Tloewald

The principle here is people can agree to surrender some of their privacy for safety. The problem isn’t that searching my bits is a greater violation than searching my atoms, but that it’s not useful. Right now there’s no pattern of bits I can carry with me to blow up a plane and in any event I could easily bypass the search.

I’m not thrilled by the social contract, but it’s a good deal more convenient than driving across country.

Twenty years ago, Nicholas Negroponte pointed out the irony that when he passed through Singapore customs, they searched his atoms but not his bits.

Is being searched before you get on a plane or enter a customs checkpoint some kind of hideous infringement of your civil liberties? No!

There’s no problem with this in principle. The problem is that it’s silly, and it causes a privacy and security violation while not accomplishing anything.

They used it for WoW patches.

Of course America got all its technology fair and square.

It's definitely not easier to manually set a timer than it is to use Siri. Also, you can do multiple timers at once and they follows you around (versus being screamed at because the timer in the kitchen is beeping and no-one has noticed for half an hour and now the fire alarm is going off).

If there’s one thing Apple did, with Steve Jobs, other than build fantastic user experience out of mature but unapproachable technologies, it was communicating the fact that it had done so. Not only has Amazon failed to do this, the writer has as well.

I think it’s pretty cool that, in theory, I could say “Alexa, turn on the oven to 450” and it would (a) turn the correct device to the correct setting and (b) remind me when it was ready (or if it’s being super duper smart, tell me that it was 2 mins or so away from being ready) so that I could stagger over to the kitchen, pull a pizza out of the fridge or freezer, unwrap it, and stick it in the oven. All I need to do is have a bunch of speakers bugging my home, a new oven, ideally probably not two new ovens or not a new oven and a new toaster oven because god knows what will happen, and all this stuff networked.

Or I can walk over to the oven, turn it to 450, and say “Hey Siri, set timer for ten minutes” and wander off. When my wrist buzzes, I go stick a pizza in the oven and I say, “Hey Siri, set timer for thirteen minutes” and go do stuff.

I don’t need a new oven. I don’t need to worry that I’ll pick the wrong oven. I’m not inviting Amazon to parse all my conversations. I don’t need to learn a new magic phrase.

Oh and imagine the hilarity when you try to sell or rent your house and the internet gets turned off. We had a smart sprinkler system which, when we sold the house, we essentially had to rip out because it was easier to install a conventional replacement than figure out how to talk to it without an active WiFi.

If I understood the details I would never have signed the contract. At the time I was pretty desperate for a job (I’d moved to the US from Australia and my own company had gone belly up and I was living in Santa Barbara with a mortgage).

A healthy human diet is 8700 kJ/ day. A gallon of gasoline has 120,000 kJ.

So, we are very energy efficient. But no so awesome in terms of energy storage density.

The exit was in 2005, and several hundred million was not bad (although it came after a failed effort to go public for somewhere north of a billion). I was very new to the startup game and had comparatively little at stake and didn’t understand any of the language but I was invited to some gatherings of engineers who had been screwed by the deal.

My impression is that founders or early investors often have a lot of ability to dilute the value of stock prior to making a deal (there’s description of similar shenanigans early in “Chaos Monkeys”)

I joined a successful startup about ten months before it was acquired for several hundred million. The deal somehow led to a lot of employees losing their options (myself included). There was some discussion of a lawsuit but it fizzled.

Um, CO2 is the problem. Also, no actual fuel you can buy just produces water and CO2.

Energy storage technologies are all about nasty chemistry. Nasty chemistry is where the energy is. Commercializing the chemistry isn’t easy or everyone would do it.

It doesn’t lose energy density in cold weather. Batteries have all kinds fo thermal issues too.

No clue if these guys are viable but the science is solid.

You do understand that the whole point of hydrides is addressing hydrogen’s storage issues (energy density and need to store under pressure). Using hydrides with fuel cells was what everyone expected electric cars to use before lithium ion batteries took off.

Interesting idea. But is the cloud version a complete image (perhaps out of sync)? If so then it’s a performance disaster, if not it’s very fragile.

It seems to me what we really want is a cloud file system with local cache (like Dropbox or iCloud conceptually) so that if our local device is vaporized we have a pretty much up to date logical store alive and well (and we can work on any number of machines). The word “swapping” seems to me to be based on the virtual memory model which means that if anything goes wrong you have two disconnected piles of crap.

At a file level you could theoretically have a giant file that is never wholly local, but how useful is this as a feature in real terms?

Wait, isn't that just Arial?

Is there a single example in business of someone taking a huge amount of money, and plopping a famous CEO in charge of a dozen people and saying "go" and generating a successful business? (Let's set aside investment funds, obviously. I guess Meg Whitman could just hire some iconoclastic traders and tell them to manage the $2B while her 10 staff clone YouTube.)

There are quasi-legendary cases in history (think Spartan and Byzantine super-soldiers) of a tiny band with no resources executing ludicrously successful military campaigns, so I guess it's not completely impossible.

My favorite result was “should I propose?” -5!

More like he’s extrapolating from differing bumps on two populations of nautilus that evolution is less important than individual variation.

Node he's making about that much a month, which is apparently around the average income where he lives.

Still, it seems low.

Upvoted based on your selection of Lotus Notes as the apotheosis of good ideas wrapped in awful implementation. I've never used Leo but just looking at the installation process turned me off the entire idea.

Actually it told me that simple stuff is unnecessarily complex, so that’s not nothing.

[this todo list](http://bindinator.com/#source=todo.component.html) example is shorter and does more.

He has a lot of competition.

FB was able to obtain SMS data from some android handsets. Tons of people found this out when they obtained their data from FB.

Yes.

Unlike FB they don’t do secret backdoor deals with phone manufacturers to spy on you. Also they don’t spy on you. Also they don’t make ALL their money from advertising creating an unavoidable incentive for violating your privacy (and wasting your time but that’s beside the point).

Unlike Android they aren’t a Wild West of malware and dodgy phone manufacturers who do secret deals with everyone to spy on you.

Unlike Google they don’t make almost all their money from advertising (see above).

Unlike Microsoft they don’t bake ads into their OS despite the fact that they don’t make much money from it. Also they aren’t trying to compete with Google. Also hardware Wild West thing.

Unl

Or maybe not.

You should look into the career of B.J. Fogg.

https://www.bjfogg.com/

He literally teaches his students how to make psychologically addictive products and is proud of it (and rich). His disciples are the priests of "engagement".

I look forward to seeing the summary of this discussion thread on n-gate.

If Earth were hit by a dinosaur killing asteroid it would be more habitable than mars before, during, and after.

Any ridiculous boondoggle might have beneficial side effects. There’s no evidence, however, that spending money on a boondoggle is a more effective way of generating positive side effects than spending the same money on something sensible.

I contend that if we were to spend $400B on a crash program to cure cancer we might accidentally end up figuring out how to live safely on mars.

I got one of the first PowerPC computers in a lab full of high end spare no expense PCs and it cranked. If your experience was otherwise, I suspect you were running software under emulation so the fact it was “no better” was a borderline miracle. The second gen PowerPC macs were “the fastest 680x0 boxes ever shipped” (an Apple engineer boasted to me at WWDC and he wasn’t wrong)

The PowerPC allowed Apple to overtake the Pentium and gave it boasting rights until the failure of the G5.

Maybe it was really because NeXTStep could print.