The more ways we attack a given problem, the more chances of success.

I'm not sure that's a universal rule. If anything, I imagine it's an inverted dip curve: the more angles of attack you add, the better the success, to a given point, at which point it becomes a liability until you're trying almost all possible avenues, at which point you're brute forcing and so success rates go up (but speed goes down and cost goes up).

With this approach, they will probably start with nematode brains.

If a nematode can do the job, I wouldn't discriminate. In fact, I think it's time for equal rights for nematodes. They're people too... just thinner slightly squirmy people.

Yes.

Remember the book War of the Worlds? In it, what ultimately kept the aliens at bay were the same diseases that plague us.

It turns out that we needed predators, new adventures, challenges, struggles and discomforts to stay motivated.

Instead, we have Big Macs and Netflix, and we keep shuffling the same technologies around and trying to build an economy on selling the result to each other and then taxing it...

Since people often need to look you up later, permanent alumni address forwarding would be a nice touch.

For example, give people addresses like bill.smith@2005.example.edu.

The pseudo-machine (2005) would exist to keep unique addresses to each of those names.

If people have truly identical names, add '666' to the second one.

Competition works well for fungible commodities, but not for things like basic public infrastructure which is extremely costly to build and maintain.

I think this is true, and that's why the state grants monopolies to utilities companies.

This is an unsustainable race to the bottom. They both are losing money here and one of the two will eventually shut down their system in this area to stanch the flow of red ink. Then, the other will gradually start to raise their pricing back to the break-even point.

Generally what you are saying is true. After all, that's the reason Comcast isn't improving in most markets; they're already at the top, and offering a better service than the competition.

The one wrinkle here is that Google's business model is not to profit off the fiber, but to use it as a means to sell other products.

I'm not sure how that one will work out. I don't trust large corporations because they're made up of humans, and if humans screw up badly on their own, in groups they screw up by creating an echo chamber and following each other into oblivion like lemmings.

For that reason, large anything (corporation, volunteer group, government, empire) is prone to fail and fail hard. And with the increasing standardization across the industrial world, "too big to fail" becomes a prophecy of the vast consequences that occur when they do. To substitute a colloquial expression: "the bigger they are, the harder they fall."

It seems unclear to me that human brains produce "intelligent behavior." It seems to depend on the brain. Only a few per hundred seem to work really well, but up to half of them can file TPS reports.

My kids only eat what they can kill. Since we live in the city, it's tough on them (and on the neighborhood pigeons), but they're going to true Nietzschean superpeople when I'm done with them!

Perl isn't really a web programming language.

What exactly is a "web programming language"? Something that can spit out HTML, I imagine. Perl does that with the best of them and, since it is a general-purpose language, it does it exceptionally well.

Right now, we're in a bubble of web trends. This will not last, because people are realizing that (a) web programming isn't rocket science and (b) most people need modifications of existing off-the-shelf blogs, CMSs, etc. and not much else.

The rare site that does require hardcore programming is more likely to use a language like Perl because it's more stable than the newer, trendier alternatives, and is more favorable to those with a classic CS education.

The trendy people want us to think that Perl is dying, but the converse is true: the trends are dying, and they're trying to improve their own position by denigrating otherwise great languages.