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Google

Google's Business Plan For Nest: Selling Your Data To Utility Companies 167

Posted by timothy from the selling-to-burglars-would-be-wrong dept.
jfruh (300774) writes "Google spent $3.2 billion on Nest. How is it going to make its money back selling high-end electronic thermostats at $250 a pop? Well, keep in mind that Google is a company that makes its money off information, not hardware. In fact, Nest is developing a healthy revenue stream in which it sells aggregated user information to utility companies, to help them more efficiently plan their electricity-generation scheduling. The subscriptions net Google somewhere in the range of $40 per user per year."

Comment Re:I don't "consume" content (Score 1) 107

by c0d3g33k (#46737615) Attached to: The Comcast/TWC Merger Is About Controlling Information

Good point. But a quick sip isn't exactly something I depend on, right? That was the real point. If one source of marginally interesting information flow gets ruined, there are plenty of other things to do. My mental well-being doesn't depend on 'consumption' of what Comcast/TWC might control. Maybe I'll just take the kayak down to the river and paddle around for a bit, take the dog for a walk or take the bike out for a spin. Comcast/TWC can DIAF.
Businesses

Michael Bloomberg: You Can't Teach a Coal Miner To Code 581

Posted by Soulskill from the you-can't-teach-an-old-dog-how-to-use-a-for-loop dept.
theodp (442580) writes "Gigaom reports that while speaking at the Bloomberg Energy Summit on Wednesday, former NYC Mayor Michael Bloomberg said he gives 'a lot of money to the Sierra Club' to help close dirty coal plants, but added that as a society we have to 'have some compassion to do it gently.' Subsidies to help displaced workers are one option, said Bloomberg, while retraining is another option. But, in a slight to the tech industry's sometimes out-of-touch nature with workers outside of Silicon Valley, he said retraining needs to be realistic, 'You're not going to teach a coal miner to code,' argued Bloomberg. 'Mark Zuckerberg says you teach them to code and everything will be great. I don't know how to break it to you... but no.'"
Science

Nat Geo Writer: Science Is Running Out of "Great" Things To Discover 292

Posted by samzenpus from the nothing-new-under-the-sun dept.
Hugh Pickens DOT Com (2995471) writes "John Horgan writes in National Geographic that scientists have become victims of their own success and that 'further research may yield no more great revelations or revolutions, but only incremental, diminishing returns.' The latest evidence is a 'Correspondence' published in the journal Nature that points out that it is taking longer and longer for scientists to receive Nobel Prizes for their work. The trend is strongest in physics. Prior to 1940, only 11 percent of physics prizes were awarded for work more than 20 years old but since 1985, the percentage has risen to 60 percent. If these trends continue, the Nature authors note, by the end of this century no one will live long enough to win a Nobel Prize, which cannot be awarded posthumously and suggest that the Nobel time lag 'seems to confirm the common feeling of an increasing time needed to achieve new discoveries in basic natural sciences—a somewhat worrisome trend.' One explanation for the time lag might be the nature of scientific discoveries in general—as we learn more it takes more time for new discoveries to prove themselves.

Researchers recently announced that observations of gravitational waves provide evidence of inflation, a dramatic theory of cosmic creation. But there are so many different versions of 'inflation' theory that it can 'predict' practically any observation, meaning that it doesn't really predict anything at all. String theory suffers from the same problem. As for multiverse theories, all those hypothetical universes out there are unobservable by definition so it's hard to imagine a better reason to think we may be running out of new things to discover than the fascination of physicists with these highly speculative ideas. According to Keith Simonton of the University of California, 'the core disciplines have accumulated not so much anomalies as mere loose ends that will be tidied up one way or another.'"
Idle

North Korea: Male University Students Required To Get Kim Jong-un Haircuts 110

Posted by samzenpus from the I'll-get-an-un dept.
An anonymous reader writes in with one more reason not to accept that full-ride scholarship to a North Korea University. "Male university students in North Korea are now required to get the same haircut as their leader Kim Jong-un, it is reported. The state-sanctioned guideline was introduced in the capital Pyongyang about two weeks ago, Radio Free Asia reports. It is now being rolled out across the country - although some people have expressed reservations about getting the look. 'Our leader's haircut is very particular, if you will,' one source tells Radio Free Asia. 'It doesn't always go with everyone since everyone has different face and head shapes.' Meanwhile, a North Korean now living in China says the look is actually unpopular at home because people think it resembles Chinese smugglers. 'Until the mid-2000s, we called it the "Chinese smuggler haircut",' the Korea Times reports."
Businesses

