Doesn't do you a damned thing if the lightning hits the power line a block down the street.

This could still result in learning German in a matter of days vs months. Perfect is the enemy of good, even if everything you say is 100% accurate (and I doubt there's any convincing evidence that the brain works like an indexed database) you could still see orders of magnitude improvement in the time it takes to learn new things.

I never understood this. An asteroid visit is the first and most necessary step to asteroid mining which is arguably the only way to open up the solar system with chemical rockets for propulsion. Go out and grab a water rich asteroid, ship up a few hundred square meters of solar panels and start cracking the water into fuel. Obviously there are challenges involved, but not having to haul all the fuel for your interplanetary burns from the Earth's surface would cut the difficulty of a Mars mission significantly.

Your friends in the aviation industry were mistaken. If you come in flat and level on a decent glide slope and decent weather, the vast majority of the passengers are likely to survive. Some of the ditches in the linked article went terribly, with the plane breaking into multiple pieces on impact, and still had the majority of the passengers surviving. Floatation devices on airplanes are not a joke, despite what some would have you believe.

That story bugs me, not the technology or anything. Just the fact that he spends the first 40% of it lamenting how bad things are and how the wealthy just want to live their life of leisure and leave everyone else to rot in the slums. Then the main character suddenly becomes fabulously wealthy and... leaves everyone else to rot in the slums while he farms... I guess... No one, not even the "good guys" with essentially limitless resources actually tries to change the system that is leaving 99% of humanity living in abject poverty with no hope of escape.

Yes, because it'd be impossible to modify a batter so that 5% is functional (at least, functional enough to turn on the device for a few seconds) and the rest is... whatever.

Why don't thy have wireless charging on these things? It wouldn't be so bad if I took off my watch, threw it on the dresser, and went to bed. Having to stop and fiddle with a charger for multiple devices is a bit of a no go IMO.

I won't delve into the details, I'll just say that calling Woz an "Apple insider" is both misguided and unfair. He hasn't been part of the company in almost 3 decades and has many valid criticisms of the company and Jobs in particular.

If you're driving a car for a living and don't understand the difference between liability insurance and collision/comprehensive insurance, you probably need to pick a different career path. Incidentally, in March or so Uber did in fact add $50k of collision and comprehensive insurance so... yeah...

Uber has coverage for all of their operators, see here for a full run down.

So what you're saying is... people will use Uber for 90% of their needs and only call a taxi when they want to go somewhere that is almost by definition unprofitable for said taxi. And you don't think they're going to destroy the taxi industry?

Google also has a long history of successful projects for the same reasons.

As other people have stated, Bluetooth is not RFID, the power requirements are different by a couple orders of magnitude (don't quote me, lets just say they're significantly different). Passive RFID do not require power to listen for an incoming signal, Bluetooth does. RFID has an extremely limited range, making it's use as a "finder" pretty much worthless. Bluetooth sends and receives many times more data at many times higher speed.

If phones had active RFID scanners or even Zigbee hardware, it might be possible to make something like this work, with Bluetooth it's physically impossible.

RFID does not have the same power requirements Bluetooth does, the power requirements for Bluetooth are described in detail in the spec; it's not something you can get around. If nothing else, unlike RFID, Bluetooth does not have a totally unpowered "sleep" mode, that can be woken by the Bluetooth protocol itself. If your device is awake enough to receive any signal at all, it is drawing power. In fact, it's drawing very nearly the theoretical maximum you could harvest from ambient sources for the dimensions of the device they are describing... and then said device has to actually power up and send besides (not to mention the theoretical maximum is a good order of magnitude higher than what you'd see in real life usage).

There's a difference between "this concept is theoretically possible" (what you describe) and "this idea, as described and designed is workable in real life" (which is what the iFind people are, erroneously or fraudulently, arguing.

I can't imagine using it for voice calls.... that would just feel... ridiculous.

For what it's worth, my possible uses would be more in line with viewing incoming texts, messages, and email (sender and subject only). Maybe it's not really that much of a hassle to pull out your phone when it buzzes; still it would still be a bit more handy just to glance at your wrist.

Another good use I could see would be Google Wallet, scan and pin credit card transactions. Put a thumb print scanner right on the face to activate that feature and call it good so long as you can wipe the data remotely and it's stored/sent properly.