The brain as miraculous as it is can only handle a single lifetime of information.

And you have how many multi-lifetime old samples in your research to support this claim.

Come up with a way to give me multiple lifetimes, healthy as I was in my late teens, to see if my brain crashes due to "filling up", and I'm willing to be an experimental subject.

I'm already in my late '60s. I'm also studying for a college degree and getting 4.0 (much better than when I was trying to work my way through college and avoid the draft during the Vietnam era.)

Psych research has shown that intelligence, as measured by I.Q. tests, increases with age. ("Senile dementia" is a handfull of specific diseases, which only a fraction of people get, and eliminating THOSE would obviously be part of "curing" aging.) Meanwhile, the brain's capacity for both memory and processing is very large (as shown by the amount of info people with eidetic memory accumulate, and are able to index and retrieve without apparent problems, over normal life spans.)

So you think there's a limit to how much the brain can handle, a wall we might hit if we cured aging? Let's find out. Bring it on!

LOL.

My major embedded experience was on some control boards with 4 MiB RAM and 4 MiB Flash ROM. That was pretty beefy, though, and had a full-featured, pre-emptive multi-tasking OS (VxWorks). The really interesting work was on the five V25 microcontrollers which we used to run the many serial ports (actually, there were UARTs to actually run the serial ports, but the V25s were responsible for the care and feeding of the UARTs). Each V25 had 16 KiB of RAM, no ROM. There was no OS at all on them; it was bare metal programming.

Yep, LiveCD operation was Knoppix' raison d'etre. It was an awesome system repair tool back in the day. System borked? Boot from your trusty Knoppix CD (later, USB stick), mount the drive and fix it. A few years later I switched to Damn Small Linux for that purpose instead, but still kept a Knoppix CD around.

In the open source world, historically the problem has been the opposite. Many packages have version 0.1, 0.5, 0.6, 0.8, 0.9, 0.91, 0.92... and so on. There's a reluctance to apply the "1.0" label because that means you have something that's really "done" in some sense.

That is exactly why costs are going up. A bank knows when they make the student loan, that it can't be dispensed in bankruptcy. It is a form of modern day slavery.

Slaves don't get paid. A loan is slavery only if you didn't receive any money up-front, at which point it isn't a loan anymore.

Make those loans subject to bankruptcy and the prices will eventually drop.

Sure tuition prices will drop, but only because fewer students will be applying. If you make student loans subject to bankruptcy, their interest rate will rise to match or even exceed that of regular loans, defeating the purpose of trying to make schools affordable.

You're erring by trying to paint the traditional bogeymen (banks) as the bad guys here. They're not. Tuitions are rising because of the schools. If you simply try to make college "affordable" by giving students access to cheap money, then demand exceeds supply and schools will simply increase prices until demand diminishes to equal the supply.

If you want to reduce tuitions, eliminate student loans. Put the money into public universities instead - public universities which charge little to no tuition for qualified students, while still paying professors competitive salaries. That will put downward price pressure on private universities to match what public universities offer at a given price point.

Turn-by-turn directions that appear to be floating in the air 8 feet in front of you, a little up and to the right so they're out of your central field of vision, seem like a safer option than putting the same directions on a screen in the center of the console and much safer than on a little handheld screen.

Short of an actual HUD, Glass seems like the ideal way to display driving-related information. In theory, at least. I've read that the current generation isn't quite bright enough, so directions are hard to see. That may be fixed in the public release model, dunno.

Of course, people can (and some will) use Glass for other, distracting, purposes while driving. But that's hardly the fault of the technology.

Google has said it's not going to allow advertising on Glass. I think the business model for Glass is just profit on hardware sales. I don't actually know the plan, that's just a guess.

Oh, and regarding the other likely assumption of evil that I know someone is going to post: Google is also not going to be streaming everything your Glass sees to their servers. Privacy issues aside, it'd destroy the battery life and blow through your mobile data plan in no time.

(Disclaimer: I work for Google but have no inside knowledge of Glass.)

I think neural network algorithms give some insight here - they start off very flexible and prone to "leaping to conclusions", but gradually grow more stable, then become so fixed in their ways that they almost completely ignore inputs. If people didn't grow old and die, we'd turn into a society of stodgy, inflexible people lacking dreams and unwilling to compromise over anything. We'd probably end up killing each other over stupid things like Coke vs Pepsi. Aging and dying is the way the species keeps its innovative edge - by systematically eliminating individuals whose neural nets have become too inflexible, so make way for younger people who are willing to try and risk new things.

It's not just a myth. There's already been at least two people who've had a mutation granting them immortality. Though not quite in the way that people would want to be immortal.

Maybe if Einsteins 20's lasted 100+ years he would have accomplished more.

I'm pretty sure a few would simply argue that the bulb isn't on and it only seems to be the case.

Hunger is actually what's missing in the US to cause a riot. Actually, the only thing that separates the US from a full blown riot akin to the Arab Spring events is that people are not starving.

Why do you think food stamps still exist, despite the recession? Because we care so much about our poor and needy? C'mon...

Depends on the gift, obviously. And as always, on the amount you get.

Right. Whenever you ponder the advantages of longevity, read my posts and realize that given infinite life, I'll make them forever!

I'm not saying that Jobs had no part in the success story. But it is highly unfair to consider him the pinnacle of computer design without even mentioning Woz.