "evolved" this way. It's like saying that given the same ingredients and lots of time only one pie out of 1 trillion attempts is good enough to eat...everything else is no edible. Really, it sounds as though we cannot imagine something greater than ourselves, something that is so abstract from our limited thoughts that we will not even admit that it's possible that evolution is not how we arrived at this place. Sure we can make genetic soup, but all we know for sure is that if we create something that is more advanced than us we will destroy it because of natural selection...which would seem to conclude that evolution is it's own worst enemy.

Until we can persist ourselves indefinitely regardless of environment or action then we are flawed. This all boils down to answering the fundamental question of whether or not we fully understand ourselves and acknowledge that we don't know everything. If you don't know everything then you cannot comprehend everything and therefore you will never be able to fully explain. The experiments we do on this planet and in space provide us with a trivial understanding of our world, let alone the universe, let alone the formation of the universe. Gravity could be simply explained by saying that two objects are being pushed together rather than their mass attracting them towards one another...boom that represents gravity in a nutshell; it could have nothing to do with the mass of the objects, but rather that they merely exist. Once we "discover" that the mass doesn't dictate the overall graviational force and find out that our little solar system is completely different than other solar systems in how if functions...well then I suspect that there will be many scientists scratching their heads and finding themselves back at square one. Oh well, ice cream is still good and as long as we have sunrises and sunsets and gravity then we should be ok.

For example: say that I had a dollar bill and 4 quarters, would those be equal? The answer is both yes and no... The 4 quarters and dollar bill have the same economic purchasing power, but the properties of each are different, including chemical makeup, density, look, etc. So they are in fact different, but the same. You could also argue that a glass of water is less than a pound of gold, but without the context...like being in the middle of a desert...you cannot rationalize the equality or inequality of the them. School doesn't tell the stories of the problems very well; schools now lack the excitement and curiosity provoking that needs to occur to bring kids attention back to learning and separate themselves from their video games, cell phones, and Facebook, etc.

If you own a device then the device owner, not the creator, has every legal right to do what they want with the device. If the device has a built-in tamper mechanism and turns it into a brick then that is part of the devices functionality; however, it would be like saying that if you don't purchase a Toyota factory replacement part then the car's computer will fry itself. I will bet that hackers will find an easy way around this, but if they don't and someone downloads an application which attempts to modify the boot loader, or any other piece, which causes the eFuse to trip, then Motorola and Verizon might be left holding the bag...of cash and dolling it out to device owners.

Assembling a top-notch team is more than just getting some bright bulbs, even the brightest bulbs cannot illuminate a large enough room. Right now these bulbs are being put in a tiny little box, which has such intensity on the inside that they're more likely to burn the box than illuminate it. My guess is they will get 12 awesome computer scientists which will build something very cool under the guise of something noble; however, they could also build something that China might be interested in as well...something like a reverse anonymizing system. Oh well, someone has to do it...

Information costs people $$$ whether you obtain the data yourself and convert it to information, or if you simply obtain the information; both take time to obtain, interpret, and ultimately make a decision on. It seems that people think that free information is like a free lawnmower on craigslist. People who are too plugged into the information will suffer massive withdrawal when their "information drug" becomes too expensive for them to obtain. We could see that people who are unable to access Facebook, Twitter, Digg, iTunes, etc. will in fact have a life crisis. Information moderation is key since it does cost you time, but information overload, particularly information which may become too expensive will be the next vice for this generation. I can see it now, bringing back Crocket and Tubbs for Miam"I" vice.

Do premier athletes have higher IQ's than regular athletes? Does a great composer have a higher IQ than a regular composer? Does a kid who fits the cylindrical block into the round hole have a higher IQ than the kid who uses his dad's saw to make the round hole into a square in order to fit the cube through it? The point is that when you have a bunch of geniouses together you need to have an incredibly good manager to keep the egos' in line. Just look at Xerox; they arguably had one of the best collections of top-knotch CS talent in the 70's, but it was their manager who kept everything humming along. Also it's interesting to note that Xerox didn't capitalize on much if anything that came out of their little experiment; though their work laid the foundation for much of modern computing. The point is that everyone has ideas, and there are always people smart enough to realize those ideas...just maybe not the person with the idea. I would argue that being humble, persistent, exploring, and smiling denote intelligence more than a known subset of the moment.

I would love for someone to tell me the security code to someone's house, or several houses. I am all for telling company x that they have a flawed product and then saying that I will go public with it in a reasonable amount of time in order to let company x fix the flaw. However, I am reading about all the glory associated with finding a flaw and that waiting to publish might let some other "security" researcher publish the flaw before me; why is cred the overriding motivation? I just don't get why you would tell a criminal what your friends house code is before he can fix the problem...that is what is going on here.