Facebook makes about $16/year/user in English-speaking North America—and it's believed that about 10% of all web traffic is ad-blocked. I'm guessing there are some other people at Facebook who are aware of this situation!

Alas, your cat lacks the capacity for it. As does mine. (*thunk*)

There's an old machine learning technique called genetic programming, which consists of randomly trying to find the correct algorithm to solve a problem. It's infeasible for large problems, but I've seen an example of using it to find Newton's law of universal gravitation. The raw result was a hilariously overcomplicated equation full of redundant multiplication and division operations, but it showed a real, meaningful evolutionary process. Just because a program's insane doesn't mean it's disqualified! (And as for engineers, remember Weinberg's Second Law: If builders built buildings the way programmers wrote programs, then the first woodpecker that came along would destroy civilization.)

Anyway, there are a lot of analogies that are easily grasped to a computer expert that have significant value in understanding biology, even if they're not perfect—I've been working for a while on comparing chromatin modelling to disk seek time optimization. It doesn't really seem to break down until the focus is on actual networks, although there seems to be no shortage of design patterns in use.

Still thinking about this one. Will get back to you sooner or later.

Funny you should mention that. Guess what Nokia was doing before Elop showed up?

Sort of... but the reality is that the core of how cells work is directly analogous to the hardware/software distinction in a computer (in fact, they're Turing-complete), so stretching things into a car metaphor is much harder to do—try explaining the contents of a typical Unix box's task list in terms of types of vehicles you see on a road, and you'll see how pointless it is.

Sure; I've just given an explanation in response to this somewhat more sceptical post.

Given that we're talking about development from an extremely early age, that would be illegal, but I will do my best to explain this.

This is the primary reason given for the class bias seen in IQ testing. That is not, at all, conventional thinking. Read this and this. If intelligence were genetic to the extent you suggest, the children of immigrants would be incapable of integrating at the most fundamental cultural level.

If you are curious about how something works, you will be more likely to figure out how it works. Once you understand how things work, you can use that understanding to interpret more situations. This includes abstract concepts. Pattern matching, abstract reasoning, and creativity all depend on the fruits of a mind knowledgeable in such things. The brain cannot function in a vacuum (as learned from Genie, along with observations of animals in factory farms), and it cannot derive new ideas from absolute nothingness, only recombine what it has experienced (this is a central hypothesis of computational creativity).

The genetic element you're identifying is a person's potential to be intelligent. That potential is meaningless until some force motivates the person to learn to use it, whether that's curiosity, school, or parenting, because we are not born with an understanding of any axioms that we can derive new concepts or thinking strategies from. These last two don't cause self-sustaining intellectual growth, leaving curiosity as the only reliable driving force for a person's development of their intelligence.

Tsk. Curiosity generates intelligence. There are other ways, of course (meeting parents' expectations, in particular), but they're not as reliable or resilient. I would argue that the developedness of Einstein's corpus callosum (which does seem to be a congenital trait) simply meant that he was better able to benefit from his curiosity and to be more satisfied and captivated by its fruits.

Los Angeles proved what happens if you don't have a strong EPA; things like children with bleeding lesions on their lungs simply from breathing the air happen. As well, the federal government prevented The People of California from implementing only in our state the automotive emissions restrictions for which we actually voted because it would do harm to their future bailout poster children.

So, you want a strong Federal government to protect the environment, but you want a weak Federal government that can't stop you from protecting the environment? Sounds like the Federal government is the problem here.

Yeah... I was wondering how to hook up the teletype and the terminal servers.

By moderation I don't mean being moderate in all things, only in monetary matters. Unlike the pursuit of knowledge of the universe, the accumulation of material and monetary wealth deprives others. The more extreme the wealth of one individual, the more deprivation others must suffer.

And history is full of people who realized there was nothing to stop them from enforcing a monopoly on wealth by depriving others of the opportunity to even consider its pursuit. If you're willing to impoverish others to enrich yourself, why wouldn't you take the next step and make sure it stays that way?

It sounds like it would be cheaper to just buy the games you want to play again for PS4.

ok, sure. Where can I get Mechassault for the PS4, then?