izendejas

Facebook is blurring the line between "personalization" and "social recommendations." The first tailors to your tastes. The latter influences your tastes. Clearly, the latter is more powerful from a marketing standpoint because it attaches a recognizable face to a product, rather than an explanation (or no explanation) of why your seeing x result.

Does ARPANET mean anything to you? Without ARPANET, it's quite possible we wouldn't have the massive growth that has resulted from an open internet that doesn't discriminate packets. Would you have preferred Telcos (or other "private endeavors") designing the internet protocols with proprietary standards and full control over every packet (or lack thereof if they had had their way)? Yes, entrepreneurs have redefined the internet, but both complement each other very well and without one, you can't have the other.

Bad behavior by politicians... who are practically at the mercy of special interests. AND bad behavior by many individuals who are always looking to cut corners* or are too irrational they end up forcing leaders to overstep their oversight boundaries.

*excuse the cliche', trying to be concise.

Rather than a rumor, it's just the way Google works. They are as data-driven as you can get. Think of all the AI work they're doing that one easily takes for granted: computer vision (image search, goggles, street view), nlp (translate, voice, search, etc), machine learning (search, et al), etc.

On a related note: All of you on AT&T plans, be on the lookout for unjustified charges on text messaging plans. I had at least two cases in which I was charged an extra $0.30 for text messages 198, 199, and 200 of a 200 text messaging plan.

I'm not sure how to explain this bug--or theft? Perhaps their famous "AT&T Free Msg's" (promoting services, for example) get counted once you pass your limit? Either way, this is wrong. And I know they are wrong because I was redeemed $0.30. I then asked them to check my previous bills because I know there was at least one more case. The service rep said I had to do that myself. The cost of doing that would exceed $0.30 very easily, so I told the guy to forget it and never did check (I also then switched to Verizon).

Anyone have a good place where I can share this story? I'm afraid others may be getting charged unfairly too. I can't imagine this happening exclusively with my account, especially if it's a bug.

Has anyone actually read their privacy policy? What's the quickest way to get 1 million people's data? This might be it folks.

This is too fishy: "In addition to any disclosures we may make as set out above, we may also disclose your personal information to third parties: in the event that we sell or buy any business or assets, in which case we may disclose your personal data to the prospective seller or buyer of such business or assets; if we or substantially all of our assets are acquired by a third party, in which case personal data held by it about our users will be one of the transferred assets..."

What exactly is an asset here? Could an asset be the very data they've collected? Who can make sense of this?

What some deem "useless" or "bad" ideas can evolve to become very useful. Twitter, is a great example. Very few thought they'd succeed. Now they're huge and growing and I bet 5 years from now, they'll be doing things even their founders can't imagine.

Likewise, whether Qwiki survives is independent of their idea, but rather their ability to adapt their product to customer needs and above all, their ability to execute.

Random acts of kindess... evolution at its best.

Partly in foreign aid, I bet.

There's a saying in Spanish (haven't read it or heard it an English) which translates to: "you can't cover the sun with a finger." It means you shouldn't pretend to be solving huge problems by, in some ways, denying them and doing too little.

However practical this solution may be (it's definitely clever), it does not really address the biggest problem--our increasing dependence on fossil fuels. It is creating more than just climatic problems (pollution, wars, etc), so why not find hacks to alleviate such "addiction" and kill many birds with one stone.

I think we should promote hacks when they address the root of a problem--otherwise you create a bigger mess in the long run, but then, would they still be called hacks?

thanks, good to know. i'm def. switching then... when i get it.

I use Brizzly on a daily basis, but I might switch to the "new" Twitter. And I too wonder if they'll die off.

What I love that the new Twitter UI has: * infinite scroll * in-line media (embedded videos/images)

Why I might not make the switch yet: * their mute feature (useful when following someone who's tweeting way too much irrelevant stuff) * they crowd-source explanation of trending topics (offers a quick way to find out what's going on w/o doing a search)

fwiw, i managed 61 fps on a karmic machine w/ i7.

and out of curiosity i tried a froyo powered device (droid 2.2) and got up to 26 fps.

