The new $100 Laptop

The One Laptop Per Child (OLPC) program is aiming to provide laptop for $100 each to children around the world. The purpose of this project is to get children using computers all over the world. Being able to read any book on the internet, being able to learn any language, getting local weather updates to help manage crops, finding a better market price for your wares or maybe just communicating with friends and families all over the world.

Take a look. Its a beautiful piece of hardware. What it ends up costing, who knows, but itll be worth it for someone somewhere.
--
Anyone can be struck by lightning,
But not everyone can conduct electricity!

The first Petaflop Computer

The fastest known computer ever made (on our human inhabited planet)

This is a pretty big thing in our computer world. The bigger, faster and stronger our computers are the larger and more complicated questions we can ask and the better answers it will give. Imagine a computer that could completely simulate the Earth? You know how we like to argue about global climate change, well the answers that we are seeking are out there - we just have to ask the right questions and a computer that is like this will be the first machine to tell us.
"To put the performance of the machine in perspective, Thomas D'Agostino, the administrator of the National Nuclear Security Administration, said that if all six billion people on earth used hand calculators and performed calculations 24 hours a day and seven days a week, it would take them 46 years to do what the Roadrunner can in one day."

Brain of 10,000 Transistors

Giant Computer Rat Brain Taking Over!

But -- has there been mental activity?

The newborn "Blue Brain" surprised the designers with its willfulness from the very first day. It had hardly been fed electrical impulses before strange patterns began to appear on the screen with the lightning-like flashes produced by cells that scientists recognize from actual thought processes. Groups of neurons started becoming attuned to one another until they were firing in rhythm. "It happened entirely on its own," says Markram. "Spontaneously."

A phenomenon arising from the arrangement of a certain set of items put in a certain arrangement. A whole that is greater than its parts. Think of a solar system. A bunch of random dust. Then a few solidifying bodies. Then very few larger bodies circling the giant mass of slowly building and heating at the center. Eventually the center lights up due to the crush of matter and it rains the energy of life onto those smaller bodies which then starts it own chain reaction on the planet...We arise from mass.

HARDware evolution

Scientists are learning about evolution on a mathematical level. I have read about other groups building software that evolves to take advantage of the hardware that it is built in. Imagine writing a piece of code that over 10,000 generations (in a computer this can be very fast) learns to re-write itself to take advantage of extra pieces and learns “new” functions. One example was the code which figured out that there was a radio signal nearby via some function and through generations learned to detect and decipher that radio signal.

Are they coding AI?

This group say they want their software to:

Discover causes in the world
Infer causes of novel input
Make predictions
Direct actions

What are we if we are not our thoughts?

National Database of Availability (Manufacturing Thought)

Factories each fill out a profile that describes the various technical capabilities, capacity, shipping requirements and all the other important pieces of information that matter in teh true manufacturing process. This information is uploaded into a database.

People who have a desire for a product do the same thing, but with complimentary information, and dump their data into the same database. Price points are cross referenced, variables taken into consideration, and splot, right in front of you a check box and some pretty pictures with receipts. You send specs and maybe fly over there once or twice. Shake hands. Kick the equipment. And then take off for a two day local vacation.

In reality this could probably be applied a lot more liberally to many industries...the kicker would be to somehow tie that system in directly to the machines that do the work so the automation can be just one touch higher.