Yeah. Teaching people to detect bullshit and think scientifically would be good.

As for getting a problem and finding a solution, it's still good to teach students to think and solve problems, rather than be an inferior "Google" and regurgitate memorized solutions or follow very specific memorized processes. Because I actually know adults who can't do basic problem solving- say there's a problem with something, their default is getting stuck. They don't go - it could be caused by A, B, C, D and perhaps other stuff I don't know yet. If it's A and we do X, Y should happen. OK lets try doing X. OK Y didn't happen, so it's not A. Let's see if 's B now, and so on. Or let me use Google to get a list of possible causes and then figure out one by one which it might be. Being able to finding possible answers that way is more important than being able to memorize and retrieve answers.

Yeah we should encourage the people who want to start cooperatives instead of companies :).

Citation please? What makes you so confident that's true? Fish oil oxidizes easily.

The smell is at least partly due to oxidation: http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pu...

Effects of oxidized fish oil:
http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pu... (affects lipid profile)
http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pu... (but does not affect oxidative stress markers)
See also:
http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pu... (fish oil easily oxidized)
http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pu...

Might not even be procrastination. From the perspective of some ISPs especially those that have strong ties to media companies the increased scarcity of IPv4 addresses and limitations of carrier NAT might be considered an opportunity and a feature.

Carrier NAT would make P2P protocols less efficient. Conventional media companies may prefer a world where "publishing/broadcasting" to many is restricted to those with $$$$$.

If you're getting bad breath from your fish-oil capsules, it may be that they contain oil that's _rancid_ or oxidized.

Bust open a capsule, if it stinks, it's rancid and you shouldn't be eating it anymore than you should be eating rotten fish. Or expecting it to convey health benefits anymore than rotten fish would. Fresh fish doesn't stink - might just have a mild fish smell. Same goes for fresh fish oil. If you eat sashimi or ikura you'd know what I mean.

The big problem is it seems that rancid/oxidized fish oil is not that rare. That's why I don't have that much confidence in those fish oil studies - I don't see much checking on the oxidation/rancidity of the oil.

So it may be that fish oil is good for you, but only if it hasn't gone bad.

The foreign countries might already have similar tech, maybe even years ago:
http://www.rslab.ru/downloads/...
http://ieeexplore.ieee.org/xpl...
http://repository.tudelft.nl/a...
https://encrypted.google.com/b...

Maybe that's what Ballmer is counting on - people paying to watch him doing crazy stuff and not just the teams. ;)

But in our universe is there really a Time dimension to travel through to the past?

http://phys.org/news/2012-04-p...
http://discovermagazine.com/20...

I've never found it convincing that there is a past to go to, at least from the perspective entities in our universe bound by its laws (from the perspective of "someone outside" running the "simulation/VM of our universe" all bets are off ;) ),

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 ;).