Maybe not—current AI seems more focused on mimicking and distilling human behavior than on reasoning out optimal behavior on its own.

I believe so—see Wake-on-LAN.

If the dark ages were so called due to the shortage of sources, ours will be called the glare-blind age in contrast.

Careful, Menocchio.

Would ex-Canadians be able to run for President?

Why not? The current president is from South Africa.

Same for those who hear the music in their heads whenever they see the title.

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Ten and a hal^f

I would emend that to: It’s easy to kill random people, but hard to kill specific people. (Which is a logical consequence of increasing population density.)

As are hooves.

On the other hand, “Ancient Aliens” is a lot more plausible.

The defining aspect of Borges’ library isn’t the content of the books, it’s that the library’s form gives it a semblance of intentionality.

With one exception: October 1582—when Pope Gregory switched from the Julian to the Gregorian calendar—had only twenty days.

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According to some prominent theories, the world of our waking experience is itself a mental simulation of sorts.

There’s a related theory that dreams basically prevent this mental simulation from overfitting our experience, so our brains are always primed to accept the unpredictable.

If you’re on your own network with your own DNS servers, you can make the real URLs point to your fake site.

But if the connection was over SSL/TLS, you could capture the web packet data before your browser decrypts it—then anyone could re-decrypt a copy of the data with the site’s public key to verify the source.

The more basic question is, why are you regarding the web browser as the “source” of an image that needs to be verified? Anyone could make a fake website with fake images, in which case the web browser confirming that the screenshots of the site are “real” would be meaningless.

If the web page is (say) photos taken at an event, a better solution would be to have the original photographer post hashes of the photos at the time they’re taken (or have a camera that does this automatically).

You can take any file, run it through a cryptographic hash function, and post the fingerprint on any site with verifiable upload dates to confirm that you had it on that date and that it hasn’t been modified since (without necessarily exposing the file itself).

Proving how the file was created is a whole other can of worms—the obvious solution is to sacrifice control of your software and hardware to some proprietary third-party system that presumably has no stake in the outcome, but that causes more problems than it solves.

So District 9?

If that were the case, the perfect love story would be a movie about a couple winning the lottery, building their dream house, and living happily ever after without a hint of conflict or unhappiness.

But most people don’t actually want to experience the things that happen in romantic stories: the main characters in Pride and Prejudice spend most of the novel making mistakes and suffering from the consequences, and the main characters in Casablanca, Titanic, and Gone with the Wind experience increasing distress and end up parting forever.