Your comment is spot on. The rule of thumb is that if you can't make sense of the ingredients list on back labels (especially if they're extremely long), it's more than likely highly processed junk.

Google doesn't want to be social, they just want "social graph" data--two very different things. It's why they've failed.

Google needs to offer a compelling reason for people to transfer their profiles and hang around Google services in order to get the "social" part somewhat right. And then Google will succeed in getting the data they value most: the things you explicitly "like" or favorite, in this case,(with a bright yellow star). And that's where I think Freebase comes in--or so I hope.

"Android's smartphone market share has now passed that of Apple—17.2% to 14.2% at the end of the second quarter, Gartner estimates"

Will this also be enough pressure for Apple to cut its exclusive ties with AT&T? I just bought an Android device today. I couldn't stand AT&T's network anymore.

Competition's good. Keep it coming.

Yea, but at what cost? Are they using more power? I would think so as they not only auto-complete, but also generate countless search results in rapid-fire mode.

For every query, how many more sets of results are returned? On average, it's easily more than one. It's only one when they predict your query.

They're not letting it rust somewhere. They indicate that they plan to "extend the technology for use in other Google projects. " http://googleblog.blogspot.com/2010/08/update-on-google-wave...

Funny you mention the internet (TCP/IP, etc). That's one thing I'm glad the government--be it university funded researchers and DARPA among others--took care of. I can't imagine a large Telco designing the internet. We certainly wouldn't have net neutrality and the Googles would probably not exist.

Think of it as an interest network-- albeit one that can get noisy, if you're not careful.

I got started realizing I can follow smart people doing phds, entrepreneurs, hackers etc who are doing things I'm interested in. And occasionally, I can ask them questions.

My followee list has evolved over time when my interests change or when someone gets too noisy.

Wikipedia has a nice section on the history of said memristor. Apparently, its discovery goes back to 1960 with work by Bernard Widrow (Professor Emeritus, Stanford). A few patents are coming out of this. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Memristor#Timeline_of_memristor...

One of the patent awardees, Blaise Motett, seems to have a different view of HP's memristor, namely that their sr is not actually one. http://www.slideshare.net/blaisemouttet/mythical-memristor

Yes, the link above links to an hp page with the following anchor text: "[with memristors] both compute and memory functions could be conducted within the same chip".

I've been following this work for years now and it's exciting to read this announcement. I hope I'm right when I predict this technology will be a catalyst for huge economic growth in years to come just like transistors and the internet. Low-power devices that remember their state even when powered off? Imagine the possibilities.

Google Voice does come with call screening: http://www.google.com/googlevoice/about.html

Awesome! I'm sure even Apple will solve it as they know HTML 5 is going to be a big part of the future.

Sounds like schizophrenia to me. I subletted to a person with schizophrenia (a very nice korean guy, very religious), also. As I point out somewhere around here, it's a truly fascinating mental condition.

I've had the same experience. Truly humbling, indeed.

One mental condition that really fascinates me is schizophrenia as you begin to understand reality is the brain's way of interpreting chemical, visual, auditory, tactile and other external stimuli, but also via its internal chemical reactions, neural connections that can go haywire.

Cognitive dissonance is another topic I'm fascinated by and wish everyone would know about it.

Anyway, if your interested in these subjects, but don't want to read very technical papers, I recommend reading Jonah Lehrer as he'll point you in some interesting directions: http://www.wired.com/wiredscience/frontal-cortex

Same goes for many criminals. The brain is a complex bunch of grey goo. So many ways the wiring can go wrong. We have a long way to go before we can fully understand psychiatric/psychological conditions, much less treat them.

Right, that shouldn't be the point of this article. I think the takeaway are the personal stories.

Has anyone ever talked to a homeless person before? I recommend doing so from time to time. It's easy to judge some of these "bums." You'll find out some of these people have serious psychological/psychiatric problems (with alcoholism/drug addiction being a result, not just a cause).

As we know, this is a good reason to be on Team HTML 5 (with all it's tradeoffs). I admire Rob's incredible amount of patience though and hope it pays off.