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I think we kind of know. I mean, wolves and dog like creatures live along side humans all over the world. They hunt with us and eat what we leave behind and we use things or did for a long time, things they left behind. It's only natural that the ones that shared knowledge with each other among the group benefited more along the direction of a shared ability to communicate amongst themselves than would members of groups that did not care to share such a bond. ref: http://tolweb.org/treehouses/?treehouse_id=3804

We see avatar and see how far into the future he saw those animals and they had evolved these complicated neuronal cross species connections. Now if you believe in evolution, then you can't argue with that as a potential reality in the future. In a way, it does exist across species now in more trivial forms, including, if you will allow me, eye contact. I would offer to suggest that eye contact may actually be one of the first forms of cross species and even family. Birds, fish, all kinds of mammals... You can make eye contact and communicate with them if you have the patience. The more primitive the organism, the more patience is required to communicate with it -- if it can communicate.

First of all, I really like it. I think it is nice.

Some questions, then some thoughts, and some prognostications. What is the OpenID box? I don't know what to put there. I don't have an openid. Will openid be a link to the numbr? Is it my email address? I tried to click on the OI icon inside the box to get some help, but alas, I never figured out what that box is for and I'm a computer guy! (A ha, just got to firefox and it told me my email address wasn't a valid openid. hmph, did it still create? Nope, not on the first page...) Why does OpenID matter? Let me use my Email address.

Well, it's a good idea. I still like it.

When I am in Opera and I click the "Create Numbr" button, nothing happens. In IE 7, when I enter the url and click the "Pick a numbr on the Page" button, I get something about it not being displayed and then it was aborted and I see a blank nothing. On my way to firefox (see above...) Couldn't save my numbr...

What I wanted to save, was the number that appears in the link at the bottom of the first section on the cover of http://news.google.com. This number is the number of articles about the "top ranked" article at google. It would show whatever google's algorithm puts there.

But it could come from Bing or any aggregator. How popular the most popular story at Hacker News is, etc...

I tried with text too, but it said it wasn't a number. Considering the one I tried to create, it would be nice to see what that article is, though because of this particular topic, you could do a little research. For today, the top article may be obvious, but what was the world talking most about on Jan 17, 1987?

Of course the Internet wasn't around back then really, I mean, it could have been, but WebNumbr wasn't and we can't take WebNumbr back to 1987 to figure it out ... okay, we could do research today about how many newspapers in the world had a particular headline for dates past, but that would be a tremendous amount of work. It would be an undertaking so vast and incomprehensible that we just wouldn't even do it at all.

And here, you've created a piece of equipment using the power of technology, that without even thinking about it moving forward into the future is going to do that very task, with almost no human interaction -- 100% automated. A task previously thought insurmountable, on your site is being done, right now 300 times an hour or so? Could be thousands, millions, even billions really. It is able to do it with a lot of numbers, like the dow, or a stock price, or the weather on a particular day or time of day and that's very, very cool and useful for a lot of people who track things using the web.

A lot of people have to track things, so they go to the web and type them in and write them down, or enter them into a database. They don't have to do that anymore.

I can understand the technical reasons to keep it to numbers only and why the limitations are there now, but if you'll allow me to indulge in a bit of speculation about what types of things your users will request in the future, beyond what I've already mentioned, would be the ability to pick a particular number within a group of numbers. The numbr in the top articles I mentioned was actually in a span with text in it, but it accurately picked the correct number (nice work), however, what if there are multiple numbers and I want the second one, will it still work?

What about dates and times? Maybe you want to track the numbr of days since the last injury, which is a number, but what if the only number on the page would be the date of the last incident? Like the X's on one of the keep motivated articles we take in once in a while.

You also may want to alert people if the values change, I'm sure you've thought of that. Give them thresholds to fire an event or call a web page or post to a page, etc...

Those are just some ideas. Keep in touch. Remind us of you going into the future so we can monitor changes and keep track of how things are going.

Depends on the woman, but in a crowd of 20 men and women, the self-aggrandizing male is almost guaranteed a ride home.

If they put it to a shareholder vote and everyone decides leaving china is good that is fine. If they make a vote among a few insiders at the top and leave china and then it turns out billions in market cap are lost as a result, I'm almost certain there will be a lawsuit.

Google's board and executives have a fiduciary responsibility to the shareholders to do what is in the best interest of shareholders -- not Chinese dissidents. It doesn't matter if those executives are founders are not.

All the warm and fuzzy about leaving China won't stop shareholders from suing google if it turns out a decision to leave China has impacted them negatively.

If one were to set out on such a path and accomplish the goal out of hobby or desire to learn a new language, or for whatever reason, how long would something like that take? How long did it take 37s to build ROR? How long did PHP take?

I'm just curious...

It's a matter of privacy. You have created this feature to reward participation, but someone who should be receiving that reward is telling you it is actually a curse.

It may be a narrow appeal, but it is being requested by someone who has demonstrated significant contribution to the community to be rewarded in about the only way one can be rewarded here and you won't free him from that which he considers a punishment.

Google doesn't give you the best answers, they give you the last answer someone else chose. That's how google works, because google believes the best answer is the one after which the searcher does not click on anything else.

How would google measure a "best" answer?

Not really. It just means that when people type "How do I" in front of a search and then click on a link with how do i and then whatever it was, then google picked the right result, even though it doesn't know that you are asking for instructions on how to perform a task.

