In this case, I wonder if it is fiction driving science or science driving fiction. It is very normal to fear the unknown and there are few that can know what will happen as robotics and AI advance and integrate more with our lives. But, perhaps instead of fearing the changes we have to embrace them while being careful that no one person or government gains too much control. To me, the question is no longer if there are going to be AI cybernetics taking over human functions, but when it will happen in our day-to-day lives.

The idea has been voiced in holland to start taxing internet connection to pay newspapers for being able to survive. This is along the same lines of thinking. The free content supposedly makes it impossible for newspapers to survive. To keep on the staff of reporters and overhead costs. Nonsense, obviously. A new generation of media companies will just have to find new ways to fund their activities. Advertising is a big one, but other models may work too. If you are going to charge 5$ to access your content I am sure you will lose your readers rather quickly. The idea sounds shortsighted to me.

I started programming by learning python. Still valuable to know the language. But now I suppose I am screwed for life as I also write Java and C#. Why I would need to learn C++ is beyond me, perhaps I just need more convincing, but I have not had a project where I wished I knew more C++.

This promises to be a fun discussion, about what is good and what is best and what sucks. Personally, my opinion is that few are in a position to really say that one tool is better than the other. It is like telling a carpenter that he is better off using a screwdriver than a hammer, where obviously he has a purpose for both.

Best first language? The one you have most fun working with I think. When you have fun with a certain tool you are much more likely to have success and really learn it. But whatever tool you choose, whatever language you prefer, learning about the right way to use your chosen language is smart in any case. For that, python might be a good choice as a first language because it does force you to at least indent properly. If you are more of a mathematician it works well enough for functional programming too, so it does seem to be a safe academic choice.

Perl anyone?

On the RC, my games worked just fine. The thing that I found very convenient is that the NVidia drivers are bundled with auto updates. It was very easy and fast to get the graphics card in my laptop to work right. Windows 7 was not very exciting to test, but that, to me, was a good thing. I installed it as a secondary OS and it just worked. It appeared to be a tad faster (although of course there was less clutter than in my original Vista installation) and has a clean look and feel. Also, it is good that installing windows live is optional. I had no use for it.

Indeed, they is without meaning unless there is a reference available to explain the term.

If you read the article you see that it is actually the kenyan government working to push the infrastructure further into the country, which is then appended with a question whether this will improve the connection for villages. The government is investing their money to further the infrastructure to improve connections for schools, a good thing, but apparently for a large part of the population that lacks even more basic things, notably electricity, there is no improvement.

So yes "they" (the kenyan government and probably the governments of South Africa, Tanzania, Uganda and Mozambique as well) should focus on some investments there as well.

It must be, especially because of the distance it carries data. The rate of transfer is impacted by that 17,000 km so much that this can hardly be the cable you would find in your common datacentre. Add to that 2 years of labour costs and all the resources needed to lay the cable.

A quote from wikipedia: "Because the effect of dispersion increases with the length of the fiber, a fiber transmission system is often characterized by its bandwidth-distance product, often expressed in units of MHzÃ--km. This value is a product of bandwidth and distance because there is a trade off between the bandwidth of the signal and the distance it can be carried. For example, a common multimode fiber with bandwidth-distance product of 500 MHzÃ--km could carry a 500 MHz signal for 1 km or a 1000 MHz signal for 0.5 km." http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fiber-optic_communication#Bandwidth-distance_product

Of course you are right. The point I was trying to imply is that the fact that internet coming to the villages might be very good news, it is interesting to me how this emphasizes the differences between cities and the coutryside. In the article, this last paragraph cought my eye: "But our correspondent says it is not clear whether the internet revolution will reach the villages, many of which still struggle to access reliable electricity." If there are going to be investments in infrastructure, should they not include working on that too?

Now all that is left is to get them some electricity in the villages and they can all start joining slashdot.

In our datacenters we have already started to employ special airconditioning units, raised operating temperatures, redesigned floor layouts, etc. All of this to reduce power used, but not because we do not have enough power, because it is commercially attractive to say and show how "Green" our datacenters are. I suppose this can be seen as another way to prove how green you are, especially if you host services and storage and not dedicated systems.