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hmm, interesting, and I don't deny that 'commercial' companies can have good (unintentional) effects. But I am sure there is a space between charity and 'actual' companies, along the lines of what Fábio Barbosa[1] is doing. Which makes me wonder if it is viable for startups to take such an approach?

[1] http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SrONJfa9lZU

I specifically chose to talk about a scale, because I do agree that it is not black and white.

There is however a difference between: earning money as a goal and improving lives as a means (improved quality of life being a byproduct) and wanting to improve lives (and as such quality of life) and earning money only being a requirement to sustain those activities.

But perhaps startups are not way to go for the latter, which is why I am curious if there are any startups taking this route (or perhaps have tried and failed).

'Improving lives' is ambiguous, it centralizes around solving problems that people have. However if you scale these problems from 1st world to 3rd world problems it seems to me that improving lives in this context is aimed more at 1st rather than 3rd world problems. Which makes sense from a business standpoint, but the title somewhat implies that is about making the world a 'better' place.

I am not criticizing pg because I strongly believe that it is a winning strategy when talking about startups, just take improving lives with a grain of salt. I'd love to actually improve lives, but unless you can take the Bill Gates route (earn billions, do charity work), it's not easy to do so from behind a computer, writing code. Are there any startups taking the route of actually improving quality of life?

Just keep it simple and go with: "No, just build the damn product."

His own idea; http://vimeo.com/1425935 around 4:10

Accurately simulating physics is quite difficult. Simulations are a simplified representation of reality, but translating a simulation back to actual little robots might not work. This is because of noise you would encounter in the real world that is hard to simulate.

So there actually are benefits to using robots instead of doing a simulation. Simulations are usually faster and cheaper to create but robots give a more realistic result.

Many people don't know/understand what they share about themselves when they sign up for Facebook. What's wrong with someone who is known for speaking up to warn people about the 'risks' of social media?

I've only quickly browsed through the online version and already had a few good laughs! And I love the;

   This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike 3.0 Unported License because I couldn't find a license with an even longer name.

Isn't the 10,000 hour most commonly applied to things like playing the violin? I haven't seen many cases of it being applied to coding, nor language learning, in the academic papers I've read anyway...

I can recommend reading "The Cambridge Handbook of Expertise and Expert Performance", it paints a clear pictures of what Expertise actually is.

They calculate the positions. Though recently the railway implemented a system in their trains that seems to use GPS to inform passengers on realtime arrival times. So perhaps in the future they will make GPS data available in their API.

The railway company is kinda behind on how the world (of data) works, and they have for a long time considered this kind of information as exclusive information that nobody else should be able to access. Despite being government owned..