A simple neural network can accomplish symbol association by merely categorizing things, without any deep knowledge or understanding of them.
Neural networks like this are trained with pavlovian methods, and are not self aware or conscious. So such behavior is not at all evidence of any kind of self awareness or consciousness.
In this case, it seems like it would have been a better choice to build the school in San Francisco proper, than its outskirts. The marginal gains in affordability aren't worth sacrificing proximity to the tech industry.
You could charge something like a quarter percent for only a few months as a placement fee, and keep the standard $200 rate for all classes, with placement services as an option. While that's not as attractive as a full refund, it does avoid the issues pointed out in some of the other comments (like counting a freelance job as employment).
I'm really fond of Holberton's tuition scheme, where you pay 25% of your salary for two years after graduation. In this scheme, everyone is incentivized to help the student get a high paying job, so the school simply can't become a degree factory.
On a per mass, or per nucleon basis, fusion wins hands-down: one gram of deuterium results in 10^12 J of energy, or 275 million kcal. Fission gives a comparatively small 20 million kcal per gram of 235U. So fusion is over ten times as potent. Keep in mind that chemical energy like that in fossil fuels is capped around 10 kcal/g. - See more at: http://physics.ucsd.edu/do-the-math/2012/01/nuclear-fusion/#...
Outlawing encryption in impractical for a whole number of reasons. But what the government wants is a situation where encryption is only available to sophisticated users. That means no default encryption on phones or apps, for example.
The real irony of that example is that game consoles would be one of the secure methods of communication that would persist if encryption somehow disappeared. Messages can be sent by in game actions which are very difficult to monitor, even if unencrypted.
Chess isn't random, it's chaotic. Where randomness is unpredictable, chaos is deterministic but so computationally complex that it can't practically be solved. Chess is the art of navigating that chaos.
My experience is that tactics is a spectrum. You can always improve your tactics, no matter who you are. There is no player who never makes tactical mistakes.
Whenever you feel like it's positional understanding that holds you back, that just means that your tactics are at a higher level than your positional understanding, so your opponents are less able to exploit tactical mistakes in the games you play. Once you improve your positional understanding, your rating will rise until you are facing opponents who are once again able to take advantage of you tactically.
"the rational behavior would be to read the code, understand what it does, and reject it if it doesn't work for their use case."
This just isn't practical in most cases. I just don't have time to read the source of every tool I use. No matter how much we strive for simplicity, the fact of the matter is that nearly any software system that is useful these days is going to be too big for every developer who uses it to read its source. You have to accept that in a lot of cases, you're going to need to use tools whose inner workings are obscure to you.
Simplicity in programming is great, but we passed the point of understanding all the software we used a LONG time ago.
This is not going to make a dent in prices. It would take developments of similar scale in every municipality in the region to begin to address the problem.
Neural networks like this are trained with pavlovian methods, and are not self aware or conscious. So such behavior is not at all evidence of any kind of self awareness or consciousness.