It might be a stretch to suggest that there’d be no AI without John McCarthy, but at the very least, we’d likely be discussing the concept much differently. The computer scientist, who died on Sunday at 84, is credited with coining the term “Artificial Intelligence” as part of a proposal for a Dartmouth conference on the subject. The event, held in 1956, is regarded as a watershed moment for the subject. Early the following decade, McCarthy pioneered LISP, a highly popular programming language amongst the AI development community. In 1971, he won a Turing Award from the Association for Computing Machinery and 20 years later was awarded National Medal of Science. A more complete obituary for McCarthy can be found in the source link below.
Mark Zuckerberg, the man who invented poking and the subject of a major motion picture in 2010 just met his nemeses on the set of Saturday Night Live. No, not the Winklevoss twins, we’re talking Jesse Eisenberg, the man nominated for an Academy Award after playing Zuckerberg in The Social Network. Toss in Andy Samberg and we’ve got a comically uncomfortable situation from Web 2.0′s very personification of awkward. All hail the Zuck Bergs!
The hotly anticipated game, LA Noire, from video game maker Rockstar – the folks behind Grand Theft Auto – has received a possible shipping date of April 5th, 2011. This news comes by way of Amazon, GameStop and Gamefly, all of which have posted April 5th as the shipping date for the video game. As of now, Rockstar is mum on the subject.
One of the most delicious phones the consumer world hasn’t had a chance to taste yet is firming up plans to finally make its way out to retail. Nokia’s Finnish store has put the E7 up for a €599 pre-order, which is expected to get the all-business device to your door some time in February. That matches the last word from Nokia on the subject of the E7′s release and should reassure anyone who’s made use of Amazon’s early pre-orders for this handset that the wait won’t last much longer.
Do you every think that there is a certain level of detachment when you photograph your subjects? Perhaps it’s the camera that is hiding you from your subjects and not being able to look into each other’s eyes. The concept REC camera might go some way to solving that issue as it features a transparent swivel display as a viewfinder, allowing you to look right through it at your subject. With this camera, what you see on the display is what you’ll get, simplifying the whole process. Another benefit of this camera is its ability to display the picture of both sides of the display panel, so you and your subject will be able to review the picture instantly without having to walk up to each other.
Emblazoned with only a minuscule Harry Potter logo, I have to say these external hard drives from Buffalo are rather uninspired given the subject material they had to work with. But, I guess what’s more important in this case is that the drives come pre-loaded with the last 6 Harry Potter films in the Divx format, complete with DRM which means the videos won’t play without a net connection. The drives themselves are rather ho-hum too, with the larger one coming in at 1TB and the portable one at 500GB, and both are expected to be available sometime in November for an undisclosed price. Yawn!
Do you every think that there is a certain level of detachment when you photograph your subjects? Perhaps it’s the camera that is hiding you from your subjects and not being able to look into each other’s eyes. The 
