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The Upgrade for WIndows 7 is available on Amazon.com as well as the Microsoft Store for Pre-Order.  Windows 7 Home Premium Upgrade will only cost you $49.99, a savings of $70 from the suggested $120. Windows 7 Professional Upgrade will set you back $99.99 for a savings of $100. All versions of Windows 7 will be available starting on Oct. 22, 2009. While initial reports say that Win7 is extremely stable and should run on a wide variety of hardware you can ensure sure your PC is compatible with Windows 7 by grabbing Microsoft’s Windows 7 Upgrade Advisor. Windows 7 installation disks will contain both 32 bit and 64 bit versions of Windows… so no matter which you version purchase it will install on your PC.

You can purchase the Microsoft Windows 7 Home Premium Upgrade for $49.99 or Microsoft Windows 7 Professional Upgrade for $99.99 from Amazon or through the Microsoft Store.

Holding out for a Sprint Touch Pro but just can’t afford the new-customer price of $299? Well, Amazon is running one heck of a fire-sale as you can now pick one up for the quite low price of  $99! Of course, that is after a $100 mail-in-rebate. But still  … with a point-of-purchase sale of $199, it is still lower than Sprint direct.

Source: wmexperts.com

If you get a Touch Pro (CMDA) I suggest flashing your phone and using MightyROM5 or MightyROM 4/R3BORN.

Ok so a lot of us love to rock out on our plastic instruments; jamming to Rock Band or Guitar Hero. The problems is… having a bunch of plastic guitars, drums, etc makes your living room look a bit, well, nerdy. Enter the AK Rock Box Gaming and Storage Ottoman with Drum Lift. It runs $199.99 with free shipping (normally $299) but might be worth it if you gaming system has it’s home in the living room. Instead of stashing controllers behind the couch, or just leaving them sitting all over the place you can neatly stash them inside the storage ottoman.

Product Features

Coming at ya straight from LifeHacker is the Top 10 Amazon Power Shopper Tools:

You already love the one-stop convenience of shopping online at Amazon.com, but chances are you’re not getting everything you can out of this feature-packed shopping engine. Did you know Amazon can email you suggestions from Mom’s wish list two weeks before her birthday? Automatically ship you a new case of toilet paper every two months? Refund the difference on the price of an item you purchased that went on sale? Several advanced Amazon features and third party apps and add-ons can help you get the best deals and the stuff you want delivered to your door right on time. After the jump, add our favorite 10 Amazon power-shopper tools to your cart.

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Mitchell Howe has a short article called “What are the Odds?” which discusses the bet between Ray Kurzweil and Mitchell Kapor. I love Kurzweil’s books so this caught my attention.

“Artificial Intelligence (AI) is a topic that always seems to drop on and off the radar of public interest in synch with Hollywood portrayals and celebrity prognostications. Indeed, the most recent spat of attention has followed a much-publicized $10,000 wager made by futurist and inventor Ray Kurzweil against corporate trailblazer Mitchell Kapor. The bet, solemnized at www.longbets.org (where all winnings go to charity), is that a computer, or “machine intelligence,” will pass the so-called Turing test by 2029. The Turing test, a challenge to see if a computer can fool a human judge into thinking it is human, is a traditional benchmark for the point when true Artificial Intelligence can be said to have been achieved – a historic moment, by any measure.

But with recent discussion of AI taking place in the context of a wager, debates have tended to focus on the difficulty of the problem rather than the implications – as though the arrival of true Artificial Intelligence would only mean the difference between a robot making your coffee and brewing it yourself.

What are the stakes, really? Why should this wager matter to you personally? And what, exactly, are the odds?”

Mitchell then delves in at a high level explaining the two sides of the bet. This is a great little read if you’re at all interested in AI. For further reading you should check out The Singularity Is Near: When Humans Transcend Biology. This book is so fascinating that I read it from front to back in just a few days.

Click on over and check out Mitchell’s article “What are the Odds?”