I haven't used Apple Card. How is that different from just using your bank's mobile app to view your latest transactions? With the Chase app and others you can even sign in with your Touch ID / fingerprint.

SpaceX started streaming a live "technical webcast" feed for the last several launches; here's the one for last night's launch: https://www.youtube.com/watch?...

In the past I think it's been linked from the webcast page, but you can also find it by searching Youtube.

Humble Bundle used to require you to sign into your Steam account and they would add the game directly to your account instead of giving you a key. It was originally keys, then the linking system, and then back to keys.

I'm guessing that Valve disabled that API because they don't want to make the process of buying games outside of Steam as seamless as their own store.

Hey, I didn't spend four years in image doctoring school to be called a shopper!

I suspect that Uber is hiring all these researchers to patent key R&D on the still-developing field of autonomous vehicles, and use it as leverage against Google (which probably has its own chest of patents already) and other self-driving automakers.

No, the biggest irritants are battery life and price. Putting a standalone cell radio in a watch will make the battery life even worse than the 24-48 hours that the latest crop of Android-based watches get with real usage. And the cell radio costs more and will probably have lousy antennas.

I can see why AT&T would want a cell-connected watch: so they can charge you an extra $5-$10 a month to add another device to your plan.

So once we create new antibiotics that can defeat these types of drug-resistant bacteria, how long will it be until a completely new resistance appears? Let's hope that in the next century our ability to engineer new antibiotics exceeds the pace that bacteria can evolve to evade them.

Research in robotics is especially useful because it has direct applications here on Earth, which makes it more likely to attract private investment and increases the likelihood of being able to spin off space tech for consumer purposes.

Maybe in the future we'll be able to build robots using off-the-shelf parts to do boring, dangerous tasks here on Earth, and use slightly more robust versions (still made of mostly off-the-shelf parts) on Mars without spending billions on R&D.

The easiest way to build billions of affordable robots is to have a dozen of them in every home. I'm still waiting for a robot personal chef, dammit!

Credit card companies charge 20-30 cents per transaction, so for $0.99 apps it's a good deal (Apple has probably negotiated lower transaction fees).

Where it gets unfair is that Apple wants the same cut of recurring subscriptions like magazines, etc, which may be a lot more than $0.99. You're prohibited from providing a link to go to your website to sign up for the subscription because Apple wants the cut they get when you buy using in-app purchases.

That's the reason why on iOS you can use the Amazon app to buy physical goods, but not music or other digital items.

Not all astronauts are trained as pilots; these days, a lot of them have scientific background. In this case, Ed Lu is a former astronaut who studied physics and published key papers about using a gravity tractor to deflect asteroids.

None of these X-prize style challenges offer anywhere near the R&D cost of even attempting the challenge.

It's mostly about the prestige -- though I guess people might consider a $10 million challenge more prestigious than a $250,000 one.

And if organizations started offering $10,000 for a bunch of smaller challenges (that still cost a couple orders of magnitude over $10,000 to develop) I'd imagine the novelty would wear off.

Then it'd be Augmented Reality (AR), not Virtual Reality (VR).

Some interesting points in the article. I think there's nothing really stopping you from creating a high-level representation that lets you work abstractly. A graphical programming model is probably going to be too simplistic, but the card example could easily be something like Cards.AceOfSpades. Or being able to call something like Math.eval(<insert some math here>).

Where it falls apart is when you have to hook this up to code that other people have written. If there was a single PlayingCard library that everyone could agree on, you might be able to create a card game by adding a "simple" set of rules (in reality, even simple games tend to have a lot of edge cases, but this would at least free up the nitty gritty work to allow writing something more like a flowchart expressing the various states).

Unfortunately, it's unlikely that a single library is going to meet everyone's needs. Even if you manage to get everyone to stick to one framework, e.g. if all Ruby developers use Rails -- as soon as you start adding libraries to extend it you're bound to end up with different approaches to solving similar problems, and the libraries that use those libraries will each take a different approach.

The partial repeal was a Republican bill that passed the Senate on party lines:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gramm%E2%80%93Leach%E2%80%93Bliley_Act

I suppose you can blame Clinton for not vetoing it.

Nokia could have made a compelling cross-platform play. Write one app, have it run on iOS, Android, and Meego -- and others. Like what HTML5-on-mobile was supposed to do, but without the performance and compatibility headaches.

It wouldn't necessarily have a native look-and-feel on each platform but there are plenty of apps that use non-standard themes anyways.