kkleiner

hah, technologies always seem obvious after they are created! Certainly an iphone like device was eventually inevitable - most inventions are. But Apple introduced it with a speed and quality that the rest of the industry would likely have taken many years, perhaps even a decade to innovate without Apple leading the way.

duh! fixed.

Sadly, I fear it is possible if you are squeezing 50 of them into a room designed for 5 people and feeding them tiny portions of corn meal each day.

I am not sure how helpful most of these supplements really are. I'm more into exercising and "eating food, mostly plants, not too much". Beyond that, is there really that much that supplements can do?

The article doesn't mention MIT, but it does mention other efforts such as Mathletics. What makes Khan Academy and Mathletics stand out from MIT is that they are MUCH more than just a collection of videos. Khan and Mathletics increasingly represent entire ecosystems with points systems, competitions, tracking of your performance, and so on. That is why Khan exemplifies the future of education vs simple collections of videos like MIT.

The writer doesn't have anything mixed up. Most of the chips were large value denominated and hence nearly all of the stolen chips were worthless the moment the thief walked out the door.

Also, the article is not claiming the thief was captured because of the RFID. The article is simply highlighting how the RFIDs in the chips foiled the thief by making the chips worthless almost immediately, and then goes on to highlight how RFIDs within chips are enabling casino operators to track user behavior in new and novel ways. The focus of the story is not that RFID was used to catch the bad guy, rather the focus is on how RFID tech within these chips has changed casino operation, from user tracking, to "turning off" stolen chips on demand.

I don't get it

I think that is pretty short sighted of you. The applications for this stuff expand way beyond simply linking to your facebook profile. Especially from a marketing perspective, these codes seem to have real potential for promotions, etc.

its 1 millimeter between the can and the pin, not 1 millimeter between the cans

right, because like 99% of hackers don't watch scifi stuff, right? What better audience is there for a movie like avatar than hackers?

Stupid. Just because traffic is going down doesn't mean the technology or the company doesn't deserve some serious attention:

http://singularityhub.com/2009/07/27/wolfram-alpha-a-force-t...

Completely different in that it is a totally original piece. The same in the sense that they focus on the same topic, but in fact this one is a response to the other.

Robotrout,

I don't have the specific info you are looking for...but if you really want to look into this further, you could contact one of the main researchers behind the project:

http://www.agri.gov.il/en/people/875.aspx

The $.05 cost per plant does not mean that the unit cost is $.05...that is just the cost to buy proper coverage for one plant, even if that means that there is one sensor for every 100 plants.

story was updated shortly after you read it to mention that not every plant requires the chip. Like you say, there must be other stuff out there as well, so it is unclear how useful this would be versus other competing solutions

Marshall has a lot more wrong than the year. I think his ideas are pretty ludicrous. He thinks that in the next decade or so robots will replace humans as construction workers. Does he have any idea how hard of a challenge that is? More likely is that robots will complement humans in construction, just as they are in warehousing, long before they completely replace humans.

Many might mistakenly think that genomes are already being sequenced for $1,000 by companies like 23andme and decodeme, but these companies do not offer full genome sequencing. Instead they only analyze a few hundred thousand hot spots in your dna called SNP’s that can tell you lots of interesting things about your dna, but not the whole story. Fully sequencing every single one of the approximately 3 billion base pairs of your dna is a completely different scenario and the price of doing this is coming down rapidly.