Owner of Nortel Patents Sues Cisco For 'Immense' Patent Infringement 83

Posted by Unknown Lamer from the patent-troll-dreams-big dept.
jfruh (300774) writes "The venerable Nortel Networks may have vanished into bankruptcy five years ago, but thanks to U.S. patent law, it can strike back at its old rival Cisco from beyond the grave. Spherix, a Virginia-based 'research company' that bought Nortel's patents in 2009, has filed a federal lawsuit claiming that Cisco has been knowingly violating 11 Nortel patents. 'The vast majority of Cisco's switching and routing revenue from March 2008 until the present is and has been generated by products and services implementing technology that infringes the Asserted Patents,' the lawsuit claims."
Space

First Asteroid Discovered Sporting a Ring System 29

Posted by Unknown Lamer from the coolest-rock-in-the-belt dept.
astroengine (1577233) writes "When you think of a celestial ring system, the beautiful ringed planet Saturn will likely jump to mind. But for the first time astronomers have discovered that ring systems aren't exclusive to planetary bodies — asteroids can have them too. Announced on Wednesday, astronomers using several observatories in South America, including the ESO's La Silla Observatory in Chile, have discovered that distant asteroid Chariklo possesses two distinct rings. Chariklo, which is approximately 250 kilometers (155 miles) wide, is the largest space rock in a class of asteroids known as Centaurs that orbit between Saturn and Uranus in the outer solar system. 'We weren't looking for a ring and didn't think small bodies like Chariklo had them at all, so the discovery — and the amazing amount of detail we saw in the system — came as a complete surprise!' said lead researcher Felipe Braga-Ribas, of the Observatório Nacional and MCTI, in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil."
Power

Environmentalists Propose $50 Billion Buyout of Coal Industry - To Shut It Down 712

Posted by Unknown Lamer from the could-but-won't-because-reality dept.
cartechboy writes "What's $50 billion among friends, right? At least Felix Kramer and Gil Friend are thinking big, so there is that. The pair have published an somewhat audacious proposal to spend $50 billion dollars to buy up and then shut down every single private and public coal company operating in the United States. The scientific benefits: eliminating acid rain, airborne emissions, etc). The shutdown proposal includes the costs of retraining for the approximately 87,000 coal-industry workers who would lose their jobs over the proposed 10-year phaseout of coal. Since Kramer and Friend don't have $50 billion, they suggest the concept could be funded as a public service and if governments can't do it maybe some rich guys can — and the names Gates, Buffett and Bloomberg come up. Any takers?"
Government

Senator Accuses CIA of Snooping On Intelligence Committee Computers 242

Posted by Unknown Lamer from the ye-shall-reap-as-ye-have-sown dept.
An anonymous reader writes "Sen. Feinstein, head of the Senate Intelligence Committee, publicly accused the CIA of inappropriately searching computers used by her committee, violating presidential directives, federal laws and the Fourth Amendment. The computers in question were provided by the CIA at an undisclosed CIA location for use by the members of the intelligence committee. When the committee staff received internal documents the CIA had not officially provided, the agency examined the computers used by the committee and removed the unauthorized documents. The action has been referred to the Justice Department for possible prosecution." There were rumors of such a few weeks ago, and now it's official. Read the transcript of her speech.

Comment Re:The "good" old days (Score 1) 273

by c0d3g33k (#46446347) Attached to: WSJ: Americans' Phone Bills Are Going Up

I'm old enough to remember all this too. And despite the picture you paint of a horrible dystopia, things were just fine. We managed to communicate with each other and the world continued turning. And if you didn't make long-distance or out-of-country calls (because you didn't need to very often), you didn't have to pay those costs, so your monthly bill was quite small. In the modern utopia, I pay a monthly fee that's ten times that of the bad old days for services I need only occasionally, if at all, because I'm given no other choice. We don't need to turn the clock back, but we might want to reexamine what we accept as normal, because the value for money doesn't seem to be nearly as favorable now.

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For God's sake, stop researching for a while and begin to think!

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