Brilliant concept, well executed! Helium is a good choice, I initially thought that the balloon might be thermal, powered by wax or some liquid fuel. (eg kerosene). The ballon project video is good but it could be improved.
Perhaps with a 360 degree fisheye or some kind of spin correction system, I felt a bit dizzy watching it. A really stand-out high-altitude stop-motion vid' with good production like this one of mountain views of Annapurna in Nepal can be really successful and might do a lot to promote this amazing balloon project.

This is only an issue when it is invisible, or out of your control. When I watch a trashy movie, I want a filter on everything else. When I go to news feeds, social sites, I want a challenge, many do not. they just want to not be bored. All this is only a problem if one treats Google, Fbook etc as being a 'true' and 'correct' view of the world. any monoply supply leads to this kind of problem.

The issue here is that these big algorythms are actually tuned to collect and hold and direct attention of users as first priority. Not to hand out accurate info, advice, wisdom, world views etc. I think It is easy to forget that " free " on the net actually means "you pay us with your valuable attention".

This is really interesting stuff... good book that I am reading (too early to review it sorry) http://cliftonchadwick.wordpress.com/2011/01/07/is-the-internet-changing-the-way-you-think-book-review/

Should have used a Trojan sized tissue!

Although this does seem a bit like getting paid to donate blood, somehow good but wrong... this guy has some interesting writing on how selling your 'private' data can be a good idea.

While it is indicative, one teardown is hardly a statistical sample to base QC on. The things mentioned all sound like non-core functionality. It is dissapointing, but this is precisely the maths that good statistical tolerancing would do. If we replace eg 5% of units in the 1st 12 months with warranty, we save 15% on unit assembly costs if we let the workers strip a few screws. Good enough is what matters to Apple and consumers.

I understand that the internet was invented/evolved as a robust distributed system that allowed communication specifically even when subject to attack or damage. Having a 'kill switch' is completely against the core purpose. as mentioned earlier, you just introduce an attack vector that was engineered not to exist. just get enought leverage against the killswitch operator and you can cause major damage.

I speculate that this is a major reason behind tiered internet. the kill switch can shutdown only the 'low tier' users of the internet, (punters, small businesses, the small fish, whatever). But, the top tier (military, corporation, gov, banking,power generation, big fish, ) can keep running unaltered (maybe even faster, and with more hardening). In this situation, the killswitch looks a lot more useful, or at least useable.

I just tried a few. It is worth a look around. Warning: There did seem to be a lot of glitches in the house. Experimental labs and all that...