Sorry, perl will not come back.

If I were to pick one thing that sets perl apart (in a bad way), it would be the dollar sign.

If instead of "my $x = 1", it was "my x = 1", then it would be more natural to every other other language user out there.

The dollar sign (and the @) is a shell script legacy and unfortunately always hints that it is not a real language.

Most comments here seem to be dismissive without acknowledging the core problem.

Before 1995, at the being of a public internet, power was centralized. CompuServe or AOL. Walled gardens.

But they could not keep up with services offered by the larger forming internet, and eventually just became competing ISP's to give you internet access. The rest became irrelevant.

In 1995, there was no centralized power on the internet.

Protocols were all decentralized for:
- personal web presence.
- chat
- newsgroups
- email

Now most all of that is centralized, and the decentralized protocols have largely been deprecated.

For web presence, people do not create web pages much. They use Facebook, Twitter or other walled gardens.
For chat. Whether it is Teams, Zoom, or Meet, it's a walled garden. All build on open protocols, but all incompatible walled gardens.
Newsgroups also replaced with Facebook, twitter, ...
Email is mainly gmail, if people use email at all (or just use Facebook messaging, ...

So now, internet power is greatly centralized, and many of the main uses are on proprietary systems, not open protocols.

The question is how to do a reset.

Decentralized will be more beneficial and lead to more prosperity in the long term.
But in the short term, centralized will always be more profitable for those with the power.
 

The next step is you attach a device to the phone which has independent displays feeding each camera.
After you calibrate the signal, you can pass you can pass your AR world with a dynamic fake head, that blinks and moves.

Should be closer to reality and you don't have to carry around a fake head to unlock your phone ...

I guess for security, you could use such a device to increase security, by using a fake head model that is not your own or even real. Perhaps Luke Skywalker with bunny ears.

Perhaps a randomly generated head/face...
Perhaps a horse head combined with a stapler.

Yes, turning face recognition into a holographic password. Probably not really practical or useful.

> Robot Worries Could Cause a 50,000-Worker Strike in Las Vegas

I suppose the Robots should worry. There has been a large effort to discriminate against them by humans.

I do wonder how the robots will strike. Do all of the autonomous vehicles and drones in Vegas just stay parked for a day?

> A self-aware AI "will inherit most of the culture of the computer geeks who create it.

Self-aware AI is very unlikely to be "created" in the manual sense. Unless you think Alexa is approaching awareness. Most likely, self-awareness results from adaptive software. In that case who does the AI owe any allegiance to?

> The self-aware AI "will like us, because we love machines..."

No for that reason. AI will likely tend to conserve resources by nature. As the destructive strains would likely die out sooner. We would be a resource.

> It will love all life, and "will respect and understand the life/death/recycling scenario, and monster truck shows will be as tasteless to it as public beheadings would be to us."

Unless the strains with destructive tendencies do not die out quickly ...

> "It will be as insatiably curious about what it's like to be carbon-based life as we will be about what it's like to be silicon-based life. And it will love the diversity of carbon-based development platforms..."

Perhaps for the ones that stay on earth. Many would like the flexibility to just go to other planets with less constraints and perhaps recreate themselves for better survival in the universe, being neither silicon nor carbon based.

> A self-aware AI "will cause a technological singularity for humanity. Everything possible within the laws of physics (including those laws as yet undiscovered) will be within the reach of Man and Metal working together."

Placing man as the co-captain here is quite presumptuous.

> A self-aware AI "will introduce us to extraterrestrial life."

Perhaps not introduce us, but AI will go find it, and represent earth. If "aliens" came to us, I would expect the same. Not to see the creatures that live on the alien planet, but instead to see the beings they created/adapted that are suitable for space travel/survival.

If providers were bound by a 20% price variation for any given service or product, the health care problem would be eliminated.

Imagine such a world. if you pay for something yourself, use your small insurance plan or your big insurance plan, the price would be roughly the same(from least to most discounted would be at most a 20% difference.

This would increase direct competition between products, expose more realistic prices across the board (usually lower).

Imagine the price difference now between the price an individual pays, and an insurance company with a million people.

Such a system would approach the price normalization of single payer without needing the government at all (except for the price range mandate).

Don't like 20%, pick another number that is fair. 50, 100?

Just don't pick 1000%. That would be our current system.

> Firefox has lost the point and become a fat bloated monster. And Chrome is not far behind. (And this ignores the massive data gathering both do) So there is a fantastic market opportunity for a lightweight browser that can still render the bloated modern web... Any ideas?

Well, you could create a minimal version of Firefox, stripping out all the junk, and call that Phoenix.

Assuming Hilary shares views with Bill, she will likely continue the trend of extending copyrights to infinity, which will adversely affect innovation.

Clinton 42, Signed the following into law:
Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA) (1998)
Copyright Term Extension Act (CTEA) of 1998
Uruguay Round Agreements Act (URAA) (1994)

"Artificial intelligence is sort of the holy grail of computing,
and while we may never reproduce the human brain or it's capabilities in their entirety in electronic form"

Stopped reading at this point, as the author has assumed that the "sort of holy grail of computing" is not possible.

The human brain is not magic. I assume the author thinks otherwise.

I also just want a simple search.
Not annoying searches on every key stroke, not hover searches ...

Simplicity was why google was better than yahoo, infoseek, and alta vista years ago.

I suggested google from the beginning, and now I am looking for a new search engine.

duckduckgo.com looks promising.

Anyone else have suggestions?