My friends call me when they want takeout.

Maybe it is the GPS then. I used to have it always on in my BBerry Curve, and I had no problems. Thanks for the advice!

Using, not talking.

Yes, I am exaggerating. And yes, I actively using the phone, so it never lasts a full day. Not that many other smartphones last much longer. To whomever maked me as troll: understand the difference between humorous and serious comments.

My most common command to my Google Nexus phone is: "Please (beeeeep) battery, do not die. It's been just 3 hours since I fully charged you." I hope that the next generation of Android will teach the phone to obey.

Of course it is not a zero-sum game. My point is that it is less news-worthy today, ***in terms of methodology***, as distributed computing is much more commonplace compared to 10 years ago. I am sure it would have been front-page news if this was done 10 years back.

Not sure if we should be excited or be sad.

• Excited: The first discovery based on a generic distributed computing infrastructure (BOINC)
• Sad: Distributed computing is rather commonplace today, and plenty of people have access to scalable Hadoop clusters that can scale on demand.

Yes, BOINC allows people to use idle computing capacity. But if we need plenty of computing capacity today, it is not that hard to get it: It is much simpler to simply rent a few EC2 machines, or get a computing grant from Google/Yahoo/Microsoft/Amazon/IBM/NSF (you get the idea), and get such projects done much faster, rather than trying to use BOINC.

SETI@Home (and later BOINC) were revolutionary 10 years back. Today distributed human computation seems to be as revolutionary as distributed computing was back in 1999. reCAPTCHA seems more revolutionary in utilizing idle human capacity for a good purpose (digitizing books). The FoldIt project (see the recent Nature article), which also uses creatively human computation, seems much more fresh and interesting.

"they quickly change their behavior based on that knowledge": This is exactly what game theory studies: how agents will change their information based on the knowledge they have.

Here is how an interaction will happen, in a very stylized manner:

1a: Party A will act in a specific way, following action A1, which seems to be the best.

1b: Party B, anticipating the action A1 of A, will follow action B1

2a: Party A knowing that party B will play B1, now revises the decision and follows action A2.

2b: Party B knowing that part A will play A2, now revised the decision and follows action B2.

3a: Party A knowing that party B will play B2, now revises the decision and follows action A3.

3b: Party B knowing that part A will play A3, now revised the decision and follows action B3.

....(the story continues)....

At the end, we have a situation where this interaction converges into the equilibrium.

The problem is not that humans will "change their behavior based on that knowledge". It is that most humans do not have the infinite computational capability to follow the logic until the end. Costis work shows that the computational power required for agents to compute their "optimal" actions is too high, so they will most probably go with their suboptimal decisions.

I wanted to say something but I forgot after checking my other open apps...

"As these techniques improve and become more popular, it makes me wonder what music produced twenty or fifty years from now will sound like, and how much authenticity will be left."

Well, according to TFA, T-Pain *has* been using it in a creative/authentic way, to create a different style of music. He may not be "in his right mind" according to Hildebrand, but he is using the tool in previously unexpected ways. So, here is the authenticity!

I am getting tired of hearing all these comments about loss of privacy, big brother, and other nonsense.

I installed the application. You have to actually give explicit permission to your friends in order for them to track you. Furthermore, for this to work, your friends should actually care to actually follow the instructions from Google, go through a set of menus, so that they can see where you are.

Apart from my mother when I was 12, I cannot think of anyone that would actually care to know where I am, 24/7. I am pretty sure that I do not care to know where even my closest friends are right now. They may be at home, at work, with their wives, with their mistresses, buying pot, or selling dirty bombs to arab terrorists. I do not care. And I am sure they think the same for me! Damn, I am not *that* important so that others need to know where I am!

Yes, it would be convenient to know where my friends are when I am trying to meet them. If they could send me an "sms-like" message with their location. But do I *need* to know where they are, 24/7? Hell no!

And to whomever worrying about privacy: You got a cellphone (so the cellphone carrier knows where you are by triangulation). Oh no, you actually got a smartphone, with an embedded GPS! (So, a hacker can install an application that sends an sms with the long/lat.) Ah, you also have a wi-fi! (So a hacker can stream the info easier.)
I see, you also installed the Google Maps application! And since you wanted to see how this Latitude things works, you also installed the latest version of GMaps? And you are *now* freaking worrying that a hacker will get your phone, and enable tracking??

Almost like being afraid of malaria and visiting malaria-infested areas during the rain season!