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This isn't a good thing and it might even be a bad thing. There already is a semi official SDK from PrimeSense the people who made the Kinect hardware for MS - it just needs a tweek to work with the Kinect (an XML file). They also supply "middleware" to do jobs like body tracking and we have to wait to see what the MS SDK includes. FInally there is the interesting distinction between the non-comercial and commercial SDK - does this mean that anything I create using the non-commercial SDK can't be used commerciall and are they going to charge for the commercial SDK and take a cut from any apps that result? The point is that the semi-official SDK is open source so why bother with the Microsoft SDK with strings attached? I wrote all this up about a week ago but it was ignored by Slashdoters - shame on you :-) http://www.i-programmer.info/news/91-hardware/2030-official-kinect-sdk-who-needs-it.html But it is clear that this is an attempt by MS to take over the Kinect party.

Yes I agree - perhaps we should start keeping old offprints just in case. see: http://www.i-programmer.info/news/82-heritage/1616-christies-sells-apple-i-but-not-the-turing-papers.html

This is crazy - so much money for papers that are available on the web for free and are simply offprints of journal articles - none of which have gone missing from the usual sources. You can even buy original copies from the web for tens of pounds. It seems this is a knee jerk reaction and a missunderstanding of the term "papers" - these are not litterary papers or personal papers but scientific papers with a few scribble that are in the main not even Turings! see: http://www.i-programmer.info/news/82-heritage/2043-purchase-of-turing-papers-secured-for-bletchley-park-.html

At least part of the above post is not just wrong but absurdly misleading. The putative quote regarding nosediving is contextually crippled. The original quote comes from another absurd post: iPad magazine sales drop wherein the observation is made that Wired and other made-for-iPad magazines are not faring well after their initial launches. The article fails to assess the impact of absurd subscription pricing policies on peoples' willingness to engage in self-abuse.

People have been over hyping AI for as long as it has been around. In this case all the researchers have managed to do is create a 2D cellular automata like structure using a chemical bi-layer. A nice piece of work but they have no idea how to use a 2D cellular automata to create intelligence either! What you use to implement it isn't the issue. Using words like self organising, healing and showing scans of the brain against scans of the chemical layer is simply misleading. AI needs this sort of work - but it can do without this sort of hype http://www.i-programmer.info/news/105-artificial-intelligence/820-brain-like-computing.html