I agree with comments that we shouldn't tax robots.
But that's not the whole reason why this idea is dumb.
Because how would you even do it if you wanted to?

Do you tax robots by the arm? By the CPU? By the degrees of freedom?
Do centrally-controlled robots count as one or many?
What about collaborative robots?
What about robot swarms? Nanobots?
What about soft robots? Tax them by weight?

I could go on all day.

Just in time to pump up the awesome C++17.

yea, we all have that, that's why we build these things in the first place.

I'm pretty sure that Pluto Truthers don't exist. I have a theory why slashdot would fake them, but I can't tell you here.

I'm a legitimate A.I. researcher, and I condemn this kind of hucksterism.

It wouldn't be untrue to say that this wasn't unexpected.

You can probably guess what a *correct* code does from 5% of it. But the other 95% are very much needed for those 5% to actually do that correctly.

"I can think of no better way to describe our failure to drop support for the Dual_EC_DRBG algorithm as anything other than regrettable." Allow me to help: indecent, dangerous, immoral, short sighted, borderline criminal.

TV static: https://www.youtube.com/watch?... ; Phonograph: https://www.youtube.com/watch?... ; Horse: https://www.youtube.com/watch?...; Old phone: https://www.youtube.com/watch?...

TV static (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7rVt2b80L-A); Any kind of low-quality recording, e.g. phonographs (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EOiFt47CsXo); Domesticated animals other than pets, e.g. horses used to be everywhere (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=q2ey1_UDj_c); Old phone ringing (listening to this now got me so irritated, just like in the old days; https://www.youtube.com/watch?...)

I particularly like how he calls the reported out by name - presumably unauthorized...

It's not just country, you know. These people have families they would leave behind at the mercy of their former comrades.

The question now is what part, if any, sensationalist media plays in this happy trend.

There can't be a program that verifies the correctness of *any* algorithm. That's absolutely not like saying that there can't be a robot that verifies the correctness of *some* algorithms, and refuses to act on the rest.

This is probably more an ad for Matlab than for Google. People in Google, like in other companies, much more often use Python and Java than Matlab, and rightly so - Matlab the wrong tool for the job, pretty much for any job. Python is a much better tool for data analysis, for example. Only the academic world is locked into Matlab, for some reason, but even that is changing fast, with Matlab so badly disadvantaged. Show good data analysis skills in any language, preferably Python, and the current job market is your oyster.