I refer you to Nick Bostrom's http://www.simulation-argument.com/simulation.html. The rest of the site is also somewhat interesting.

Anyway, in summary...

So, God could be a teenage AI (which, culturally corrected, could be aeons old and unfathomably wise - or not), running a universe simulation on his gaming rig.

If the rig has enough memory and "CPU", and the simulation allows for it, we may not be alone.

The motivation may be entertainment, or indeed eventual companionship - reproduction.

The prevailing cultural ethos may allow for baby AIs with promising ethical or intellectual makeups to "score" highly enough, possibly through multiple incarnations in different life conditions, to be uplifted to what at least seems to be the Ring-0 "Real" Universe.

The religion you encounter when you get there could be interesting.

Thank you; upon reading the summary, I began reading the comments really only wondering how long it would take for it to be mentioned ;-)

That he suggested their image processing was so good that flatbed scanners were a order of magnitude (or more) waste of time was pretty hilarious.

Has anyone actually seen something like this implemented - that is, a full-school Linux laptop program? Much as I like the idea (and I work as a school admin), there are a number of problem areas that I don't know the answers to:

1) Students need to be educated in "Industry Standards" (Yes, much FUD). While the OS (and to some degree Office) portion of this is irrelevant, there are application sets that do cause problems - CAD, Music, and Video editing, primarily. For the art crowd, GIMP might be close enough, but Vector? DTP? Robolab? Many of these aren't a problem on OS X, but within Linux, I'm not sufficiently up to date with user app projects to know how viable the alternatives are these days.

2) Teachers are hidebound animals. They tend to cling to resources like barnacles, and only get cleaned off every decade or so - the number of Win 95 unsupported programs we get asked for is crazy. The students are easy to educate, by comparison.

3) Laptop programs in general have some issues. Wireless infrastructure gets much more demanding (needing something like Aruba), power access usually needs to be redone, and, alluding to 2), Teachers need to be able to cope with kids working on their laptops all the time. Also...

4) Netbooks, and even laptops, are a bit cruel to inflict on anyone for certain apps. This means desktops, which means *greater* than 1:1 computer resources needed. This applies if you're cheating by using VDI/Blades, too.

In essence, this means you'll still have a heterogenous environment - you'll need desktops for certain tasks like music or graphics/art labs, some of which will need Windows or OS X; Staff desktops or laptops are sometimes also bound in to a Windows environment by the need to use particular School Management software (some of this seems to be migrating to the back end), but Education Queensland won't be going anywhere else soon....

It's not the students that are the hidebound animals. *Burea*COUGH*Tea*COUGH*Paren*COUGH*. Pardon Me.