Their is some value in understanding just how powerful iterative learning tied with reward is.

Of course this is way easier to apply to a game then to real life subjects, but we could try.

Imagine a computer programming tutorial game. Problems are thrown at your to solve by writing a function, class, whatever. Successful unit tests bring rewards and so on.

Functions written in the early parts of the game could be used in subsequent challenges if not required. Use of them brings bonuses, achievements, etc. The faster your code runs the better...so replay would include rewriting older versions of your functions as to improve performance.

There are plenty of games out there for children around school subjects, etc, but I rarely see them marketed at adults. Could modern warfare 3 not actually teach something as the game play goes....seems like language would be a good fit. You have to interact with characters in the game with more and more complicated version of some language to proceed. Start with having to say hi to a guard in whatever language, end the game having to convince him your not a spy.

I guess the real point is creating a better sense of achievement and combining entertainment to overcome the usual tediousness associated with learning. I liked learning how to code because every time the compiler reported no errors it was like completing a level of angry birds. I can't say the same for economics and for many I'm sure they got no pleasure from cracking a calculus problem.

Then I might. I'd love to have my watch show little recaps of emails, caller id, etc. How many times do you hear your phone and don't want to go digging for it.

I'd rather this be just a dummy terminal with great battery life that my phone can control via bluetooth or whatever.

I would have loved google maps while walking around there. Disney's app was pretty poor. GPS isn't super accurate, but enough to kind of let you know where you are in the park. Being able to "navigate" to space mountain would have been pretty cool. I'm sure Disney would give them access before or after the park opens. It also be cool if Google maps had Bluetooth or some other kind of wireless access so towers could give your phone even more accurate location.

Where is the wonderful open market when it comes to this thing?

I would love for my ISP to offer virus\porn blocking services to certain members of my family.

If the ISP goes to an end user and says do you want the safe package? And they block certain sites with possible a way around it this would be acceptable.

Why does the government have to get involved if customers are clamming to block porn? Sounds more like a small group of anti-porn people who just can't stand me seeing it so they go to the government in some last effort.

I don't do either. I use sorting. Often I can remember a crucial piece of information... the sender.

It still kills me that gmail doesn't have the way to say show me all email from user X in the order they where sent. I read my gmail alongside my work email in outlook.

I often find emails where others fail with this simple strategy. Searching requires you to know the word(s) that are in the email or subject. It is usually something completely different than what your brain remembers. Searching works well on the web because the web pages have tons of content that might match what your trying to hit...or many sources of the same information. Email is more precise....searching for Geese won't return Goose.

Combine this with search you might get a general date that the "subject" was being discussed in your company. Then sort by date and start scrolling. If you delete stupid emails or catalog them away you get even better.

At the end of the day email is a horrible way to store data. Use a wiki or something. If you are searching your email it is usually an indication that the information is not stored somewhere better.

Since the SSD is non volatile I'm not really sure what a system lockup would do. If the byte(s) writes to the SSD and the system fails it is still on the SSD. When the system boots up the thing would be considered dirty and would write it out to the hard drive. I'm sure they will have to reserve blocks of data for dirty bits... a byte can store 8 bits each bit representing a much large ...like 64k block in the cache. A 1 means dirty a 0 clean or vice versa.

The same basic thing has been around for SCSI RAIDs for a while. The PCI card has high speed memory with a battery. If you enable write ahead cache it writes into this memory and then returns to the OS. Then it write out to the hard drive. If the system fails upon boot up the card would still have the cache because of the battery and could recover.

For db servers I would probably turn off write ahead cache, but for a normal computer even if there is corruption it probably would be easily recoverable.

Write your republican reps, write your republican friends, or if you are a republican realize this is why we need a CPA.

Someone in the government needs to say "Hey, stop f'ing you customers."

In the long run people will get overage charges like they used to with long distance, local news and national news ( 20/20, dateline ) will "expose" it. Then someone will come along and say hey don't like caps, don't like overage's come to us.

I'm actually more interested in abstracting the actual network. If there are companies that can sell tower time then perhaps Google could just offer direct Internet access.

I'm just as exited about finding these answers as anyone, but what are the real ramifications and are we actually creating new technology or just struggling to use existing to solve a complicated problem.

I lost my mother to cancer a few years ago now. So yes this is a bit emotional, but I rather this 5 billion go to cancer research. This will have real ramifications.

If you look at say the Apollo program it was pretty obvious that solving the problem ( going to moon ) would solve many problems that would spread out in the rest of society. The list is long from material science to better computer. Not to mention better rockets.

I guess I need the case to be pitched as to what are potential overall gains we might see. The real return from this national R&D. If it just a bunch of scientists trying to prove the big bang theory I think it could wait...until we have health care costs and other things under control . If the world could spread the costs or we could think of a cheaper way to solve this problem and others that would be a better use of cash.

