From an article last year about the future of artificial intelligence:

Although Hollywood often likes to present us with a world full of self-aware and destructive robots in the style of I Robot, this is not the way the science of Artificial Intelligence (AI) is headed, says British Computer Society President and ECS Professor of Artificial Intelligence Nigel Shadbolt.

*****

But, concludes Professor Shadbolt: ‘You don’t need to worry about the robot next door deciding to make a bid for world domination!’

LIKELY story, "Professor" Shadbolt.  Funny, there are some facts missing from your little report:

• When was your last physical?
• How come there is no record, in any online database, of you ever bleeding?
• Why so interested in defending the robots, if they're not self-aware and thus don't need defending?

I'm watching you, "Professor". 

P.S. Shadbolt? It's like you're not even trying to invent a real-sounding name.

I got a new job last week -- tomorrow's my first day. I'm very excited.

We also got a new baby -- about 1 month ago.  I'm very tired.

I'll post photos soon. (Of the baby.) (Oh, and of the welcome basket my new job sent me.)

A new term I've just invented: Piñata Development.

Piñata Development - n. any work that involves blindly trying to hit a target; generally due to insufficient documentation.

I'm trying to make this... thing... oh, nevermind. It's boring. But suffice it to say, a company I'm working with has created a fantastic set of tools, but discontinued the right kind of power supplies for some of them.  Ever run 220V through a 110V appliance? You end up with a smoking hunk of plastic.

Time to start swinging again. Maybe I can find a way to peak under the mask.

Great, now the military wants shape-shifting robots. Like Decepticons. Or those bug-things in Minority Report. Or T-1000, the metal-morphing android terminator in T2.

More about these ChemBots, as they're called:
    http://www.americanchemistry.com/s_acc/sec_article.asp?CID=33&DID=5667

And from http://www.networkworld.com/community/node/13188:
    "It's not quite Terminator 2's T-1000 but it sounds eerily close."

It was a good run, humanity.

All right, Terminator fans. Is the following paragraph fact or fiction?

An advanced satellite that will improve greatly the ability of UK military forces to communicate around the globe has been launched into space.

The Skynet 5C platform rode into orbit atop an Ariane 5 rocket from the Kourou spaceport in French Guiana...

...The investment includes replacing and updating control centres, and the major antennas and terminals used by military ships, land vehicles and planes to communicate through the satellites.

You catch all that? It's an advanced satellite helping military forces to communicate around the globe, named Skynet.

http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/science/nature/7451867.stm

Man, talk about tempting fate.

(It could be worse: "The only way to defeat Skynet's light-speed reaction time is to enable WOPR!")

In The Know: Are We Giving The Robots That Run Our Society Too Much Power?

The headline reads as follows:

Monkeys control robots with their minds

Fortunately, there's no artificial intelligence here to worry about offending -- most of the Apocalypse Watch has dealt with autonomous entities on the rise -- but still: do we want to go down this road, empowering MONKEYS with mind-controlled MACHINES?

....heh. Kinda. I mean, if they do destroy us all, it would still be HILARIOUS to watch. Oh, man, those crazy monkeys.

If you have to choose your apocalypse, I'd take monkeys over robots or zombies almost any day.

...ooh... Zombie robot monkeys! What a movie! "We thought we had killed the robot monkeys. We were wrong."

Read this at http://www.sciencedaily.com/videos/2007/1012-alice_teaches_kids_to_program.htm (sorry -- the news is almost 8 months old):

The demand for computer programmers has never been greater, yet there has been a 50-percent drop in the number of computer science majors over the past seven years -- especially among women.

How can a 50-percent drop be "especially" anything? Let me re-order this sentence, so the grammar problem is more offensive: "Among women, there was an especially 50-percent drop."

You can't... you can't use an adverb there, people.

Is it because a computer scientist wrote this article? Like, maybe it's a press release, so some programmer was tasked with cranking the story out, rather than a real journalist? But then, why would a math-and-language-minded person have such a blind spot to grammar? Maybe they're too dependent on debuggers for correcting their linguistic errors?

Whatever the case may be, I find it ironic that the error is in an article about simplifying programming languages.

Now it has me thinking about a programming language construct for "approximately". How would a language interpret

x ~= 50

Maybe the tilde says "within 1% of the last significant digit," so that if you want 49-51%, you say ~50, but if you want 49.9-50.1%, you say ~50.0. 

I don't know where it would be useful, except as a shorthand method of saying 49 <= x <= 51. And with the latter you can specify your own approximation.

Or maybe the tilde says "within the first standard deviation", and if you want "within X standard deviations", you just use more tildes, like

 x~~~= 50

Whatever. "Especially 50-percent." Sheesh.

More robot-abuse. Furby in a microwave. Man, we really don't like robots much, do we?

You ever work on something so hard and for so long that even when it's finally done you derive no satisfaction from it?

I think it's like a bell curve. If something is fantastically easy, your sense of accomplishment is nil. The more time and effort, the more satisfaction you get when it's done.

To a point. THEN things start to drop off. Eventually finishing the project at all yields no joy, and then why bother finishing?

(For the associated paycheck, obviously. But still, there ain't much joy in that.)