Was there any word on why Paramount dropped it? Seems like a strange thing to do one week before the planned release.

Exactly. The idea of a self that isn’t anything other than an arrangement of atoms in space is a spiritual one—one that people will have probably/hopefully gotten past by the 24th century.

I’d like to point out that this isn’t exactly “Damascus Steel” as the method for making it has been lost to the history books. What we have are reasonable reproductions using theoretical methods of how it was possibly made.

Dear Sophie Kleeman, are you sure you’re not trying to create beef in a place where there is no beef?

Especially in this case.

The makers of Axanar are paying themselves salaries from their crowdfunded movie and wanted to use the money to set up a future, for-profit studio for the creators, and they were doing it on the back of fans of an established, copyrighted franchise which CBS, who own the TV rights (and Paramount, who own the movie…

Side-by-side comparisons are extremely common for trademark infringement cases.

Pretty much this. The problem is that basic, single-task algorithms are being conflated with intelligence. We should hold AI to the same yardstick that we hold biological intelligences, judging things such as problem solving, tool use, sentience, and finally sapience. A single-task algorithm can play chess or go, but…

As somebody who doesn’t live in the USA and is therefore not drowning in a morass of racial neuroses, I don’t find anything remotely offensive about Rowling’s description of Native American magic.

You know what they say about guys with big hands...

People, please start believing that health care IS the miracle God sent you.

If you CAN write a program to break the encryption, then it exists. If it exists, then others will want it. If foreign governments get it, then they will use it to break encryption on the US phones (the President’s, for example). The greatest secret in the 20th century was the creation of the A-bomb, a different time…

Jeez. I had the opposite experience. I went all-Apple in college - had an iPod, iPod Nano, MacBook. Then a MacBook Air and iPhone. Even got an iPad. Now I’m on a Win10 PC. I carry a Nexus 5X. I have a Netgear R6400 AC1750 router. I have zero difficulty setting them up or using them, and my options for programs and…

OMG exactly. I don’t understand why people don’t get this. Think about this scenario: you’re a female uber driver. Some dude sees your car sticker and you, decides to call uber and say “hey the asshole in car blah blah at the corner of whatever at 5 pm hit me! I need their name and number for my insurance company.” I…

This is how a custom/special ed console should be done... not those colour & printed side panel rubbish

This is a line of thought that should have been pursued in the original story, and the fact that it was not is highly disappointing.

Samsung Gear is just a fancy version of Cardboard really... baby steps into VR. OR and HTC Vive are the “real deal” or at least, much larger steps into immersion

I still think its a lost opportunity that the Worgen druid doesn’t get its ‘cat form’ replaced by a ‘wolf form’ - same effect, just visual chance.

I lived in Osaka about ten years ago, and can agree on just about everything your friends said. Now it should also be mentioned that there are tons of wonderful, accepting Japanese people who will go out of their way to be helpful to foreigners. But live there long enough and you’ll run into the incidents that you…

I have a feeling that this will turn into a can’t win scenario for Abrams though. Sure, it’s great that he is introducing gay characters. HOWEVER, the people demanding this the most want a specific character to be not straight. Poe. They want Poe to be gay, bisexual or pansexual. And if Poe doesn’t come out of the…