Central Park is "publicly available," but that doesn't mean you have the right to cut down the trees in it and sell them for lumber. The AI companies are selling lumber and when you ask them where they got it, they shrug and say "publicly available sources."

It's confusing because of non-unique names, but I haven't been able to find a CV, bio, or publication list... nothing to confirm that he is at NASA, was at NASA, or that he's the top electrostatics expert at NASA.

If the Future "Fund" didn't have a endowment--an endowment in the form of cash "fiat" money--or at least a portfolio of conservative assets denominated in "fiat" money--then it was always a shaky reed. If they were gambling on their research funding coming from promise of future cash flow, from investment activity based on FTT play money, then they need to be big boys and accept their gambling losses for what they are.

...not that there's any bright-line definition. But 1401's were considered "small computers" and the main use I knew for them was as satellite computers--auxiliary equipment used together with real "mainframes." For example, an IBM 7090 might perform input and output only to magnetic tape. The tapes were then mounted on the tape drive of a 1401, which read the tape and printed the contents on a line printer.

I read a fascinating book, "Seeking the Cure: A History of Medicine in America," by Ira Rutkow, that answered some questions I'd always had about appendectomies.

If someone asked you to fill in the blank quickly in the sentence "The surgeon performed an _________" you would probably say "appendectomy." Yet it isn't such a terribly common operation today. Why is it the ur-operation, the one always used for purposes of hypothetical illustration? Why appendectomies?

According to Rutkow, It was a confluence of events. I hadn't realized that abdominal surgery had once been a medical taboo, with a nearly 100% mortality rate. Antisepsis ("Listerism") and anesthesia made it safe. It had once been extremely difficult to diagnose. I hadn't really thought of centrifuges, microscopes and blood counts as being a breakthrough in modern technology, but of course they were, part of the medical technology revolution that emerged from World War I. And they made it possible to diagnose appendicitis reliably. And there was one influential surgeon who promoted the idea that it was a surgeon's disease, that appendicitis "belonged to" the surgeon. Hospitals and surgeons found appendectomies to be lucrative, and they became almost a fad; Rutkow cites a hospital in which 1/5th of all operations performed were appendectomies.

There are plenty on the LEAF message board that I frequent. They mostly charge at work.

Based on your responses below, I know I'm pissing into the wind, but... just be patient. It will happen. For a pick-up, you will need more battery capacity than a car due to its additional weight and aerodynamic losses. Expect, for 300 miles range (how often do you need that much range? daily? occasionally?), to need around 120-150kWh of battery. Even with today's battery prices, that might be doable. The truck will push your $50K boundary pretty hard, but it is feasible. The battery itself, conservatively, will be around $25-30K. Add a truck body and its components and it will be close to $50K. With quick charging, the battery should be able to go from empty to full in around 1.5 to 2 hours. Most of the time you rarely completely discharge the battery, so for daily-driving purposes (which, in the US, is an average of 40 miles) it shouldn't take very long to charge, even at home. I've been driving electric for over 5 years now and it's great. A pick-up with that much range and an electric powertrain would be amazing!

Do tell. I've been driving electric for 5 years. The "fuel" is very inexpensive compared to gas. I have yet to go to a mechanic or dealership to have maintenance done. Your turn.

In 2010, Nancy Gohring reported in Infoworld, Ballmer bets Microsoft's future on the cloud.. "'Seventy percent of the 40,000 people who work on software at Microsoft are in some way working in the cloud,' CEO Steve Ballmer said Thursday at the University of Washington. 'A year from now, that will be 90 percent,' he said.... 'Our inspiration, our vision ... builds from this cloud base,' he said. 'This is the bet, if you will, for our company.'"

I think there was similar rhetoric years earlier than that.

The Microsoft "Kin" phones lacked features normally implemented locally on phones, and Microsoft said that was going to be fine because modern-day young phone users were comfortable with relying on the cloud....

That sounds like what he discussed with Putin:

"Putin & I discussed forming an impenetrable Cyber Security unit so that election hacking, & many other negative things, will be guarded."

Donald Trump, July 9th, 2017
https://twitter.com/realDonald...

The next day he said tweeted "The fact that President Putin and I discussed a Cyber Security unit doesn't mean I think it can happen. It can't..." But maybe it can. Perhaps Putin's role in it is one of the "Details [that] are still being worked out, but officials say they expect a decision and announcement in the coming weeks."

Indeed. I used to like checking the Christian Science Monitor, hasn't been a major news source for a couple of decades but often has interesting items others miss or an interesting slant on something... and it's now using a desktop monitor to display less information than you could display on a cellphone screen.

I used to be able to scan headlines of about thirty or forty stories at a glance on my 1600x900 monitor. Now I can only see five. I'm interested in reading news, not complaining, and I've tried to figure out how to work around this, but I can't. The layout and sizing is such that if I use "reduced" magnification, by the time I get eight or nine stories onto the page the text is too small to read.

For heaven's sake! It's just a skin. With all the things they let you customize in Google News, why can't they give me a choice of information-dense and information-sparse presentations?

...without in any way minimizing the seriousness of the situation, let me observe that littering is deeply embedded in human nature, and it was ever thus. The very phrase "throw it away" tells us what we need to know. If we throw it far enough to be out of sight, we feel that it's gone. I'm leading up to a quotation from Owen Wister's 1902 novel, "The Virginian." Wister visited Medicine Bow, Wyoming in 1885 and I think we can take this as accurate observation:

"Sardines were called for, and potted chicken, and devilled ham: a sophisticated nourishment, at first sight, for these sons of the sage-brush. But portable ready-made food plays of necessity a great part in the opening of a new country. These picnic pots and cans were the first of her trophies that Civilization dropped upon Wyomingâ(TM)s virgin soil. The cow-boy is now gone to worlds invisible; the wind has blown away the white ashes of his camp-fires; but the empty sardine box lies rusting over the face of the Western earth."

The novel by John Wyndham begins with a spectacular spatial light show, a meteor shower unlike anything anyone has ever seen before. The protagonist is in a hospital with his eyes bandaged and feels sorry that he can't see the magnificent spectacle. It turns out that everybody who looks at the meteor shower goes blind, and the reader is given to understand or at least strongly suspect that it is some kind of orbiting weapons system that was activated accidentally.

Was the first version of ResEdit released in 1984 or 1985? In any case, for more than thirty years, there have been developer tools that allowed you to draw a UI screen, while simultaneously creating a WYSIWYG screen image, an object-oriented description of the elements in the image (e.g. "a checkbox at 50,100"), and code to generate the image.

As nearly as I can tell, the only novelty here is the ability to work off a static image file, rather than being able to work off the time-sequence of the series of drawing manipulations used to draw the file. This wouldn't be a big deal even if it worked, since it doesn't take very long for a human to look at a UI screen and draw a duplicate layout using a UI layout tool.

As for "77% accuracy," I have no idea what that means or how you calculate the percentage, but sounds like "it doesn't work," because the amount of work needed to correct something that is only 77% accurate is probably about the same--quite possibly more--than the amount of work needed to create it from scratch with a good layout tool.

Furthermore, it is very common for a UI layout to contain elements that are only conditionally visible. An obvious one would be a tabbed panel. A screenshot can show you the control that are in the frontmost tab page, but has no information at all that would allow pix2code to even begin to guess at the controls and other elements that are present in the other tab fields. Therefore, to get even a complete visual record of the interface, it is necessary to have some kind of procedure or script that results in every UI element being systematically revealed. That's not trivial. (Imagine some of the currently fashionable designs that save screen real estate by putting larger parts of the UI on invisible trays that only slide into view when needed).