We asked the experts when they estimated AI would reach each of four milestones:

* passing the Turing test by carrying on a conversation well enough to pass as a human * solving problems as well as a third grade elementary school student * performing Nobel-quality scientific work * going beyond the human level to superhuman intelligence

We also asked how the timing of achieving these milestones would be affected by massive funding of $100 billion/year going into AGI R&D.

We also probed opinions on what the really intelligent AIs will look like — will they have physical bodies or will they just live in the computer and communicate with voice or text? And how can we get from here to there?

Thus in every land where Christianity spread the slain and resurrected god, and the dramatic annual celebration of his death and resurrection, were quite familiar. It was Tammuz all over the plains of Mesopotamia, from Ur of the Chaldees to Jerusalem. It was Attis all over the region to the north and northwest of Palestine and through the old Phoenician civilization on the coast of Palestine and Asia Minor. It was Adonis in Greece, then in Rome, and gradually all over the Greco-Roman world.

...

"I am the Resurrection and the Life" is merely an epitome of what the Egyptians chanted for ages about their great god Osiris, the judge of the dead, one of the oldest and most revered gods of Egypt. He had been slain by "the powers of darkness" embodied in his wicked brother, Set. His sister and wife, Isis, had sought the fragments of his body and put them together again. And he had arisen from the dead, and was enthroned in the world of souls, to judge every man according to his works.

jQuery doesn't focus on things outside of the DOM. This is one of the reasons it is so easy to learn, but it also limits the ways it can help you write JavaScript. It's just not trying to be anything other than a solid programming system for the DOM. It doesn't address inheritance nor does it address the basic utilities of all the native types in the JavaScript language, but it doesn't need to. [...]

This is where MooTools is vastly different. Rather than focusing exclusively on the DOM (though, as I'll get into in a bit, it offers all the functionality that jQuery does but accomplishes this in a very different manner), MooTools takes into its scope the entire language. If jQuery makes the DOM your playground, MooTools aims to make JavaScript your playground, and this is one of the reasons why it's harder to learn.

The ubiquity of frustrating, unhelpful software interfaces has motivated decades of research into “Human-Computer Interaction.” In this paper, I suggest that the long-standing focus on “interaction” may be misguided. For a majority subset of software, called “information software,” I argue that interactivity is actually a curse for users and a crutch for designers, and users’ goals can be better satisfied through other means.

Using just open source tools and a few tweaks, it is possible to detect and block suspicious login attempts.

[W]e describe selected studies of experimental evolution with robots to illustrate how the process of natural selection can lead to the evolution of complex traits such as adaptive behaviours. Just a few hundred generations of selection are sufficient to allow robots to evolve collision-free movement, homing, sophisticated predator versus prey strategies, coadaptation of brains and bodies, cooperation, and even altruism. In all cases this occurred via selection in robots controlled by a simple neural network, which mutated randomly.

Apple is marketing the iPad as a computer, when really it's nothing more than a media-consumption device - a convergence television, if you will. Think of it this way: One of the fundamental attributes of computers is that they are interactive and reconfigurable. You can change the way a computer behaves at a very deep level. Interactivity on the iPad consists of touching icons on the screen to change which application you're using. Hardly more interactive than changing channels on a TV.

Let's bring back barratry, maintenance, and champerty for patent lawsuits.

Combine that with a limitation on the assignment of patents and a lot of patent trolls would be out of business.

JUST suppose that Darwin's ideas were only a part of the story of evolution. Suppose that a process he never wrote about, and never even imagined, has been controlling the evolution of life throughout most of the Earth's history. It may sound preposterous, but this is exactly what microbiologist Carl Woese and physicist Nigel Goldenfeld, both at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, believe. Darwin's explanation of evolution, they argue, even in its sophisticated modern form, applies only to a recent phase of life on Earth.

At the root of this idea is overwhelming recent evidence for horizontal gene transfer - in which organisms acquire genetic material "horizontally" from other organisms around them, rather than vertically from their parents or ancestors. The donor organisms may not even be the same species.

Andrew Carlson along with Prof. Tom Mitchell and other researchers at Carnegie Mellon University have developed an artificial intelligence language-learning program that never ends.

It simply continues to run and learn more of the English language every day.

The idea is that the Web contains so much information to be extracted, and has so much new information added each day, that an AI program can continuously mine it without its knowledge ever reaching a plateau.