from his new book "If Only God were as Smart as Me!"

That worm brain is well studied, but they still do not understand how it works. Whenever you see something about someone simulating a human brain, or a cat brain, or a rat brain, just remember that the people working on this stuff realize that even 302 neurons are still too many to understand currently.

Short answer: yes, different levels.

Longer answer: There is much complexity and the real answer would probably cover a few books. But a few highlights: neurons have their firing rate and their spike levels modulated by a variety of things in the brain. Glial cells (which are 10x more numerous than neurons) inhibit and disinhibit neurons, communicate with each other and are involved in computation. Some neuron communicate with a continuous flow of protons (inner ear, acceleration detection), some fire locally on their dendrite instead of the typical method of sending a signal down the axon. There have also been recent discoveries linking microtubule quantum vibrations to anesthesia effects (implying it is part of computation).

I can believe they have universities, the buildings at least, but I'm a little suspicious about the whole "student" thing.

I always wondered why that mission failed so badly and then I read up on our special forces. They had only been formed fairly recently before that mission (a few years?) and that mission was one of the first. I was surprised, I had assumed we had those types of special forces groups in the military for a long time.

or my 16oz latte is going to get cold and I will need to buy another one.

For me, coding/design/problem solving seems to be mostly 3d abstract visual with objects being represented by some abstract entity and interactions that I can "see" (in quotes because I'm not sure that's what's really going on) and manipulate.

Reading or writing code is a translation to/from the imagery which is the real "code". The imagery is the abstract representation of the solution and where the problem solving happens.

The new and exciting "Smoke Signal" app. 1 puff signals "danger", 2 puffs for the "all clear" and of course 3 puffs for "party at my place".

US has traditionally had a much lower fraud rate than the UK so there was no motivation.

The UK fraud rate was much higher but chip and pin has helped bring it down to match US levels (in 2010 US cc fraud rate=.085, UK=.070, first time UK was lower)

The only thing missing are Live Tiles

My experiences: each of my 3 kids encountered two completely ineffective/incompetent teachers in junior high and zero in elementary and high school (although we were aware of 1 in elementary that we fortunately did not have to deal with).

It wasn't that many but the level of incompetence was astounding and nothing could be done.

The data was stolen from the POS device's ram during the brief amount of time it was there. Would Chip and Pin prevent using any of that data later on? Seems like the pin would have to be in mem at some point also, but I don't really know.

Ya, it's pretty weird. In our DC we have people running around doing this work and some of the orders are mail order/ecom and some are wholesale and some are for our retail stores...but they have no freaking idea which is which, they are performing the exact same tasks, filling a tote full of goods from the pick bin and placing the tote onto the conveyor.

They've already done the calcs (so has everyone managing a dc), human labor is expensive and so there is a lot of money available to pay for automation.

For an average sized DC of about 250,000 sq ft and using 1,000 robots to replace 100 to 200 pickers/putaway people (still need packers and others), it would pay for itself after a few years.

Nokia retained rights to their brand and logo, only restricted from using logo for 2 years (until 2015). Nokia could introduce an android phone in the near future if they want to.