Or India but your mileage might vary: https://www.youtube.com/watch?...

More choice is not magically good. More stupid/bad/needless choices is bad - since users are more likely to make the wrong decision, or have to waste their time making decisions. More good choices can be good but even then many users don't want to have to make zillions of decisions.

That's why many go to a restaurant and pick from a menu which doesn't have zillions of choices and they expect the chef to use his/her experience, talent and judgement to make good decisions - how much salt to use, when to use it, where to use it etc. They don't want to have to "configure" their entire meal from scratch, just so that it's edible. If the restaurant/chef expects them to do that most will just go to another restaurant. Same goes for cars and most other consumer products.

And that's why good defaults matter. If your defaults are good then most users will stick with them and when users call support, your first level can handle >90% of them.

It's true Microsoft doesn't really pick good defaults either, but they are in a monopoly/dominant position.

OS X gained share vs Windows not by giving users a choice of desktop environments. OS X has a greater market share than Desktop Linux. I personally don't like OS X and actually prefer Windows XP/7 (once I've configured it to not hide stuff from me).

There used to be a pacman game that ran in excel.
http://technabob.com/blog/2008...
http://www1.plala.or.jp/chikad...
Not sure if it still works.

Probably many other excel games if you look around.

http://www.nytimes.com/2011/09...

http://www.pnas.org/content/10...

Even so they could be doing it at the wrong level or wrong way.

When humans are awake we are continuously trying to simulate and predict the world (including ourselves). We often recognize stuff by generating many similar things to match with. If one of those similar things matches enough then we think it's likely to be that thing. When we look at a dog, our internal world simulator creates a model of that dog. Then we see the dog.

So a dog that really looks like a dog will never look like a cat to a normal human just because the pixels are tweaked slightly. The "internal dog" that's seen is generated by the human. It may look like a weird cat to someone who has seen cats but has never seen dogs, and that person may say "hey that's a strange looking cat".

That's also why we often need a lot more "CPU" when dealing with unfamiliar stuff.

Lastly I'm no AI researcher or neuroscientist. I'm just making shit up ;).

Being aware of a possible future doesn't mean you have to like it or want it, or not complain about it.

That said, I don't see how he's going to stop Amazon doing what they are doing.

It's not really a huge problem[1]. If writers like Charlie Stross stop writing books there are plenty of existing books around. Given a lifespan of 80 years it might well be that there are more books than most of us will ever be able to finish reading. Especially if we are going to spend some time doing other stuff... Efficiently and effectively finding the stuff you want would be trickier.

[1] The real huge problem in the future would be when our continued growth approaches or hits the finite limits of this planet. There is no such thing as sustainable growth given finite resources. Growth becoming zero or negative messes up a lot of assumptions/bets many people have made ;)

Humans as long as they stand upright.

So watch your back ;).

Want bigger screens and more of them? Wait for the next gen oculus rift type devices.

Too bad Microsoft and the Desktop Linux bunch have their heads too far up their butts or are too busy forcing tablet and other crappy UIs onto Desktop users to actually provide us with an environment that will take full advantage of such hardware.

So you'll have to resort to some 3rd party software.

Or you use Kmail on KDE where ctrl-s saves AND closes the message! You have to look for it and reopen it if you want to continue editing it.

The developers keep claiming the bug is fixed:
https://bugs.kde.org/show_bug....
https://bugs.kde.org/show_bug....

But I just checked kmail 4.11.2 and it's not fixed! 12 years!

I don't really care that much anymore since I've long stopped using KDE as a serious desktop environment due to this and many other bugs/annoyances. I've reported a number of them but you can see for yourself how they treat bug reports.

Windows 7 has its annoyances (in aero mode the task button for the foreground/active window is not very distinct from the other task buttons, file search is broken). But for my purposes it isn't as bad as the popular Desktop Linux options (gnome, kde, unity).

Windows 8 on the other hand is an abomination from a Desktop UI perspective.

From what I see scientists don't even understand how single celled creatures think. And yes single celled creatures do think/"think": http://soylentnews.org/comment...
Note these single celled creatures are building shells for themselves. Each species has a distinctive shell style! And as per the link some don't reproduce until they have gathered enough shell material for the daughter cell (when they split both cells split the shell material and build their own shells). How the heck to do they figure that out?

Plenty of people beg the question by saying: single celled creatures can't and don't think because they have no brains. What makes them so sure? If thinking requires brains then does that mean computers will never think?

You can see numerous multicellular creatures with brains that don't really seem significantly more intelligent than those single celled creatures.

So I suspect that the main problem most animal brains solve is not thinking, but controlling and using a multicellular body (interfacing with muscles and sensory systems). The problem of thinking was already solved. At least that "base level thinking". How clever does a worm or slug or single celled creature need to be anyway?

I'm not even sure that scientists have solved that "base level thinking" problem yet.

I see them more like the escalators and elevators in a shopping mall or office buildings. Most malls and office buildings don't charge people to use those. They make the bulk of their money elsewhere.

As such I think public transport should be free in cities that can afford to make it free. The cities could charge their "tenants" a tax which pays for it all.

It might actually be more efficient that way since it costs money AND time to charge (slows commuters down too). If you don't charge you won't need a lot of the infrastructure and staff for handling, reconciling and enforcing payment. Perhaps someone can work out the costs of "charging" and the amount of net income it brings to the city.

See also: http://edition.cnn.com/2013/09...

I wonder if that guy was impaired or he built up a tolerance.

Would be nice if Firefox made it easier for people to create plugins to handle DRM and other streams. Might even make Firefox more popular.

There are many legitimate reasons to download streams for later playback even if some supposed "owner" doesn't want to let you do it. Not all countries have the same laws and from an ethical point of view I don't see how it hurts for someone to watch/playback something without stuttering and pauses (not everyone has great internet connectivity).

I think your problem is you say it's a "side effect" and stop there. Scientists are often curious about unexplained "side effects".

I said:

And you said:

You believe in magic? If you don't then it should be remarkable from a scientific point of view that consciousness exists. Since by the current human known scientific laws of this universe it doesn't have to exist! BUT it does, and we know it.

So you actually know you have a consciousness. Do you not even find that experience remarkable? Why would and should we be able to "be", to experience and know?

You said: "To me consciousness is just memory and the ability to make decisions based on old memories" but assuming a universe with just our current known laws of physics, couldn't you/something have memory and the ability to make decisions WITHOUT having this consciousness that you know you experience? There is no need for it to "magically" be there right? Something could do 1+1=10 without requiring consciousness. Matter and molecules arranged in a certain way could do all the same things our bodies do without it too right?

What in our current scientific knowledge explains consciousness existing? Note, I'm not saying we will never explain it, but I'm saying it's one of the peculiar things in this universe. The first peculiar thing is that the universe exists at all - but without the second peculiar thing called consciousness, we won't be wondering about it - we'd just appear to be wondering about it ;).

Lastly if the distinction is silly and has no value does that mean you don't value your consciousness? And make no distinction between oblivion and consciousness?