1. The biggest problem I say is its entirely closed nature. I don't mean simply closed source -- I've used tools such as Mediamonkey for Windows and have been relatively satisfied -- but entirely closed to plugins or user developed support. Specifically I refer to the inability to use/add anything to use FLAC, lyrics search, grabbing high quality album art ( a la allcdcovers.com ), social integration (mixtape, last.fm), 3rd party hardware syncing, and library visualization. Each of these could be solvable if only Apple allowed some sort of plugin integration
Though the per-song cost for Pandora is very hard on their business model, is their support of the same for traditional radio anything but hypocritical?
As a student working in AI, I have to say that I both agree and disagree with this writer. I agree with his assertion that AI, in its current state, is not nearly as generalizable as we hope it to be, but simply because it is not now doesn't mean we should give up on it entirely and wait for some breakthrough to come in from another field. Better hardware has been a great boon to AI researchers, but it's in times like these that we need not only to verify or dismiss the mathematical theories put forth 50 odd years ago but enhance them with experimentation.
For example, perhaps descriptors are truly the wrong way to go about object recognition in images, or perhaps segmentation is the wrong way to look at a scene, but they are ideas and they are worth testing. We won't find out unless we try, because unlike the equations proven decades before, there are no constraints we can simply apply.
Though interesting to watch, this is undoubtedly the same method that has been implemented in surgical robotics for years and is little more than a series of go-to-point operations. The fact that both the slave and the masters are of the same general design even makes inverse kinematics unnecessary.
2. See suggestions above
3. Not using mac.