(I also replied the following elsewhere in this discussion, but it is apt here as well)

I currently live in Asia. Whatsapp is very, very popular over here.
A good number of my European contacts are also using it.
I don't know how popular it is in the USA.
I find it a very useful piece of software, one of the most used apps on my iphone.

I currently live in Asia. Whatsapp is very, very popular over here.
A good number of my European contacts are also using it.
I don't know how popular it is in the USA.
I find it a very useful piece of software, one of the most used apps on my iphone.

I am less sceptical than the average slahdot reaction regarding these rumores

Medical devices: an area that could use good innovation. I can imagine Apple being well placed to combine lots of non-invasive sensors into a userfriendly (watch?) deivce) to monitor health. It is not an unrealistic expectation.
They also bought a home automation company some time ago, I can see them defining a standard that will be as popular as Airplay is these days. I can imagine using an idevice/watch to quickly dim the light in the living room for example.
Tesla, now that is really interesting. Indeed a different industry but that does not need to spell failure. Both companies have an innovative attitude, both companies have experience with high quality manufacturing. I can imagine the skills and experience to be nicely complementary. Currently these cars are a the top end of the market, and issues remain, but I bet it is a growth area.

It is not really a news site, but I would pay for wikipedia if paywalled. I did voluntary pay a bit, twice. It is in general very useful for me. Otherwise perhaps occasionaly for an in depth article by a repute dpublisher (even then, max. $2), but not a subscription.

Back then a colleague of mine wanted to buy a mini disc player (remember?) with a pile of discs for her frequent business travels.She is not a technically minded person. I recommended her to check out the newfangled original ipod. She loved it immediately. Simplicity in use, no piles of discs. Subsequently, I helped her by ripping her 50 or so CDs on my Mac and then putting the music on her iPod (in 128K quality if I remember well, unthinkably low these days) - she did not have a computer with firewire. Anyway, the lady had several years of pleasure out of it.

I can imgine that the iWatch would wirelessly communicate with the iphone which the user has in a pocket, for various functions. The iphone has GPS. The iWatch would suffice to show only sections of the map, it would not need to do the positioning. But indeed, battery life will be an issue for a truly "smart" watch.

Fully agree. There is no journalistic reason to link to the leaked script. No serious journalist would do that.

Thanks, MR James. I don't expect that the wd tv live would be able to completely replace the Apple TV if it were running xbmc. Would it run as smoothly and as elegantly integrated with the Mac environment as the apple TV? Can you mirror the iphone and ipad screens on it through wifi? Can you rent movies from iTunes? Can my visiting friends immediately stream the media on their ios device to the tv via wifi? All nice features of the Apple TV.
These are 2 very smalll boxes, I don't mind having two of these devices around.

I have to admit: I wrote that it plays ALMOST anything. Of late there have been some anime files that don't play at all. They do play on the Mac on VLC. The use h264 codec. really puzzling. But in general it works like a charm.

The Western Digital TV live box is cheap and it plays almost any reasonable media file (except flv) you'd throw at it. Certainly the ones prevalent on internet. It can access a shared folder on your computer so you don't have to walk around with that stick anymore. To be fair, I only use it for downloaded video files. For music and photo I have an Apple TV, I love its GUI and easy integration in our Mac/IOS based home.

Apple bought a home automation company some time ago. A sensible rumor is that the upcoming iwatch could also be used to for example remotely dim your living room lights, etc. I can see Google aiminh for a similar path forward.

I recently read an article on Watson, on how hard it was to model medical knowledge in it (in one of the first commercial applications that is being created now). In essence this kind of modelling must happen for all potential applications, these are projects of significant effort. But, it is surely interesting how this more modern expert system technology is inching forward, even if I expect that it will be many years before we encounter a machine comparable to HAL.

Newer technology applied by one side in a conflict have cause important victories before throughout history. The ability to totally outclass an adversary is from a military point of view desirable. I did skim the linked article, one issue is that of proportionality, but still, those who win do not really care.

If I read the article correctly, the impressive part is not that the game takes place in a generated maze, but rather that the AI created from scratch a game, however simple, that takes place inside that world. That step which involves working with concepts is far from trivial.

Angelina's first game may be very simple, but it is conceptually quite something. For example it is interesting to read in the words of Angelina how she picked the music. So, let us not focus on how "meh" this first outing is but rather think of it as an interesting first step. By 2020 a hypotetical Angelina v6 should already be much farther evolved.