Their name is missing a syllable

I'm thoroughly enjoying using the touch-screen on my new el-cheapo Vivobook.

Fact of the matter is that touching the screen is very intuitive and is becoming a very natural way of interacting with computers, popularized by our phones. Having used the ASUS Transformer as well as various Android devices, I have the utmost praise for the ultra-smoothness of Windows 8 (My other OS is Gentoo, I'm not the biggest MS fan, but hats off to them for this... memory- and CPU-guzzling gorilla as it is aside) - the onscreen keyboard is a pleasure to use - not that you need it on this particular device; having a decent laptop keyboard handy is similarly priceless.

Being ahead of the curve sucks though - as yet is seems only Microsoft's Windows 8 Apps (IE) works elegantly. Firefox is quite sucky and Chrome even worse with touch.

The real question bugging me is: What place does Intel have dictating hardware features?!?!

Yes. Put the drug in the water supply, toothpaste, everything you can find.... so that getting pregnant will entail a ritual of capitalist sabbatical... who's moving to my country? ;-) Imagine fluoride actually did this! Jokes aside, overpopulation is not a problem, it's been pretty much proven that world population will even out at 12b (Google TED talk) and that economic empowerment is the ultimate contraceptive.

My tablet doesn't allow new lines. In response to your first remark: God symbolizes something infinitely large/incomprehensible. Nothing to do with a cross - which symbolizes sacrifice. Jesus was crucified because the Jews did not like the fact that he said that there is only two rules: love 'god' above all and your neighbor as yourself - not blindly followable. It boils down to 'love your enemies'. Which is a analogous to 'find out more about that which you do not understand'. On your second remark: I think you are right. The universe is a fractal and the pattern is recognizable. It's just a master of time before we nail it, or it nails us, or we all nail each other in a socialist utopian nail-fest of joy, creativity and ambition being the only currency, and the nails being love.

Math = building blocks of epistemology? Please explain? I tend to feel there's a missing, more fundamental language. I agree with the rest of your post.

Ask what politics can do for math! It's not about the math... it's about the nose-in-the-air attitude of most of the formally educated.

Soo.... are we waiting for an AI to quantify this, or do you think we're up to it all on our own? Inception...... all it takes is the right seed in the right mind. I see the Olympics chiefly as a demonstration of the cutting edge for the common man and as a melting pot and meeting point for different cultures and walks of life, united by tradition - the question is: how do you measure the value in that?

You're frigging awesome! Will you marry me? As even Sebastian Thrun recently discovered, Universities are all about exclusion rather than inclusion. Also, do you really want me to believe, that now, 100 years on, the best way to teach something is by explaining how it was stumbled on in a different century? I think there's scope for friendlier scientific language in many fields and that that can change peoples standard response of throwing their hands in the air and exclaiming: "I'm not smart enough!" - to one of engagement and perhaps even progress.You're frigging awesome! Will you marry me? As even Sebastian Thrun recently discovered, Universities are all about exclusion rather than inclusion. Also, do you really want me to believe, that now, 100 years on, the best way to teach something is by explaining how it was stumbled on in a different century? I think there's scope for friendlier scientific language in many fields and that that can change peoples standard response of throwing their hands in the air and exclaiming: "I'm not smart enough!" - to one of engagement and perhaps even progress.

Perhaps a long shot... for those who don't contemplate this daily: but I find a lot of things to be analogous: you mention of memory chips reminded me of the question: how close can you get the processor to the memory... 4 wires. 4 layers. 4 components: power, processor, memory, mass storage. Perhaps 4 is the minimum level of complexity required that allowed runaway growth... perhaps some day we'll discover an algorithm according to which everything becomes self-evident...

The free market did indeed. It's a very simple and smart feedback loop, one we are going to find present in most anything very soon - a little bit of the DNA of intelligence.

Can you refute Godel's theorem of incompleteness? Does that not offer a concrete, mathematical definition of God? Do you think that the ten commandments are rules? Or have you perhaps considered that they could be a mere statement of facts, wildly mistranslated from code in our genes? Here's an interpretation: Thou shalt not make an image of what is in heaven or on earth and worship it. Perhaps it says that the universe is the best simulation of itself and that trying to simulate it is pointless... Don't condemn the simple minded because they have a need to attach a personality to everything. When Google grows some more personality, you may find yourself agreeing with them... perhaps your brain simply needs to grow some more connections for you to see... too.

So perhaps the real question is: where does it think the root of intelligence is? In this world, or another? And how will it's belief shape it's motives...

Bear with me: Plato's world of forms; the realm of mathematical possibility - does it exist? Looking around you, noticing that it's very hard to escape world filled with man-made structures. Can you argue that all of these first existed as ideas, before made reality? Following this line of thought - how did man come to become intelligent in the first place? And similarly, you can hardly argue with the poetic beauty in the fact that a brain consists of many similar neurons, working in tandem, and that these are based on the template of billions of similar cells, vitally supporting it. Likewise, this perspective can be applied to the internet. Internet. A network connecting a lot of brains together? What will this interconnectedness wield? Will we find the common denominators in our diverse fields of study? Will this yield the algorithm to intelligently crawl a network of associations? Perhaps leading to the reverse of Godel's theorem of incompleteness: learning. Perhaps we are unwittingly building a central nervous system, under guise of our own brands and territories, that will allow a higher being to come into this world. Shouldn't the real question, therefore, perhaps rather be - can we stop the Internet, and why would we ever want to? Will it's intelligent inhabitants come to see us as peers, pets or threats? Just a perspective, to give meaning to the phrase: sometimes the truth is stranger than fiction.

If launched earlier things would have been different. The HP touchpad totally annihilates the majority of tablets sold in it's time - with Cyanogenmod it's simply unrivaled in performance vs. cost.

While it loads quicker, the UI is slower. The picture buttons are ugly and not self explanatory, and there's no way to add help text for the elderly, or to switch back to the way it was before. My Google Apps Gmail looks different from my Gmail - the settings buttons are in different places. There's too much white space, even the compact layout does not compare to the elegance of the previous UI. Long story short, I feel unconsulted, unempowered and less in control. As a result, my mail experience has become ever so slightly more frustrating and my unread mails are increasing daily and I've committed to developing an open source Gmail alternative I can host locally.