Inquiring mind here, but are there any interesting gadgets or household revolutions that we foresee on the horizon, if this sort of tech is commonly available?

There's plenty of cases where a well-regulated monopoly performs better than independent competition, usually when there's a particular resource in question that needs to be exploited or perform at a consistent level, and plenty of circumstances arise where you'd rather that control not be a purely profit-driven organization.

Careful - expiring copyright upon death might yield an incentive to kill the author so their works can be profited from. Stranger things happen every day, and there's probably a good reason to keep some measure of timeframe for expiration after death, even if the current 70-100 years is too long.

Good thing those patents expire and become public domain in the long run, then. While there's a technology curve that you're ultimately behind due to patent enforcement, all it can do is postpone the release of competitor's projects, and they've done a wonderful job of laying out the work and research to figure out why it's useful and how it can be applied. Waiting twenty one years isn't necessarily the worst thing in the world when it comes to development.

"That would be impressive, except if you would have known what you were looking for, you would have seen it written on my dorm room window."

A fun anecdote to this - I have an uncle who works at NASA and he said that the engineers of today were trying to figure out how the engineers of the Apollo program had solved a particular kind of problem. No documentation existed, and no one still working there had been part of the original program, so they had to go over to their own space museum to tear apart a section of the rocket to see how they'd done it. There's a lot of experiential knowledge that comes with actually solving problems, rather than just using someone else's notes, and a lot of that kind of information was lost.

I'm sure some Googling could find me some basics, but this would be a great chance to hear anecdotally from people who work on this stuff daily - how big of an issue is radiation and the hardening for circuits? What kinds of damage/effects are you having to counter, and how do you go about fixing it? There was a story floating around last month of the phone-based projects that are being launched. Are there certain zones or ranges in the magnetosphere where the radiation hits harder, or becomes a non-issue? And what's considered "good enough" when it comes to hardening?

You have to admit, for all the Facebook bashing that happens, the fact that hacks, break-ins, and bugs of this nature are so uncommon, given that they're dynamically managing a userbase of a billion people, is an impressive task.

When break ins or bugs do occur, they happen in a very big and very bad way, as a single bug affects millions, and there's a lot of people I wouldn't want seeing my personal data. Most of us here seem to take the stance of locking down our Facebooks, keeping what's posted at a minimum, and generally keeping it at a distance with a ten foot pole, but there's admittedly very little respect for Facebook managing to be more or less secure from a technical standpoint. Now, their change deployment policy is god awful, but that's a different piece altogether...

There's been that talk of the mini nuclear reactors for a few years now, and a number of prototypes made to power neighborhoods. That's exactly the kind of distributed power generation that would make EV very attractive technology without straining the grid. It could make for a very interesting and effective pairing if either one ever became common enough to foster the growth of the other.

It's true that social networks and search engines were built or innovated on the shoulders of giants, but the important thing is not that they had to do something truly new in order to transform our lives - the innovation came from the lives of the users, not from the specific code technology implemented to produce it, and their effects were sweeping and permanently transformative in their nature.

15 years ago, we didn't have a way to instantly receive news tailored to our specific interests, keep in touch with people constantly anywhere in the world to the point that we might as well be right next door to them, automatically sync and permanently back up all of our digital photos, target our online searches to exactly what we wanted to find, or look up anything on anyone or any subject in seconds, especially without being tethered to a desktop. While Facebook is finding that they can't really expand past certain core areas of their offerings, the inherent use of what they've created is a thing that would not otherwise exist, and that *is* an invention. Many social networks since have tended to model themselves after Facebook's innovations, in the same way that MMORPGs all looked like EVE or WoW after their success.

They might not be amazing or particularly interesting technologies so much as impressive exercises in optimization, but they've certainly had such a radical effect on people all over the world that it should be considered an invention of sorts. We couldn't fully envision the scope of what a Facebook or Google could do to the world, and the world was both modeled after and changed by their existence. It would be foolish to say that they're done innovating on any of these counts.

That's really not the same technology at all. That's an LCD screen. We're hoping for something that gets more than 8 hours of battery life, and something closer to the two months the Kindles can get.

Mission accomplished.

Etsy's been a fantastic exercise in home-grown projects that can turn into full-time work for yourself, or for a whole team of people, if you're lucky enough to get a lot of attention from the community. Etsy, like Pinterest, Facebook, or Reddit, is easy to get a lot of attention on if you've got a good product, as people are constantly combing Etsy for cool stuff to buy that doesn't exist anywhere else. I run a store that makes custom Kindle and iPad covers and enjoyed enough success building Neverending Story covers that it's enabled me to expand out, and find other people to help me meet the demand.

https://www.etsy.com/listing/95190935/neverending-story-ipad-tablet-cover

My team is about half and half guys and gals. The girls often have great ideas on improvements to the products, or a lot of input to make new geek things. The guys have proven to be good organizers and implementers of ideas that are more removed from what we do, and often prefer to work with completely different materials and mediums than the girls. It's proven to be a very fun and dynamic with a lot of creative energy, but overall I would say that the girls have a lot more distributed creativity and imagination that they can apply in many small ways, while the guys tend to focus on bigger, singular projects with their creativity. It's been interesting observing the difference between the genders in a crafting workshop, and seeing the balance it brings in furthering the company as a whole. There's a lot of crossover training that happens too though - the guys have engineering backgrounds, and teach the girls how to program Arduinos and work with laser cutters and workshop tools, while the girls teach us guys how to sew, book bind, and work in some of the more traditional mediums. If it's a fun environment and they've got access to people willing to teach, many people are far more willing to learn than if they're asked or expected to make the leap into something unfamiliar. There may be a lot fewer female engineers by numbers, but that's not to say that many of them don't have engineering skills or inclinations, even without the formal training.

How else could they stream Lindsey Stirling performances live to her millions of fans?

This. For the love of God, yes, this.

I just changed phones because my old phone tried to install Plants vs. Zombies from the Humble Bundle and literally bricked the system, to the point that it doesn't even charge any more and the techs are utterly baffled. I replaced it with a new phone that did away with every single physical button on the front. My previous phone had one tiny nub for navigating left and right. Now, when my phone auto-corrects something, I don't have even the little precision I was accustomed to. The touch-screen can only easily get precision within two characters in any direction, to my constant irritation. The trend away from physical feedback is annoying, and I really hope some of the tactile technologies catch up to give us a rough bar to work with...