WTF are you talking about? What is this "outside" that you speak of?

He only said it would be one of the last jobs to go, which is probably correct: once a computer is smart enough to program itself to do other jobs, then the other jobs are also obsolete. Therefore those jobs will be obsolete before, or as soon as, programming is obsolete.

unless they involve prison. Am I politically correct yet?

Even if Google doesn't "need" new ideas right now and execution is more important, once they get rid of 20% time and it disappears from the corporate culture, it will be VERY difficult to bring back. I worked at a place where they tried to promote 20%. It never gained traction because of management's inability to reallocate the 20% from pre-existing tasks. Some day when Google is in need of brilliant ideas, they will probably regret this move.

I'd buy more of their stuff if I had infinite money. Unfortunately, the Fed isn't pumping cash into my bank account...

Why would anyone want to move to a place where their taxes would get swallowed up by pre-existing debts rather than being spent on something of benefit to that person? I know this is unfair, but people act based on their self-interest, and their self-interest should tell them to stay the hell away from Detroit.

All this does is redefine programmer. Originally, you had to code your own machine code, but very soon you had assemblers, so you could just use mnemonics. Then you had compilers, which wrote the assembly code for you: all you had to do was write C code. Thus, we already have programs that write programs. Still, we have to describe what program it is that we want. And that is still considered programming. If in the future we do this using a flow chart, then that simply means we use a visual programming language (Although I'm very skepitcal about flowcharts making programming any easier. Flowcharts were popular in the 80s and fell out of favour as a way of describing tasks. As a task gets complex, the flowchart becomes unwieldy very quickly. Far easier to use a high-level language like Python.)

No, I think he means the planet will turn to dust eventually regardless of whether humans are here or not.

It just occurred to me that if you make sure each proxy only downloads/uploads a tiny portion of the file, then it'll be harder to sue any individual proxy for the whole amount of damages, and they'll have to pursue a large number of defendents for a small amount each. This could help unite people against unreasonable RIAA actions.

Oh, hey, you're right. Nice.

One major problem with Google's two-factor authentication is that it requires mobile phone reception. There are many settings where mobile reception is not available. It would make more sense to SMS or print a one-time pad with enough numbers to last until the user decides to generate a new pad.

So the state thinks the public needs to be kept ignorant in order to behave properly? The public is too immoral to be expected to behave fairly if allowed to know the truth? Is this sort of paternalism appropriate in a transparent information society, where were are told "privacy is dead - deal with it"?

I agree. The X axis is usage time, but also the amount of stuff you have gotten done on the road to knowledge. A shallow learning curve means you can actually get a lot of work done before learning very much. The Y axis is obviously your knowledge of the system.

Wait, so he's saying jockdom is obsolete because it's the best way to motivate factory workers, but China is overtaking our factories, but the Chinese place their nerds above jocks? Is this a contradiction? If China is still industrial shouldn't they have jocks on pedestals? Or I guess maybe not, because Chinese are automatically nerds?

What'd be awesome is if someday they could scan people's brains and, if they had a song stuck in their head, automatically charge their credit card or bank account.