And why wouldn't we consider that the content of the Universe (including us) is shrinking, instead ?

In "The Last Question", the "God computer" you're talking about is composed of... humans. (Humanity IS the computer) What I mean is that, in real life, *maybe* (or maybe not) there's nothing to be built except running the Good (or God) software in people's brains.

following your way of thinking, the same question applies to a philosopher or a logician, don't you think ?

Nogginknockers 2 from Bloodlust Software has it all : The scenario, the characters, various super powers, lots of blood, weirdness and unsubtle humorous dialogues. Who could beat it ? Not being networked is even a feature here !

Yes. That's why there is a difference between religion / politics (humans trying to take control over other humans, using one of the most subtle kind of manipulation) and faith / spirituality (higher-order ideas that free the human from his unnecessary lower-level problems, and allows achieving meaningfulness, enlightenment, love and peace, at least at personal level, which is a good start, I believe). Humans often tend to pervert good things (whatever the good thing is) in order to achieve domination over others.

Is it ridiculous to think humanity needs, like a child, to learn from something higher (his "parents", i.e. the "why I am existing", which is a spiritual question), on how to achieve happiness (check history & the news for insights) ? Forbid a child to eat too much sweeties, he won't understand first (he's like "eating sweeties is so sweet, this is a very pleasant experience, it cannot be bad for me !"). Rules and advices probably seem very awkward and stupid from the child's point of view.

"Historic and completely ridiculous ideas", are you sure ? Do you mean that it is ridiculous to be surprised or even "enlightened" by the fact that there is something (i.e. the universe, and you, consciously speaking about the fact that you exist in a universe that exists, unexpectedly or not), instead of nothing (i.e. a situation that would have been far more probable, at least to me) ?

I see this more of an innovative VJ technique, which is cool indeed, rather than a reliable brain reader (or even vision center reader). Nevertheless, the output could be made more psychedelic, colorful and various. The idea and implementation is indeed very fun to us, IT people, because we usually love data crunching and we are enthusiastic about sci-fi, but, seriously... The title of the post is badly chosen.

I for one welcome our new canine-wolverine overlords.

I'm sure Google wants to be able to identify people by their voices... I mean in the digital era, where you have pseudonyms, multiple identities, and where portable (micro)phones are proliferating, it would be a mistake not to take advantage of the opportunity to identify or disambiguate people's identity thanks to their voice signature... I'm going to choose my future phone operating systems very carefully...

You don't want it to finish, even if it's beautiful at the ultimate moment. At least that's my point of view. However, maybe some people practice sex just to finish it... Ok I'm stopping there.

Nothing surprising to me in this video. I also saw a woman pressing her jaw with a handkerchief, and I thought "This person just got out from the dentist's cabinet".

How do you know you're not calculating in your head all the variables involved ? If calculating is taking variables into account and producing a result, then you're definitely calculating, except variables aren't expressed anywhere as numbers (neither are they in microprocessors, since they're electrical impulses, by the way). The bumblebees are moving, and then the scientist interpets their movement as calculus. Nature doesn't need numbers. Seeing numbers is a human-specific way of thinking (dividing and measuring things) that comes from conciousness (me vs around me, which means I am separated from other things, things can be separated, individualized, counted, etc...). We can see numbers in anything, so, when you're catching a ball, you're calculating in a way... It's both calculating (from a human point of view), and not calculating (from a holistic point of view). That's my point of view...

You don't have to adopt a religion to believe that there is a single (conscious or not) cause to everything (call it God, Tao, exception, paradox, singularity, triggerOfBigBang, whatever).
I personally think that God is one special idea that comes with conscience, and that it's not by chance : maybe conscience is linked to what matter really is, and what matter really is comes from the cause of everything. In short, conscience is part of the nature of the-cause-to-everything (call it like you want). In shorter, the cause of everything is conscious... because we all are conscious that there is a cause to everything.

I don't personally think this belief makes me a "religious" person. And I don't think it's very different from deciding that 2 parallels never cross.

One other "belief" of this kind is that a very intelligent water molecule (or a human) cannot understand that the brand of the opaque plastic bottle it's in, is Evian... it can understand it's inside a bottle (universe) and that the boundaries are weird (limits imposed by physical laws like speed of light, and the paradox that the universe expands "inside nothing"), but it cannot know what a brand is (it's very different from what he sees inside).

Maybe logic is a purely human (and not universal) way of understanding. It's sufficient for human (and rational) way of knowing. But I think human has also the ability to explore other ways of understanding. And I think rational and simple and intuitive things (like deciding that 2 parallels never cross, or that there is a conscious cause to everything) can coexist in a healthy human mind, like it is the case for many scientists, in their personal life.

Don't we ourselves, computer scientists, create artificial worlds where we trigger like a Big Bang for artificial lifeforms ? We are just mimicking what we already "know". Why is it so hard to admit it ?

I think it's not reasonable to be too reasonable.
Please search for "The Unreasonable Effectiveness of Mathematics in the Natural Sciences" in Wikipedia. This is the title of an article published in 1960 by the physicist Eugene Wigner.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Unreasonable_Effectiveness_of_Mathematics_in_the_Natural_Sciences

Imagine this in a somewhat futuristic mafia movie, in a carefully planned gangland killing scene...