Realistic, but very hard to learn from since it'll all be one-time events. I suspect what they want is repeatable "randomness" so more like scripted cars where you can tweak the algorithms, reset the scenario and try again. Not to mention that if you're intentionally trying to break the computer's algorithms, having actual people in the mix seems like a bad idea. Having people drive cars around like they do with drones could be a good compromise though.

Both Qatar and us here in Norway have oil, basically we won the natural resource lottery which is rather independent of any political system. Try Sweden or Denmark if you want more fair examples of social democratic countries. In any case, we're part of EUs inner market so there's not really many import tariffs but we do have a large public sector, many things are paid for by taxes and provided as public services.

Actually less and less people live in extreme poverty, world literacy rates are going up, agricultural jobs are replaced by industry and service jobs that require skilled labor. Almost half the remaining extremely poor live in India and China, both countries that are rapidly pulling themselves out of poverty. The financial crisis that has hit the west hasn't really stopped progress on that. The greatest challenges are still in Africa where the numbers are going backwards due to population growth, but with pretty much all of Asia moving in the right direction the total picture is more good than bad.

As a counterargument, I've been on vacation in three other continents and in one year made 50-100 international flights for work. I think you can count the number of times my parents flew abroad on one hand, my grandparents to my knowledge never flew anywhere. While I'm sure my apartment is also better insulated, I have more space and far bigger windows than they had and we have a family cabin too. A lot of the "eco"-whatever is like light potato chips, 30% less fat but still totally junk food compared to a salad. Eco-vacation would be grabbing a tent and going camping somewhere nearby, not travelling to exotic faraway places as an "eco"-tourist.

Also don't forget that many swap eco-friendliness for time, I could take the bus to and from work and it'd take me about 20 minutes extra each way. But when I realized 2*20 minutes * 225 work days/year = 150 hours = 4 weeks of extra vacation time @ 7.5 hours/day I'd rather have more leisure time. I'm not so sure you can win this through efficiency, sure I try not to be an eco swine but like most people I'm not going to let it curb what I want to do. And what you want tends to expand when you get the possibility to do so.

Any smallish company where security is not compartmentalized from other development activities but with a public Bugzilla server so users can report bugs and such? You register with a @company.com address and you're assumed to be an in-house developer with access to all your dirty laundry. Not everyone runs on a strict need-to-know basis...

Except they have nothing like that, all they have is an early indicator of Alzheimer's. That is of course useful, but since we've got neither a cure nor any useful treatments to counteract the effects that alone won't do much. It's a major achievement in decoding how the mind works though.

The problem is that you can not control a kernel driver through an ABI, it all runs as root so bad driver code can corrupt or crash everything. If you can compile and trace/fix the driver yourself that's a manageable risk, if it's just a blob you're at the vendor's mercy. And since Linux doesn't have the market share (carrot) or a big certification program (stick) that wouldn't be a very good idea. The best case scenario is when you have a low-level ABI and can put the high-level driver code in a userspace driver, that way it can't harm the rest of the system at a slight performance penalty due to the context switches.

That does depend on the hardware complying to some low level ABI though, otherwise the kernel wouldn't know how talk to the hardware. Fortunately USB is such a thing, plug in any USB device be it a keyboard, mouse, printer, scanner, memory stick or an XBone controller and Linux has a low level kernel driver (one per USB generation I think, actually) to read/write data. That's what the alternate "xboxdrv" driver does, it reads USB events, translates them to input events and returns them to the kernel. It only works for USB though, you still need drivers to talk to PCIe devices, disk drives, network controller and whatnot else though.

The PC market was not saturated, until tablets came along they were growing along with the growing digitization of the world. It declined as the western world bought their first tablet instead of a new laptop, very many now have both and the decline is almost stopped as predictions are -3% or so for the PC market in 2014. The indications are that the world is still in a booming need for more "computing devices" like smart phones, tablets and PCs with smart phones and tablets stealing all the growth while the PC market is almost flat. Of course that means Microsoft is becoming an increasingly smaller piece of a bigger pie, but that's not even remotely the same.

Obviously Intel wants that, but so far with very limited success. Remember that there are forces on the ARM side like Samsung had have significant interests in excluding Intel, so it might not be so simple. Also if x86 becomes dominant Google might not like having a hardware supplier with such great control of the market. Microsoft has tried the other way too with WinRT and failed, if they can win the market they're hogtied to x86 which Intel would prefer. Clawing their way into the Android market with x86 chips is a plan B, but Intel has the luxury of pursuing both at once. Creating a new "Wintel" monopoly is plan A, if Microsoft can pull off the software side.

Man, I wish I could be circling the drain with $22 billions in profit in the last 12 months. The smartphone/tablet explosion has led to a decline in the PC market but it's still 80-90% of the max volume with Microsoft still having a 90%+ PC market share. Sure, they'd like a do-over to make even more money in the phone/tablet market but they're very, very far from hurting. And unless any of the major Android manufacturers decide to get serious about x86 then Microsoft and Intel will still be allies in the struggle against Android/Apple, which is to their advantage. I think you vastly underestimate what it takes to kill a mega-corporation like that, AMD took a good stab at Intel yet lost eventually. And even if they do fail, they'll take much longer than that to die and wither away. At least those who don't have Elop as a CEO, Microsoft might have dodged a bullet there...

