Popular Science poses ten good questions they would like to ask this future theoretical artificial intelligence.

Perhaps we’ve been spoiled by science fiction, but we tend to assume that intelligent machines will want something to do with us – either destroy/enslave us (the “Terminator” and “The Matrix”) work with us as partners (”Star Trek,” “Aliens”) or be used to serve us as, essentially, robot slaves (”Star Wars”). One of the more interesting points PopSci brings up is, if a super-intelligent machine is created, will we be able to relate to it? What if the nature of its intelligence is absolutely foreign to us?

I hope that one day within my lifetime humans can use AI to exponentially increase technological development in a relatively short period of time, which will theoretically lead to incredible advancements that will greatly enhance human lives. However, there’s always the chance that a super-intelligent AI will want nothing to do with helping us solve our problems. Can we play God and create them “in our own image?” Time will tell.

Analysts said this shows the financial viability of Facebook, which has faced questions about its underlying business model, despite its popularity, and was a good sign for a potential initial public offering.

“It’s certainly meaningful to show that this is absolutely the real deal,” said Broadpoint Amtech analyst Ben Schachter. “They are executing. People are spending money on the site.”

Since its creation in a Harvard dorm room five years ago, Facebook has emerged as one of the Internet’s most popular destinations and is increasingly challenging the Web’s established powerhouses like Yahoo Inc and Google Inc.

Facebook unveiled a revamped search engine last month and is currently testing an online payment system. Facebook users have tripled from about 100 million a year ago.

In related Facebook news, yesterday the company announced “Facebook Prototypes,” which has been described as its version of Google Labs, where developers can test out beta versions of various applications that may still have “some kinks to work out.” Nonetheless, if you’re interested to see how Facebook expects to stay ahead of its competitors, it’s a good way to see what they’ve got up their sleeves.

While Gibson’s novel appears to be set in the near-future, the technology he describes is widely available today. “Augmented reality” has found its way to video games, product marketing, and social media applications. And while no companies have ponied up to market a dedicated visor for viewing AR, most of us have a device with a camera and an Internet connection that makes viewing AR possible. Camera-equipped laptops and game consoles are responsible for introducing most consumers to the possibilities of AR, but the latest generation of camera and GPS-enabled mobile phones will really enable this technology to become both ubiquitous and useful.

Here are five applications of AR that will make you re-think the way you perceive the world around you.

AHhrrr – AR zombie shooter

AHhrrr is a tech demo for NVIDIA hardware that uses its screen and camera to create a fully three-dimensional shooting game that requires players to move around in “real space” to access different parts of the tabletop city before them.

Layar Reality Browser

Layar is a browser for Android-powered mobile phones that enables users to view “layers” that show points of interest using information from services like Wikipedia, Yelp, Twitter and more.

Canon “Mixed Reality” Aquarium

Canon is using some specialized visors that users can wear to view interesting virtual graphics around them – in this case, users have the impression of being in the middle of an aquarium, complete with fish, sharks and sea turtles. Even cooler, they’re using this technology to bring virtual dinosaurs to “life.”

Transformers 2 Movie Promotion – “We Are Autobots”

This promotion for Transformers 2: Revenge of the Fallen allowed users to (virtually) replace their head with that of Autobots leader Optimus Prime.

Topps 3D Live Baseball Cards

Hold a Topps 3D Live baseball card up to your computer’s camera and a model of the player on the card springs forth. The player moves with the card, and users can even interact with the 3D model to play games.

Enhancing options for data portability is awesome for at least two reasons. First, I can see how storing one’s data “in the cloud” could be a bit disconcerting – what happens if a particular product or service goes under and takes your data with it? Being able to move your data from service to service, or store it locally, ensures that you’ll always be able to access it.

Second, it enables users to choose the service that best meets their needs. Someday, a Webmail service might come out that blows the pants off of Gmail. Should I be forced to use Gmail simply because that’s where all of my data (like contacts and archived mail) is stored?

In a way, enabling people to easily take their data to a competitor shows how confident Google is in their products. They’re betting that giving users the option to easily take their data wherever they want will attract more users than they’ll lose through people doing just that. I think their confidence will be rewarded.

Ownership—Twitter is allowed to “use, copy, reproduce, process, adapt, modify, publish, transmit, display and distribute” your tweets because that’s what we do. However, they are your tweets and they belong to you.

Now I’m no big city lawyer, but it seems to me that while your tweets remain your intellectual property, Twitter could still, given the terms of the TOS, publish a book of the greatest tweets and profit from it without reimbursing users. However, given the controversy over Facebook’s revised TOS earlier this year, Twitter users and those who value privacy should be able to take comfort in the fact that if they delete their account, Twitter won’t own the deleted tweets.

Asylum has a nice roundup of some of the most bizarre examples. And “bizarre” is a fair assessment, because these definitely aren’t published for a mass audience. Let’s face it, “Miniature Donkey Talk” isn’t going to be displayed near the checkout counter at your local grocery store. That goes double (or triple) for “Girls and Corpses,” a horror mag that features “scantily clad young beauties posing with hideous, decaying, festering corpses.” Hey, it delivers what it claims.

