Even shorter TL;DR: Some news article claimed that launching a magazine only for Apple's iPad is not a good idea. Gruber comes to Apple's rescue and explains how it's The Daily's own fault if they failed.
Right. What I should have emphasized is that the banking system will be provided entirely by Google. The credit card companies will be out of the equation.
Self-driving cars + robot arm + bufferbox = extremely cheap, fully automated delivery service. Add a robotic distribution center http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Fdd6sQ8Cbe0 and you have an automated Amazon competitor. If, on top of that, Google turns your Google account into a bank account, you'll be able to buy literally with one click. Google's dominance in mobile with Android will ensure that everyone has a Google bank account through which you can make most of your purchases. If you're a manufacturer, Google will take care of all your advertising for free, just so long as you give them a tiny cut of each sale. Google will be a trillion dollars company.
Can someone explain something to me. These guys have 5 patents for their Dragonfly and, according to them, the research that led to these patents was funded by taxpayers to the tune of $1,000,000. So, the government funds the research, and the researchers get to patent the results for themselves? Is that the usual arrangement?
In the video, the founders suggest that I can "spy on people" and simultaneously show a picture of little girls. I would suggest removing that from the video.
Also in the video, they proudly announce that "the dragonfly has 5 technology patents on its design, ranging from mechanics, aerodynamics and flight controls". The fact that they intend to use the patent system to prevent competition might help them attract investors, but it sure as hell is not going to encourage me to contribute to their funding campaign.
Yes, and Google hasn't really even gotten started yet with monetizing Android. The real money maker will be Google Wallet. Just imagine Google taking a 2% cut out of every transaction you make through an Android phone. No one will be calling Android a failure then.
I understand that allowing patents for algorithms is bad for innovation. What I don't understand is that people say that and then in the same breath claim that allowing patents for chemical formulas is good for innovation. In both cases, the patent holder gets a monopoly and everyone else is stuck with them as their supplier. I feel a terrible cognitive dissonance trying to reconcile these two positions.
If the patent troll doesn't produce anything, you have no power against them. They don't care if you own a million patents yourself, they can still sue you for infringement of their one patent with no fear of repercussions.
> Free markets always tend towards monopoly/oligopoly/cartel structures in the long term - because the firms that do so retain their pricing advantage (profits) and the firms that don't - die.
Can you give any example?
> Free/natural markets are probably one of the greatest lies ever sold.
What do you mean? Free markets are not a lie. There are tons of free markets. If I buy bread at the supermarket, I can choose among multiple brands.
"To license the use of images or clips, please contact Science and Society Picture Library."
That's unfortunate. If they released the raw digital data to the public, I bet someone out there would take it on themselves to restore it much further.
I like this game. Here are some suggestions. I would prefer to only have to select the hue (the angle in the circle). That is, the game would prepare the correct saturation (distance from the center) and brightness (the vertical bar) for me. My score would be the difference in degrees between my answer and the correct answer. It would make the game more enjoyable to a wide audience. It would also make the score easier to understand than a percentage (the percentage means nothing to me). Finally, I would like to have the name of the company written in text under the logo for cases where I want to know who it belongs to.
Copyright is most definitely not a good force. Whenever the government intervenes to prevent voluntary transactions among individuals, it destroys more value than it creates. Copyright falls under that category.
If I had to bet, I would say that AR glasses of the future will replace your vision entirely with a camera feed (called video-passthrough in the article). Today's glasses have a low field of view and lag, but these are only quantitative problems. They can be solved with gradual improvements. They're not physical limitations. The camera is right next to the display, so there are no fundamental speed-of-light issues. It's easy to imagine that, over the years, the lag will be reduced enough to be imperceptible.
The problem of drawing black with see-through glasses looks like a much harder problem in comparison.
I would like to see an Olympic Games that make no assumption as to what the competitors are made of. A competition where robots are allowed to compete as much as humans. To avoid injuries to human athletes, you would probably have to limit it to sports where competitors don't interact with one another, but it would be interesting to see the evolution over the years as robots get better than humans.
"Holes such as this are of particular interest because their interior caves are relatively protected from the harsh surface of Mars, making them relatively good candidates to contain Martian life"
Isn't that grasping at straws a little? I'm not a biologist, but it seems highly unlikely to me that life would develop in a hole 35 meters across.
When I think of a submarine cable, I think about fiber optics and all the data that can go through it. But when I see a map of all the submarine cables on Earth, it reminds me of a nervous system. Unicellular organisms long ago started cooperating with one another and evolved into multicellular lifeforms. I get the impression that, as data transmissions increase year after year, humans are forming some sort of superorganism.
> Planetary Resources wants to identify and characterize these top targets before it does anything else. To that end, it has designed a high-performance, low-cost space telescope that Anderson said should launch to low-Earth orbit within the next 18 to 24 months.
Wow, they are not wasting time. Last week, the idea of an asteroid mining company was still in the realm of science fiction. Today, an asteroid mining company announces that they are launching a survey telescope within two years. It feels like we are entering a new era of technological progress. It makes me wonder what other surprising announcements are coming over the next few years in other fields.
SpaceX's launch prices are already much lower than its competitors. Things will become even more interesting in a few years when SpaceX starts reusing its rockets. Launching stuff to orbit will become so cheap, it's difficult to fully comprehend the impact SpaceX will have. The imagination runs wild. Massive spaceships anyone?
Identity theft is only as bad as the fraud that was performed through it. If the act causes a measurable loss to the victim (e.g. credit card fraud), the victim is going to find out about it one way or another. No need for surveillance. However, if you wanted to effectively forbid anyone from impersonating anyone else even when no harm is done, you would definitely need a surveillance society.
One thing that strikes me as unnatural about copyright is how difficult it would be to enforce effectively. With a traditional crime like robbery, the victim suffers a direct loss. The victim or a relative can report the event to the authorities. With copyright, the victim suffers no damage. Most of the time, the victim of infringement doesn't even know that the event occurred. To enforce copyright effectively, all private communications would have to be monitored at all times. After all, any data transfer between two people is a potential violation of the copyright of a third party. Even private chatter inside your home would have to be recorded and analysed. Otherwise, you'd be allowing kids to sing "Happy Birthday" without a license.
Great comment. On an evolutionary scale, humans just recently became smart enough to get the ball rolling and accumulate technology from generation to generation. The potential for improvements in intelligence is enormous.