Nobody cares about your tales of the old days, grandpa.

Let's try an experiment. We'll put 100 adolescent males in a room, and give them a choice of two gaming systems: One older "classic" system, and the latest high-tech thing available. We'll tell them "If you pick the older system, you'll be a better person someday", and "if you pick the newer system, you will regret it later". Would you care to guess what might happen? I don't know. I've not ever performed that experiment. But purely based on intuition, I suspect I know how it might go.

Go back to bed, grandpa, with your stupid "in my day" bullshit

Rather than debate something you disagree with, you turn to insults. You're a dick.

I agree with your goals, but here are some of facts as I see them:

(1) Kids of this age do not have the higher thinking skills to appreciate sacrificing something for longer term gain.
(2) If you force them use an outdated or substandard system, they will resent you, be humiliated with their friends (or more likely, lie about it to prevent that).
(3) You're not really teaching them anything useful in a practical sense. Yes, I love the Atari 2600 too. It is completely irrelevant to anyone born after 1990 except in a historical sense.
(4) Desire to learn history has to come from the seeker, not the purveyor of that knowlege. It can be encouraged, but not forced.

Very regularly, someone writes a clever new algorithm to crunch a specific limited set of data more efficiently.

Repeat it with me: "This is not an AI breakthrough".

"While anyone can file a lawsuit, being sued by an institutional investor is a little different than being sued by John Q. Disgruntled. "

Not in this case. Men in black will make the case disappear or be dismissed for trumped up reasons.

Good luck with that.

Where do they think the power comes from? Those magic wall sockets most likely are connected to coal burning plants. There aren't enough sites for hydroelectric power to increase by a substantial amount, and solar and wind power aren't capable of supplying the "base curve" of the grid demand because of their unreliable nature. Either allow nuclear energy and/or fracking to supplement them, or STFU about renewable sources please.

As always, the problem is that people don't agree on what "success" means. I think that impersonal testing with static measures of success is best. Other people think that you need to factor in how this particular child got to this point.

Wow. I guess everything I read over the last 40 years is wrong then. Oh, BTW, care to back that up with any facts?

Build huge obelisks that are inscribed with instructions for technology. At the very bottom, instructions about how to read that script using pictures. Further up, details on how to farm and build basic shelters. Higher still (and out of sight from the ground), things like electronics, power generation, etc. Even higher (not reachable by primitive ground structures) things like nuclear power and advanced topics. Thus the populace would have all the info handy to get restarted, but wouldn't be able to use the advanced stuff until they had gotten the basics right.

Disclaimer: Not my idea. Read it in a science fiction book years ago, but cannot locate the title at the moment.

oops... $129.47 billion in 2012.

My ancestors apologize to you for birthing a pathetic moron who can't properly proofread.

from http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apollo_program#Program_cost:

"The final cost of project Apollo was reported to Congress as $25.4 billion in 1973"

According to http://www.westegg.com/inflation/ that would be $129.47 in 2012. Now obviously we have the benefit of relatively inexpensive technology to help offset that. However we also have the burden of stricter safety standards and more expensive "available" technology as opposed to "required" technology. Hopefully the government would be pragmatic enough to select the "appropriate" level of safety. That means quantifying the numeric value of a life (factoring in all the publicity involved, future projects, etc) which is something people don't seem willing to do. I suspect that NASA is very gunshy about repeating a shuttle type disaster, and would not be able to give an upper bound to that number.

All it all, it seems pretty farfetched that this will happen to me.

Building an AI that can understand and implement business logic might be possible if the people making up that logic were somewhat logical. Or could even string together coherent thoughts.

I suspect that once we invent that AI, the 500th revision of the inconsistent and illogical "business rules" by some random jackass son of the owner will be the cause of skynet taking over.

There is no legitimate use for null pointer exceptions. We should ban them. Think of the children.

Thanks for the info. Obviously I should have picked a topic I know something about to use as an analogy. ;-P

" This is hardly something to get up in arms about, unless you regularly re-install your OS in front of a crowd."

Sure, it won't cause a problem if everything always goes according to plan. Perhaps we should save money and remove the interlocks from airplane doors too. After all, it's nothing to get up in arms about, unless you regularly open the door in flight.