Empathy for athletes during competition is an evolved phenomenon that aids the assimilation of useful hunting and fighting skills for the audience.

ANSI SQL and configuration changes everywhere you need them to be flexible.

Mhm, this was the state of the industry the last time I checked. I suppose it would be easier to take an existing laptop and replace the parts...

The same reason I built my own workstation. The same reason I build servers. Because you can build better equipment and gain an intimate understanding of the system so if something goes wrong, you're more apt to fix it without a $500 fee from the manufacturer.

It's like one people saying "I don't want to use guns, because they are difficult to understand and I can do bad things with them."

Meanwhile, the people who are taking the time to learn about and use guns are dominating the world.

Any developer worth his salt will understand how to do SQL Statements to get back the right dataset or perform the correct updates. Harping on the benefits of an ORM is a bright red flag in my book, because none of them are better than the power, performance, and flexibility of actually understanding SQL. If you concentrate on learning the ORM, then you are learning yourself into a box and won't even know that there are great things outside it if you had only spent the time to learn SQL.

What if, like physics, each "improvement" to mankind has an equal and opposite negative impact on the world?

If we think about benefit and harm, these are usually with respect to energy. It takes time to heal wounds, it takes more energy to overcome injury. Benefits, like the car for example, enable humans to expend less energy, but they take more from the environment.

If we extrapolate that to the world around us, then for example, taking a prescription drug will have a corresponding negative impact on the environment.

If what I suggest here is true, then any improvement we could make to human evolution is merely an illusion. Perhaps the improvements we do make are merely improvements, or perceived to be improvements, because we can't see the harm created somewhere else, like the destruction of landscape, deaths in mines, pollution, etc...

I don't think you have to be an evolutionary biologist to understand it or find patterns in evolution across timescales. Hawking is a brilliant man and I'm sure he knows a lot of stuff outside physics.

is there a reasonable way to build ones own laptop these days?

There’s always some ratio of developers working for monetary benefit to those working their way up.

Additionally, the corporates can depress wages by pointing to plenty of inexpensive competition in the "working their way up" group. Not only are they getting lots of work for free, but their production costs are reduced as well.

first sentence of the article: Courier is a real device, and we've heard that it's in the "late prototype" stage of development.

So It's at least a prototype

I think in this case, ad hominem is appropriate. He is arguing about mispriced assets while investing in companies that sells more virtual tractors than John Deere.

He's saying, in effect, Amazon isn't paying you enough to waste your time posting links to their books, while making other people pay good money to waste their time growing virtual gardens.

Rationale like that doesn't work well for him.

I've gotten tired of Fred's blog. I really don't like seeing requests made from my browser every other second. I don't like how slow it is because he has every social hook in there, many to his own companies.

He's a venture capitalist, why is he wasting his time with affiliate marketing? In the amount of time it takes him to build the link to amazon, he should have been working on closing a million dollar deal or doing research into companies or finding a better justification for supporting web fraud companies like zynga who make the internet worse like a lot of his investments, bit.ly to name just one more.

I also find him to be a bit hypocritical. He blasts conferences, then blogs all about having gone to them. He's lost a lot of credibility in my book. I don't think he or his investments make the web better.

   Aught 3 = '03
   Twenty Aught 6 = 2006

A lot of people got ripped off. That's the point.

One of the problems with no schedule pressure, which I believe is best, is that software can always be better. Clicks can be removed. User interfaces can be made cleaner and easier to look at.

To remove the schedule pressure, you have think differently. Instead of, "This project is done on Friday," Think, "This project is done when no one has complained about this form for 3 weeks." This project is done when no bugs are reported for 4 weeks. Etc.

They haven't been able to generate web logs for almost a year, maybe more now, eta is still several months off -- for log files.

I bet rackspace isn't happy about this. They need a lot of help with scalability problems.

You're absolutely right, that's exactly how I remember it too.

People used to call me all the time, "I can't find a laptop under $1,000, help! What should I buy? Should I just get a desktop for $700? I can use the same monitor."

Now, my next portable is going to cost $100. It might be a tablet. Not too long from now, they're going to be in refrigerator magnets for $5.

Doesn't work in Opera.

Well, that will be okay. Do you want to spend your time building the game or writing ray tracing algorithms? You want to call Array.sort(), not write a sort. It just takes up time.

It's interesting that CISC won out over RISC considering the conversation we are having. It's simpler for the builder. You can repeat yourself less. Imagine doing a quicksort in assembly. No way, right? Not today. Why?

It's endlessly hardwareable.

What I mean is, every algorithm or solution designed with software can always, by definition be implemented in hardware, bringing vast improvements in performance and scalability. This will always happen as long as hardware continues to get faster and there is no reason to believe that it won't continue to get faster exponentially for the foreseeable future. Quantum computing, 3D processors, light based data storage, carbon nanotubes, dna circuits...

Soon, we will have Databases and Web Servers implemented in hardware... When graphics was the rage, Intel put MMX in the CPU. Now we have two CPUs in the CPU, or four. We put SSL in hardware to speed that up. We can and do put it all in hardware eventually.

There are already lots of instant hardware solutions you can burn with EEPROM, PLAs, and the like. I don't see any reason Intel or AMD won't let consumers upload programs to burn right into the silicon. It'll be like embroidering polo shirts.