I suppose you could make the same case for Hubble telescope. The end result is a little more accessible I suppose. The pictures from Hubble have inspired people in ways we can't replicate. I just wonder if the Webb scope would have the same kind of effect.

The cable set top box wouldn't really stay in Google's control. The cable companies themselves have to drive them.

Do you think they want Netflix running on your cable box that they subsidize?

If Google can get some kind of profit sharing model with the cable companies when it comes to advertising then they will get some traction.

Google also got into the whole ad scheduling space as well. This might give google the ability to insert local ads into youtube streams, which could be a decent revenue stream and really start getting way more customized ads into the streams.

Cisco is the other big holder by buying scientific atlanta a while ago.If google started doing dumb things cable providers could plop back to their products.

Could you incorporate a transparent battery and transparent solar panel to create a window with some sort of a plugin in it?

I wish we would standardize on a standard DC power cord, but I guess USB is as good as any in this combination. Put you phone on the window seal and charge it up.

Should you not have bought a brand new shiny pair of shoes for this demo? :)

And oil isn't. We don't fight wars over it right? It doesn't have any environmental issues right? We don't have a supply constrained system right?

Ethanol is easy to bash on paper...harder to do in reality. WE USE LOTS OF IT TODAY. This isn't some future thing. It's use will not go down with lack of subsidies it will just be more expensive...but less money paid in taxes or taxes going to something else. This is just cost shifting.

http://www.foe.org/usda-approves-use-genetically-engineered-corn-ethanol
Corn based ethanol is improving. We can grow it here. We know how to put it on trains. We know how to make it. We have the system to transfer it around. Newer cars are tested with it.

Sugar cane is also starting to come online in the states. It really only grows in certain southern states...corn is grown in more places with more expertise.

I'm going to guess that everyone that hates on it will love wind and solar. What do turbines and panels make themselves? We use lots of fossil fuels to make both.

The point is we are in transition. Until we have a robust non oil eco system we will be using oil to make the new energy sources. Hopefully some day Iowa will require their farmers to use ethanol in the tractors that being used to harvest the material.

At the end of the day it is just solar energy anyways. The corn doesn't grow itself. Sun for the chemical reactions in the plant, sun for the wind that drives the water cycle....maybe a little gravitational energy thrown in there.

Electric cars are going to be expensive and take a long time to materialize and have the range we need. In the meantime and probably even after we need a liquid fuel that works in existing designs. Yeah maybe a gas like hydrogen will be used, but that is probably way way off.

A lot of IT and programming is not about something you learned in math class. Yes there are times when having a good understanding of math, etc can help, but I don't think there is much math in understanding the HTTP protocol, or TCP for that matter. Most languages are high enough level where you don't deal with the low level stuff all that often.

I've seen kids come out that are super smart, but couldn't get a project from start to finish to save their souls. Each team will need one or more of those super nerd types to help when we need a complex algorithm etc. Although I often want more and better open source libraries where you can just get this stuff..most of the time you do a google search and find some dudes work.

Does installing anything from a mysql server to an Exchange server really require anything that college would require.

For my money we need to start turning our world into more like a construction union. Certainly we still need engineers and other computer scientists, but we also need the project managers, carpenters, plumbers, etc.

I don't want unions and all their baggage, but it would feel cool to have various guilds like a HTML/JS/CSS guild, a DBA guild, a server admin guild, etc.

And why isn't high school enough anymore? Maybe we should stop teaching stupid history and English course and help kids understand computers earlier. Maybe the problem lies earlier than college.

Finally this sounds like some very arrogant crap. Like academia, scientists, economists, etc are never wrong about anything? College professors are always right right?
 

This isn't a south park script that got leaked? Seriously this is the kind of crap Kenny would do.

Although P2P is pretty cool, I do feel like having a server in the middle generally helps things.

Sure there is uPNP, but I don't even like using it with bittorrent.

Skype does open a port on your machine, but I think in general don't you use a middle server that connects the two sides ( likely behind firewalls ) together?

What I'd rather see is a more general purpose API that connects to networks, sound, and video. We are definitely getting there, but we can essentially replace Flash with a few more APIs and further Javascript performance improvements.

From a security standpoint we have to find a way to let Javascript do network connections that are not the same as the main URL. I think the easiest way it to use something like SPF where a dns entry can be plopped on the main sites URL marking the IP address of the server as safe.

This won't really replace Skype as they still have native apps and other access points ( POT lines ), but it could even be used by skype while you are on the road versus some Flash app.

And can't we get an open web cam API before a P2P api? This is why Google needs better product teams, engineers just decide to do cool things, not always useful ones.