Here's my scenario:

Bennett, did you ever steal anything?
Bennett, are you still beating your wife?
Bennett, did you write "I was masturbating to the sound of my own superbly polished writing skills and I just came all over the keyboard." in a forum readable by 9 year old girls? That is a felony in my jurisdiction.

No need to consult a lawyer, just cough up a binding series of Yes/No answers and bask in the brilliance of your impeccable logic.

As you note, capable people focus on things that society values most. "Getting rich quick" is the result of producing what society values most, *not* the thing that society values most. So you make Facebook and get rich because society wants Facebook, not because it wants you to be rich.

So I don't see what Nnaemeka wants to happen: society to invest more money in the underclass, or people to altruistically forgo riches to serve the underclass. Either one may be a noble goal, but he should at least articulate what he wants: he complains about us being to urban-focused, but over 80% of people in America live in an urban environment! And tech apps work better in a dense environment: seamless.com, etc, isn't a business model for a farm community; the big stuff has already been done (amazon.com, youporn.com.)

It's not a bug, it's a feature!

Once a course goes online, you can't get feedback from the online tests and fix the teacher's exposition where stuff went wrong. You wind up with two or three great online courses, perhaps with a guest teacher giving a talk on a point where the main teacher can't explain well.

Ideally, you separate the course from the final tests: students watch the lectures, do the homework for the course, but take a final competency test that is designed by a certification body, not the teacher of the class. It's a much better model for all involved: I waste a ton of my time and interview candidates' time seeing if they have basic skills I need: I'd love an off-the-shelf test for that combined with teachers trying to teach the skills required to pass that test. I'd pay real money to put a screening test online and have college professors respond by teaching to that test.

At my last co, we did just that at a Canadian compute farm - used cold river water as the main coolant, pumped the low-grade waste heat to a local town for residential heating.

Hell, just whip up a website that lets users upload a video and get a link back to the improved version of video (use cloud compute for the first few months if needed.)

Get some word of mouth (look at Youtube videos that could benefit - mail the uploaders.) If people actually use it, you can and will get buzz fast on the tech sites.

If you have growing users/day, the VC pitch will be much easier.

Fire and electricity seem to be game mechanics. They happen all the time even if humans aren't around, think about a lightning storm. Game changing, yes, but what the game designer expects you to find and use.

Quantum mechanics, on the other hand, seems more like an artifact of the implementation of reality: everything seems to behave like a classical, Newtonian, clockwork universe, until you look really closely and see we actually have delayed evaluation (or "compute when needed.") That seems like an efficiency hack we weren't supposed to be aware of, and actually makes me think we are probably in a simulation.

I've not sure you understand what the creative people are trying to say. Inspiration is not some Greek God blessing bestowed randomly on creative people because they are walking in the sun. Every good "inspiration" is the result of hundreds of hours of thinking about something from lots of angles and exploring the various ramifications of the ideas you are generating. You can get this from lots of walks outside with your mind free to play with ideas, you don't get it from playing simple games that occupy your brain.

Talk to a musician or scientist: every "inspiration" is the end result of lots of precursor work. As the pieces start falling into place in your mind, you know you are going to get that breakthrough in a week, or a day, or a minute. It becomes so obvious you hardly need to think about it: "it's so beautiful it must be true" is common to music and physics and math.

Agreed, but what do you expect them to sample?

A global statistical model? They claim not to have one.

A Population of actors doing rational things? They didn't seem to implement one.

It's not the DRM (a real screw-up) but the fact that the entire underlying game is borked.

All that cool "model each sim, global structure emerges" rather than "model the global structure, visualize it with animations of sim" seems to be faked. All the fakery means the global structure of the game is just broken: you can't build a large functional city in any reasonable way.

For example, sims leave work, drive home, and pick the first random house they see. They they get wealthy/educated for the next day based on the house they are in. Sure, you get some emergent structure, but it's nothing like a real city or even previous simcity games.

Path-finding seems borked: shortest path is picked over fastest path. All your fire-trucks race to the single closest fire. Left-turns are a recipe for endless traffic jams. Forget using mass transit usefully.

The YouTube videos show all this. It seems beyond fixing, unless they can revert to the old statistical simulation model somehow: one PC doesn't have enough compute to run a large city - they could offload to the cloud (ha, they aren't going that,) or rope the GPU into doing clever sim work (that's a research project.)

Closest I got to Utah was Arizona. Got pulled over for 87mph in Buckeye. Using my English accent, told the cop how much better the roads and scenery and everything was in Arizona and the United States (how can you not speed on such an awesome motorway?) He let me off and gave me a list of Arizona attractions. Win for us both.

Wow, then you are doing something really wrong. Sure, 20% may be idiots with a pre-conceived notion of what the situation is, but 80% are people doing a job and wanting to have a good experience for themselves (and that includes fixing your problem, etc.) If you can get a girl's phone number at a bar, you have enough social skills to get good service from a state or federal employee.

70 over the speed limit, 3 years unfiled minor tax forms, fishing out of season, expired vehicle registration, no car insurance, underaged drunk semi-naked 15 year-old. All resolved with a warning, a high-five, or a $17 payment (for the annoying tax issue, penalties waived.)

And the supreme court judge who granted us smoke breaks during jury sequester (easy negotiation, the court bailiff was impressed though,) and the hot assistant DA (loved the red dress) who returned my lost wallet and said she got satisfaction out of making private citizens happy, and could she do anything more for me?

I love my interactions with government.

Spend energy to convert CO2 to another fuel. Great. That has nothing to do with the article unless "unadulterated CO2" is something important. Unfortunately, "unadulterated CO2" is not exciting: it's cheap and hardly more useful than adulterated CO2.

Thanks for playing.

So it captured 99% of the CO2 in a vessel. Great! Now what does it do with it? Vent it to the atmosphere for zero gain?

Or use some magic zero energy cost process to convert it to chalk or something? Guess the article was missing that.

This is like Sasha Cohen's Hoverboard invention - it's a plank that real scientists can figure out how to levitate. Can I have venture capital?

It's often worse for lawyers, accountants, architects, and consultants at the big firms. You get hired out of school, are expected to work eighty-hour weeks, get ranked and bonused for three to eight years, then just get fired if you haven't advanced to the stay-alive job title (junior partner, director, etc.)

The logic is brutal but compelling: you will work hard, some will make it. Those that don't should be fired before they can form long-term relationships with the firms clients (and become potential competitors.)

Tech isn't quite as tough, but similar logic often applies: the stagnant old timers in any firm become liabilities. They aren't kicking ass, but are creating ever more B-quality code building upon older B-quality code. Eventually, your firm becomes a dinosaur.

It's pretty damning data: it says the reporter lied on significant points. The ball's in his court now: he can declare he told the truth, or he can call out Musk for lying.

If he goes all in, that's when the hard log data comes out.

Broder wants to keep his reputation intact, and is trying hard to avoid saying Musk is lying, because he has to have a bad feeling he will get hit with the raw log data. If Musk is lying, and he calls him on it, he gets a Pullitzer, but he isn't doing that.