I suspect autonomous cars will arrive first, as the physics of batteries are quite well researched and finding revolutionary new chemistry seems unlikely. Not that genuinely driver-less cars are close either, but they seem far more realizable using existing sensors and computational power. One of the greatest costs to charging EV vehicles today is the downtime for the driver, if there's no driver then it won't matter for most bulk transport that it keeps stopping to recharge. As for personal transport, it'd take most of the inconvenience out of renting a car (pickup, delivery, driving an unfamiliar car, liability for traffic damage) while being a lot cheaper than a taxi making it a lot more versatile. That is true for ICE cars too, but it makes it a lot more feasible to own an EV that only covers your daily needs. Not having to drive myself is just a bonus, If I could have an alternate car show up at my doorstep when I need it at reasonable rates then I'd only need a single-seater 15 mile radius EV with room for groceries in my garage. Need to go further or have more space? Call on a Leaf or a Tesla or an ICE. If it was that easy, I wouldn't need the car I have today.

Well it was about remembering a photo so I'd say it's more about recall than learning, which definitely is under conscious control. Imagine the following three scenarios:

1) You show the subjects what you tell them is an instruction video about the test. Then a surprise pop quiz on details of the video (no motivation)
2) You show the subjects the same video, after telling them there'll be a pop quiz afterwards (external motivation) but no consequences or rewards.
3) You show the subjects the same video, after telling them there'll be a pop quiz afterwards and $1000 for the person who gets the most right answers (external and internal motivation)

Does anyone doubt 3 > 2 > 1? In this case "interest" is your internal motivation, of course if you want to learn the answer you'll make more effort. The rest is basically saying it's not a light switch, if you know an interesting answer is coming in a few seconds you're already cleared your head and heightened your awareness. Sadly what I take away from this is mainly the effectiveness of having a 15 second ad before a YouTube video, as long as you're interested in what's coming chances are good you'll remember the unrelated ad in front of it too.

While they might not know how to use an address bar they do know how to follow links, so to send a site down a black hole Google would also have to blacklist all the sites linking to it. Besides, I doubt Google would like to be so blatant as the Great Firewall of China, if you search for a particular site you'll find it. If you're only vaguely close though it might end up on page 10 instead of page 2. Google needs to appear neutral, they're just an action house selling off adwords to the highest bidder while displaying whatever search results their robots have found. If they start messing with that image though obviously taking sides they'll lose far more business than they gain. Google is now to online marketing what lawyers are to lawsuits, no matter what side wins they always get paid. They'd have to be really, really dense to mess with that.

You mean like how they turn drug users into drug criminals so people won't become drug users? Yeah, that'll work... not. And it totally makes life so much better for the "victims" to get a criminal record on top, particularly one with so little stigma attached to it. They recently did a survey here in Norway and 7% of teens 13-16 were "sexting", pretty much all of it between themselves. If they'd included 16-18 in the survey, the number would probably be a lot higher. The same survey showed 60% of 13-16 year olds had watched porn and about half - that's 30% liked it or found it exciting. When both the average age of first intercourse and age of consent is below 18, what really do they expect when they define "child pornography" to be everything under 18? It's probably the second least enforced law against teenagers after copyright infringement, you only get hit with that hammer if you're an adult or they're trying to stop unwanted distribution.

<devil's advocate>
The opposite is implied, that you have no right to refuse reasonable searches and seizures or warrants issued upon probable cause, supported by oath or affirmation, and particularly describing the place to be searched, and the persons or things to be seized. That it is possible for the police to "break into" your device is similar to how it's possible for the police to break into your home or for that matter, pull out a gun and shoot you dead. Whether or not that's legal depends on the circumstances and whether or not your device is encrypted or not won't change the legality. This is more like building a safe with built-in sensors that'll self-destruct the contents with thermite if the police wants to drill it, should "police-proof" systems be a consumer commodity? Yes, I know the government can be the bad guy but they're not the only bad guy, there are real criminals being caught through a constitutionally valid process. It doesn't say "The right of the people to be secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects, against all searches and seizures, shall not be violated"

The real issue here is that you don't trust the government to play by the rules, which given the NSA affair and such is probably not a bad thing. A backdoor doesn't mean it has to be a covert backdoor though, it could be that the next time you enter your PIN you get a pop-up saying "Your phone has been searched by law enforcement. Here's a scan of a signed warrant authorizing the search. For further details, contact [police department] on [number]." Granted, it's not so safe as it being impossible, but getting your chance in court is what you get if they break down your door by mistake. And if they shoot you dead by a misunderstanding, you don't even get that. Besides, last I checked he didn't actually want to outlaw it which would create a whole lot of problems for open source and everything else without a back door. He's saying it would be bad for law enforcement, which would be good for criminals and ultimately worse for the general public. Right or wrong, he's certainly got the right to make the argument.