As is the case with successful blogs, these magazines have been able to maintain their readership precisely because their readers have few alternatives for the information found within their pages. For people, it’s been said that “specialization equals failure” – we’re expected to possess a wide variety of skills and abilities, and that makes us more valuable. For print, however, the opposite is true. Focusing on a very specific readership where there are few to no competitors can lead to success.

(via Neatorama)

“The traditional early-adopter model would say that teenagers or college students are really important to adoption,” said Andrew Lipsman, director of industry analysis at comScore. Teenagers, after all, drove the early growth of the social networks Facebook, MySpace and Friendster.

Twitter, however, has proved that “a site can take off in a different demographic than you expect and become very popular,” he said. “Twitter is defying the traditional model.”

Sure, teenagers and college students made MySpace and Facebook what they are today, but young people also have a ton of time on their hands to customize profiles, add “about me” information, browse profiles, and so on. Older folks usually have responsibilities like careers and kids, and so they don’t (or can’t) devote the same amount of attention to keeping updated.

The great thing about Twitter, however, is that it doesn’t require much of a learning curve or time commitment to participate. Even better, it’s been built to work on mobile devices, so users can check tweets and update on the go. Given this dynamic, it’s no surprise Twitter has been embraced by older users, who are able to get a lot out of a service they don’t have to put a lot into.

There are downsides to running Linux on one’s primary machine, of course. This biggest downside is that very little commercial software runs natively on Linux. Gamers use Windows, and drive purchases of high-end processors and graphics cards. Offices run Windows for the almighty Microsoft Office suite. Creative types are often loyal to Macs, but most popular graphics, recording and video editing software is available for Windows as well as OSX.

Since people buy computers based on the software they need, very few people are buying computers with Linux installed from the get-go. Because nobody’s buying computers with Linux installed, companies aren’t spending time to port their programs over. And the cycle continues.

When netbooks began to rise in popularity, I thought Linux might actually start to pick-up some market share, since it makes sense to package a fast, lightweight OS with small laptops primarily intended for surfing the Web. Asus, Dell and HP all offer some flavor of Linux with their netbooks, but sales of Linux netbooks get crushed by sales of their more expensive Windows-packing siblings. The fact is, people are reluctant to use an unfamiliar OS, let alone one that won’t run their existing programs.

While Linux might be a bit of a bust on the desktop, there’s one area where it’s experiencing phenomenal growth and has the opportunity to become the dominant OS around the world: mobile phones.

The advances in power and user interface among mobile phones in the past five years has been astounding. Better hardware has made browsing the Web from a mobile device both useful and downright pleasant, a fact that isn’t lost outside the United States. Already 155 million Chinese are accessing the Web from their phones, and the number is rising.

While much of the mobile Web revolution was sparked by high-end smartphones like the BlackBerry and iPhone that run proprietary operating systems, heavy hitters in the mobile world are pinning their hopes and futures on Linux. Much of this is due to Google’s open source, Linux-based Android platform, which is being embraced by HTC, Motorola, Dell and Lenovo among others. Palm built their WebOS platform on Linux. Word came out today that even Nokia, who have traditionally included their Symbian OS on their phones, will now be building high-end smartphones running the Maemo platform, which as you might guess, is built on Linux.

For the foreseeable future, Apple and BlackBerry will continue to sell zillions of phones with proprietary operating systems. Every other manufacturer will have to decide whether they’ll devote the time and money to develop their own proprietary OS, shell out money to Microsoft and license Windows Mobile, build a platform based on Linux, or embrace a ready-made open source Linux-based mobile platform like Android.

For most hardware manufacturers, the latter two options will increasingly make more sense and enable them to produce advanced smartphones that compete with anything on the market.

In the next few years I bet that I’ll still have a difficult time finding someone who runs Linux on their home PC, but will routinely sit next to someone on the train browsing the Web from their Linux-based phone.

The improvements in outcomes were striking. Patients with colorectal cancer who regularly used aspirin before and after a diagnosis were almost one-third less likely to die of the disease than non-users. Patients who initiated aspirin use only after a diagnosis did even better and had half the risk of dying from the cancer, possibly because of differences in their tumors. The patients were all being treated for nonmetastatic, or localized, cancers, and were followed for almost 12 years on average.

Unfortunately, I have an elevated risk of this type of cancer, so any news of this nature is good news. The first thing that came to mind on this is whether people with certain risk factors (inflammatory bowel disease, family history, history of polyps, and so on) might ever consider a daily regimen of low-dose aspirin, similar to what is sometimes recommended for people at risk for heart attack and stroke.

Of course, the doctors in the study make no such recommendations, and besides, aspirin can actually irritate the stomach and can cause ulcers or internal bleeding, which I would imagine to be very bad for someone with Crohn’s or ulcerative colitis. Nonetheless, it’s a promising study, and will hopefully lead to additional research into potential treatments for colon cancer.

I was somewhat relieved to find out that I wasn’t the only one who would describe the Palm Pre commercials as odd, but neither did I think others would describe feelings of “happiness” and “inspiration” when viewing them. Surprise, surprise:

A nationwide study of 305 viewers looked at response to the new Palm Pre ads. While comments at our site and others seem to have an overwhelmingly negative response to the ads, that was not the case with the study group. In fact, half of the viewers chose inspiration or happiness as the emotions they felt while viewing the ad.

The report didn’t specify whether any of the study participants noted the commercials were “vaguely creepy.”