So only cook sleeping children?

I think you're right about the "tragic accident" side of things, but if we figure out how to get people to live to 1,000, I don't think nutrition, controlling obesity, or smoking will be very big issues -- they'll be pretty much solved (if they weren't, we wouldn't be living to 1,000).

Based on the headline and the fact that I was not in the idle section I expected this to be some sort of examination of incoming freshmen' opinions on things like education, drugs, and sex. Of course the article is instead just a collection of celebrity trivia and popular culture from the past twenty years.

Perhaps, but once you get online it changes entirely. I could beat everyone in my dorm at Starcraft even in 2v1s and sometimes 3v1s, but online I'm just an average player.

Actually the singularity is not really about exponential growth -- I mean, sure, Ray Kurzweil writes about it a lot and uses it as evidence to get people excited, but the main idea of the singularity is that once we can create a high-level AI (at or greater than human), it can modify itself to become "smarter", and then that modified self could modify itself, and then it recursively continues. "Let an ultraintelligent machine be defined as a machine that can far surpass all the intellectual activities of any man however clever. Since the design of machines is one of these intellectual activities, an ultraintelligent machine could design even better machines; there would then unquestionably be an âintelligence explosion,â(TM) and the intelligence of man would be left far behind. Thus the first ultraintelligent machine is the last invention that man need ever make." Also, I don't know about Cerf, but Kurzweil definitely doesn't use this idea to incite fear -- he has been criticized for being too optimistic.

When I saw this headline I was hoping it was about using virtual worlds to train an artificial general intelligence, like Ben Goertzel is focusing on with his "novamente" project http://www.kurzweilai.net/meme/frame.html?main=memelist.html?m=3%23710. So far he's only implemented virtual dogs (well, he's done a lot more than that, but only really experiemented a lot with dogs, I think), but parrots are next up I believe.

"What is happening to our young
people? They disrespect their elders, they disobey their parents. They
ignore the law. They riot in the streets inflamed with wild notions.
Their morals are decaying. What is to become of them?"

- Plato

People just love to see the past as better than the present in some way, and of course to use that as justification for whatever stupid ideas or traditions they're trying to keep around despite reams of evidence pointing to their bad effects.

And yet more and more books (especially computer science related textbooks) are becoming easily and freely available online (sometimes legally, sometimes via rapidshare or torrents) for anyone who knows where to look -- far more easily than taking a trip to a library and picking up a dead-tree book. Right now, of course, there are some books that you can't find online and should head to the library for instead (or order off amazon...), but the percentage in this category is dropping constantly, and it'd happen even faster if people like Bradbury wouldn't be illogically resistant to change. What people seem to forget is that the internet isn't just a collection of websites with short articles or videos, it can be a source for sharing actual books (many of which your local library would probably not have). So it's got a quickly-growing library in it, and then other stuff too (the other stuff just tends to get focused on more).

I am all for this if it means that they'll make the game actually difficult now. Recently Nintendo games have become way too easy, presumably because they don't want to frustrate casual players. With this demo feature, they can make the games provide more of a challenge without risking alienating casuals.

It doesn't seem likely that this thing could recoup the cost of installing it in any reasonable timeframe.