Racism is: canceling a conference because of the race of the speakers.

"no one expects ads in a piece of software that they just paid good money for"

Why not? You pay for cable TV and see ads, you see product placement in the shows you watch between the ads, there's product placement in movies, advertisements for other products on the products you buy, ads for books on the backs of books, and the list goes on. The only thing, I think, that really KEEPS ads OUT of a product is the value of its aesthetic. You'll never see an ad on the back of a fancy-looking leather-bound book, because you're paying for an aesthetic that precludes it. You won't find an ad in, say, a free Linux distro, because the aesthetic of the culture precludes it.

So I think we should look at this from the opposite perspective: why are ads showing up in Windows NOW? It may be a sign that Microsoft's business model is changing in some way, but I think it may have more to do with the adoption of the app-market aesthetic. You may not expect to see an ad in an app that you paid for, but you REALLY wouldn't expect to see an ad in a traditional program like Excel or Photoshop.

Could that be overcome by conventionally breaking up pi into blocks of certain sizes, then conceptualizing those blocks as matrices of conventional height and width?

I am (pleasantly) surprised by how many of my friends have "come out," as it were, as atheists over the last few years. I'm a young person, and I suspect that the amount of closet atheists among younger people (in America at least) is much greater than that among older people. In general, how optimistic are you about humanity getting past religion in the next few decades?

Things I have never seen: 1. a bicyclist obeying a stopsign. 2. a unicorn. 3. a bicyclist stopping at a crosswalk.
Things I have seen rarely: 1. a perfect 10 on the uneven bars. 2. a car passing a cyclist without giving them a berth of at least 2 extra meters.
Things I see all the time: 1. cyclists cutting off pedestrians. 2. cyclists running red lights. 3. cyclists cutting in and out of traffic.

I live by a college campus. I've talked with a campus police officer about all the bike accidents we've had here. He says the overwhelming majority are the fault of the cyclist. Helmets are small potatoes compared to 1. the devil-may-care attitude toward traffic laws that seems to prevail among cyclists and 2. the unsafe piggybacking of considerations for bicycles onto existing roads. Consider the bike lane: it continues straight through an intersection, ACROSS the right turn lane for cars! Furthermore, drivers are not used to this situation because it's both novel and counter-intuitive. Someone please design a better road and let's all tell our cyclist friends to obey the signs.

Contrary to popular belief, the Romans knew about lead poisoning and figured out ways to avoid it. For instance, aqueducts were lined with lead to make them waterproof. New aqueducts were mandated to run for a certain amount of time before water was drawn from them. In that time, the Romans knew, the minerals in the hard water would deposit on the lead and form a protective coating. Nevertheless, lead shavings were used as a seasoning on food. You may say that's horrendously stupid in a society that knows about lead poisoning, but then there's cigarettes today.

Handwavium? I like it. I like it more than "unobtanium."

The Language abilities of Star Trek computers are extremely advanced compared to today's latest and greatest. Of course most of the things in this article are only inklings, on their way but nowhere near what Star Trek showed. But I find many people are fooled by the usefulness of Siri et al. into thinking that real language processing and synthesis is only N years away. Talking with Siri is like using an old text adventure game: you put in words, it filters those and matches them to a small set of commands, and if that fails it returns an error dressed up as a polite English phrase. The biggest advancement is speech recognition and speech synthesis, which are indeed very good at this point. But this only deals with the physical forms of words at the level of phonetics. All higher linguistic levels (phonology, morphophonology, morphology, morpho-syntax, syntax, semantics, pragmatics) are woefully closed off to the electronic brains we use today. With our current language technologies, we are only about half a step above text.

If we combine the two statistics, we should arrive at a useful number. I have done the maths, and it seems that 105% of Americans are uninformed about the cloud. But now, being an American, I am forced to look at myself in this new light. I, for one, have looked at clouds from both sides now, from up and down and still somehow it's clouds' illusions I recall. I really don't know clouds at all.

Consider how long children's books have been heavily illustrated. When I was little I won a "reading award" in my first grade classroom because I always had out this science book. Truth is I was just looking at the pictures and reading the captions. Nevertheless I obviously did learn to read, and I can assure you that seeing pictures as a child ruined my imagination in no way. Think of the vast amounts of data we are presented with every day. There are images, written words, music, speech, on advertisements, street signs, in movies, on television, in books, in classrooms, at home... If having one possibility illustrated (in a broader sense) before you actually stifled human creativity, there would be far fewer inventors, artists, and writers. And if you want proof you can search for "fanfic" and see thousands of young adults (perhaps older adults?) and children writing stories based on their favorite movies and television shows and books, simply because they want to apply their own creativity to the fiction. I found one story, obviously written by a young child, which sought to give a back-story for how pokemon evolved out of present-day animals.

In short, I think the least of your worries should be any new media constraining the imagination.

Thinkofthechildren! Technology improves illustrations --> Entire generation rendered illiterate! Soon they'll invent an entire GENRE of new media with moving pictures and sound and no need to read at all! And what will happen then!?

So it's running Linux?

I have always wondered what it would be like to live in Ancient Rome. Odds are I'd be poor and have to join the army to keep from becoming homeless, or worse: I'd be a slave. But if I became one of the aristocracy, or at least a wealthier family, then I would have it made. Anyway I find it hard to imagine that if computers and robots take over doing all of humanity's dirty work, then humanity will have no way to get by. Obviously SOMEbody will get by (the owners of the machines?) but consider the following.

A major food company gradually phases out human workers. They own countless farms, and they fire the farmers. They automate all their factories, they automate their lower levels of administration, distribution, and all the other human-run parts of their industry. But they do this because it's cheaper. And now they can produce far more than they ever could before. They're a food company, so the price of their food goes down, partly because they can now make more for almost nothing, partly because the people they fired have no jobs. But if the only jobs now available to humans are (presumably) in public relations, professional sports, entertainment, etc., then what's to stop our society from entering a new era of "bread and circuses," one in which there are two classes: the rich who get more because they are famous or do unique work, and the aristocracy who need not work because their needs are provided for by the machinery doing all the grunt work?

Then there would be no reason for anyone to be poor, because that station would be filled by the machines. Of course there are countless factors to look at and probably countless reasons why the above fantasy is just that: but I would like to hear them in following comments!

I agree with you on that last point, but I would prefer to generalize further. Nobody who speaks a language of ANY level of complexity has any right to criticize people who speak ANY other language. Just as it is not stupidity to speak Ebonics, neither is it arrogance to speak Standard American English, or Middle English for that matter. Nor are the rules of English grammar that complicated, but native speakers must view it through the kaleidescope of acquisition. That is, you do not learn the grammar of English, you just internalize it as a child, and you don't get it all from one trusted source. You hear different people speak different dialects and you put together your own idiolect without any true standard to point at and say "there are the nuts and bolts of my grammar." Asimov had his heart in the right place, but problems with literacy are not rooted in language. Also keep in mind that writing is not Language, it is a secondary system of representation. So while simplifying spelling could help (but consider how much more difficult it is to be literate in China, and their literacy rate is 93.3%), simplifying grammar would be neither easy to do, easy for people to learn, adopted by anyone, nor long-lived. Complexity in languages arises from speakers like you and me and everyone else. It is not bestowed by college professors. Indeed, Ebonics is in many ways FAR more complex.