Well, if you want reasonable housing prices in the face of climbing demand, then it's your problem. Without new housing in quantity in Mountain View, existing housing in Mountain View will cost more, and the same effect will ripple out to surrounding communities, including SF. The increased number of commuters will also increase traffic on the roads (though not as much as it could, thanks to the Google buses).

If you don't care about housing costs and traffic in the region, then it's not your problem. I don't live in the area, so it's certainly not my problem.

Very good point. I stand corrected.

Putting something into LEO with an elevator would probably require lifting it well beyond LEO to get something close to the right orbital velocity, then applying thrust to fix up the resulting eccentric orbit. It'd still be cheaper than lifting it from the ground into LEO... though it occurs to me that the reason it would be cheaper is that it would get its orbital velocity by taking energy from the elevator. That could be restored by lowering a mass from geostationary orbit.

I hadn't consider it before but it seems like a space elevator would need station-keeping thrusters to maintain its orbital velocity since it would be sapped a bit by every kilogram lifted from the ground. Without thrusters you'd need so send a like amount of mass down, which means for every kilogram you lift up and want to keep in orbit you'd need to find a similar mass to send down. Maybe ore from asteroid mining operations? Of course, then the source of the orbital velocity you're using to restore the elevator's velocity is the thrusters that put the ore into the right orbit to go down the elevator.

I don't have any concerns as long as Page and Brin are running the show. You're right that a future CEO could make other decisions... though he'd have to change the company culture first, or face mass rebellion.

What you call 'spiral dynamics' sounds a lot like Machiavelli's theory of political history, which he laid out in his book The Prince.

Machiavelli postulated that Monarchy tends to devolve into an aristocratic and oligarchic Tyranny, Tyranny is supplanted via revolution by Democracy, Democracy eventually (and inexorably) falls into Anarchy, and Anarchy is solved when one person rises to lead the masses and forms a Monarchy.

History is cyclic. The question is whether we can break the cycle, and do we want to. As powerful as the security state has become, we're likely to break the cycle by spawning an eternal Tyranny instead of a sustainable Democracy.

Must not have been a Google ad, Google doesn't allow gun ads. Personally, I think that's stupid, but in the interest of accuracy, your ad couldn't have been from Google.

Since the space elevator's center of mass is orbiting, climbing the elevator would also get you to orbital speeds. Indeed, one limiting factor on the rate at which you can climb the cable would be the lateral acceleration experienced by the climber and cargo.

Actually, I think you've got the process right, but the motives wrong. Google's primary goal is the technology, the profits and competitive advantage are a means to that end, not the other way around.

At present, at least, Google's policy is not to sue over patents, except defensively. This could always change, but I seriously doubt it will while Larry Page is in charge.

Not in quantity.

Actually, studies comparing areas with rent control to areas without, controlling for other factors, indicate that rent controls cause lower housing supplies and higher rents. The market actually does a pretty good job -- certainly far better than planning commissions achieve.

By looking at the source.

You missed his point completely. The point was that many production systems weren't running the new version. Of the 2/3 of web servers that use OpenSSL, it's likely that only half were running a newer OpenSSL. So it's not "every SSL session was (potentially) compromised", it's "about a third of SSL sessions were (potentially) compromised".

That's bad. Really, really bad. But it's not as bad as if OpenSSL really were a monoculture.

Indeed. Sorry I was a little unclear; I mixed two things together there. One is the global equalization, which is going to cause some pain in the wealthy world. Another is the concentration of wealth within nations, particularly (but not only) the wealthy nations. The latter is something that has happened during each technological revolution and the resulting creation of new industries. The captains and leaders of those new industries get insanely wealthy, then over time competitive market forces push margins down and the benefit of the new productivity gets spread to the people.

Both of these things are going on at once, of course.

I don't think that argument went away, it just changed. The core of the concern about silver was that the proposed bimetallic standard overvalued it, meaning that 50% of the value of silver coins would be fiat, not market, value. The issue only "went away" because we opted (for better or worse) to go 100% fiat. So we eliminated the debate by making the problem anti-silverites were declaiming (if it is a problem) infinitely worse.

If you can go back over the output of thousands of creative writers and cherrypick the predictions that vaguely resemble what we have today, of course you can find lots of matches. However, you will find even more failures. Even the successes you mention aren't really all that close... for example the "Star Trek tablet": yes, Star Trek portrayed tablet devices with electronic display screens which accepted stylus input, but look at how different -- and inferior! -- those are to what we have.

As far as I can tell in Star Trek the tablets were used only as a slightly-improved version of the clipboard. The yeoman would bring one over to the captain for him to look at and sign off on some forms, for example. Why? Why not just display the information on the captain's own tablet? And why are the tablets only used for display and entry of text? Why does Spock have to walk over to his station to pull up readings on the unknown being's energy emissions, rather than just flicking it onto his tablet, or the captain's? Our tablets are general-purpose display and input devices -- with audio and video I/O -- and powerful network-connected computers in their own right. They're also full of sensors: GPS, magnetic compass, barometric altimeter, gyro, accelerometer, camera, not to mention all of the radios. They look more like the Star Trek tricorder rather than the tablet.

Really, the only thing Star Trek tablets have in common with today's tablet computers is the form factor... and even that isn't all that similar, since they were over an inch thick and had much smaller screens relative to their area. Further, the form factor is an extremely obvious one, since clipboards have been around since the late 19th century, and people have likely been using something similar to tally on for millennia.