The fact that IBM is selling Watson as Watson just goes to show that Watson didn't in fact lead to anything interesting, in terms of general purpose AI. I always considered Watson to be Eliza on steroids, even in the midst of the marketing hype, and so far my prediction seems to be true. There was a lot of noise initially about how Watson was being sent to medical school, was going to be plugged into medical databases, etc etc. So far, from what I can tell, Watson is an expert system, just like Deep Blue -- good at the narrow problem it tries to solve, but not a good model for human cognition or language processing per se.

"Works that are designed for use doing practical jobs must be free; " ... uhmm... and that would be because...??

Open protocols don't help when everyone stops making webpages and moves to Facebook, which isn't publicly crawlable. Remember when everyone wanted their OWN website, and websites linked meaningfully to other websites, and there was a whole ecosystem of small, independent webpages with information on a crazy number of niche topics, and everyone's webpage had links to other webpages that they thought were cool? That doesn't really exist anymore. THAT web is dead. If Wikipedia and Craigslist, and a dozen other silo-type sites are all that's left to crawl (if they decide to let Google do it), how important is Google, really? The web has changed, and Google had to change or die with it. Google+ is just Google's attempt at taking what's left of the public, open web and internalize it (and make it all 'social' content mostly not publicly crawlable, ironically). So yeah, the (open) web really is dead, or will be soon.

I love how the pitch boils down to "Google goggles: they'll help you get laid". (Ukulele not included)

So the countermeasure/defense against this device is one that records what you're saying and then sends it out after a 5 second (or longer) delay, essentially pre-recording what you want to say by a short time. They already use this device at airport gates when they want to make an announcement.

I use InDesign CS5 on my Acer Aspire 1 (Win XP) netbook with 1 gig of RAM. Just sayin'.

Over 168 children have been killed in drone strikes in Pakistan. You're right about one thing - the US is not at the level of Iran, nowhere close.

Funny. When I took Law 30 in high school I came away with a similarly ridiculous notion of my "rights" under the law. I though I understood what I could be arrested for, when I had to answer questions, what kinds of searches I could decline blah blah BLAH.

Well, take it from someone with a little experience and some hard-earned wisdom. The subtle and nuances of how you reply make no difference. The cop has the gun and may not be too concerned about breaking your fingers. He doesn't know or care about the finer points law as much as you think he does, and he's definitely not afraid mess with you and make your life hell if he doesn't *like* you. It doesn't really matter what you SAY because unless it's recorded (which it won't be 99% of the time), you SAID whatever he SAYS you said. In off-slashdot reality, the best advice is to be a submissive dog and pray the officer is in a good mood. Yeah, not a popular opinion, but there you have it.

Wiping out small independent publishers who "collate" mountains of information that they don't own the copyright for may well be what google intends to do. Let's be clear here. Are you an author? Do you create content? Or do you amalgamate other people's work, with or without their permission and/or using "fair use" provisions of copyright law? You don't really say, but I'm guessing from the tone of your post that you don't in fact create content. So, if your site is useful, provide the link, so we can have a better informed discussion about the merits of your site wrt the recent change in google's algorithm.

So what can you run on 1.36 kW/m2? Translated into one year's worth of energy, could that enough provide enough heat to keep me from freezing to death in the winter (I live in Canada)?

Hell, why not legalize herion? And sell it in schools! I mean, if we don't, we'll just be letting the black marketers and backroom pushers make all the money! hahahaha, you crack me up. Everyone "else" (the voting majority) is just blind to the lessons of history, everyone older than you must be a 'fuckwit' moron. uh huh.