Exactly! Pretty much no startup succeeded with their initial plan intact. The trick is to be agile yet decisive, which is a hard balance. You have to listen to the market and find an opportunity that "clicks", but at the same time you can't redirect every week.

I'd say that Google realizing that consumers don't want Glass, but enterprise customers do, is a pretty reasonable redirect. For another example, look at Apple - they change their minds about things based on market demand. They thought larger phones were a terrible idea, but a few years later the marketplace made clear that larger phones were a significant chunk of the market that they couldn't ignore. Heck, iPhone started with no apps and Apple saying that everything should be web-based, and the redirect to add the App Store turned into a huge success. You can't let yourself be locked into an initial vision and pass up real opportunities in favor of imaginary ones!

Google does all the heavy lifting on servers, for Glass and pretty much everything else that they do. The Glass just collects data and displays the results. It has barely any compute or storage, just enough to be a client to the web services, really. That's how they got it small, light, and relatively cheap (compared to previous similar devices).

Retinal scanning is great, but the goal is to ID people from a distance, so that the observer is just wearing Glass and watching a stream of people. If they're doing a retinal scan, they can also stop people and check IDs. Besides which, of course, normal people don't have a reference retinal scan to check against.

I agree that trying to do general population facial recognition would generate too many false positives, wasting everyone's time.

But there's also some room for optimization to improve the odds, and to find a use case that doesn't require perfection. For example, the system can narrow matches down to people with tickets for flights in the next few hours departing from that airport, and flag anyone who doesn't match for an ID check. To be useful it wouldn't have have to be 100% accurate, or match everyone in the universe, so it's an easier computation - it's value would be in letting security filter out 80% of the people that are known OK travellers, and interview the people that are out of that profile.

Um, no. Jon isn't just a guy hired to read stuff to the camera, it's his show, he runs the staff that produces the show, and he's responsible for selecting everything that goes on the air. He even writes a fair amount of the material. The bit on camera is just the icing on the cake.

That's due to US non-profit rules. That is, by US law (and the IRS) non-profits can have educational missions, but can't produce anything that's of direct benefit to for-profit companies. Since FOSS software can be used by for-profits and not just by non-profits, creating FOSS software can't be the primary mission of a non-profit. That's why the Apache Foundation, GNOME Foundation, etc., are non-profits set up to educate and promote, but can't directly fund development of the FOSS software. Yeah, seems a little silly, but the IRS is quite consistent on this point for decades now.

9/11 was under Bush. Are you arguing that Obama made Bush de-prioritize counter-terrorism?

Sure, if we could disable all of the crud they piled on top, the core of Windows 8 is relatively good, as it's efficient and stable. But the crud on top is really, really irritating, and bloated, which is why Windows 7 looks so good in comparison. My PC that ran find in Win7 became almost unusable with Win8. I'm hoping someone writes an un-installer that rips our the crud, like there was for Vista.

I'm sure that's how you use Note.js, but as far as I can tell, the vast majority of the usage of Node.js is server side. And that's where it overlaps with PHP. They both can be used to do the same thing, but with different strengths. For example, if you're building a modern AJAX app, Node.js is very nice - it's very efficient, lets you use the same programming language for the client-side and server-side code, uses JSON to pass data, is event-driven, good at web services, etc. PHP's strengths are more for the old-school, non-AJAX web sites - it's easy to stick a database query into a web page to pull data and display it, etc. And, of course, there's an already-written PHP solution for almost everything which is it's real strength. For example, if you need a web site CMS, you pick one, and if it's written in PHP (most are) then you use PHP to write whatever plugins you need.

I worked for one corporation with a 30 day email retention policy, and the servers were configured that way. After that, anything of importance was supposed to be printed and filed for future reference. And this was in the 90s. Of course, people still had email on their desktops, etc., but I'd guess it let them respond to lawsuits' discovery in a more limited manner than trawling through all email ever sent by anyone about anything, limiting risk of embarassment. I follow the logic, but pragmatically speaking it's convenient to have past emails easily searchable.

It's easy to set up secure communications within a small, trusted group. So this won't affect any real terrorists that are organized enough to be a real threat. They just install PGP (for example), just as anyone else can. And since the security is end-to-end, it's secure no matter what mail system it passes through. And no matter what laws anyone passes, math still works, so end-to-end encryption is secure from anyone attacking the security. And it's open source, so they can't sneak in corruptions to subvert security. Math doesn't care about politics - if the attackers are your government, or foreign attackers, it's all the same math that protects your communications.

What it will do, though, is let them collect tons of data from from people who aren't serious terrorists. Think of the fun the can have with that!

The real answer to terrorism isn't increased surveillance, or the "magic pixie dust" of data mining, it's real police work. That's what's stopped ever terrorist attack (that's been stopped) so far. If they cared about security, instead of surveillance or big equipment contracts, they'd focus on the stuff that works. Hire lots of smart people, train them and equip them, and pay them well, to do the hard work. The rest, attempting to outlaw encryption, scanning people's shoes, etc., is all a stupid waste of time and money, degrading our society's freedom (i.e. doing what the terrorists want) while achieving nothing of value.

That and the White House de-prioritized terrorism, and ignored the clear warnings that they were repeatedly given. Why?

I think you're mistaking "what you want" for "what everyone wants". So while I agree that these press release tend to hand-wave over the difference between "printing in wood" and "printing in PLA with wood powder mixed in", I disagree with the idea that these composite materials aren't valid or interesting.

These sort of composite printing materials aren't very interesting from a structural perspective, because the mixed in particles aren't structural.

But they can have other interesting properties. For example, stainless steel and iron mixed into filament makes the filament look like metal, and magnets will stick to it. Mixing conductive materials in can yield (mildly) conductive 3d prints. Mixing wood in gives a material that feels and looks like wood. Bronze particles make the print look like bronze, and be extremely heavy. Heck, glow-in-the-dark is similarly a powder mixed into a base material. So is fire resistance. There are a near-infinite number of materials that are mixed into plastic to affect color, hardness, fire resistance, feel, ... all that's new is that people are figuring out how to take techniques from injection molding and casting of plastics and apply them to 3D printing. And that's a good thing!

And while you might only care about the structural properties, it's entirely legitimate that others might care about appearance, feel, weight, magnetism, glowing, etc.

Good points, Mr. Anonymous! Product positioning based on price sensitivity is probably what drives it. That is, there are plenty of products in the market already, but Sony saw an opportunity for the higher-end MP3 player than what's in the market, so even though it's by definition a smaller market, it's a better business opportunity than competing directly at the low-end (the dirt-cheap generic MP3 players) or the mid-range (Apple).

Feel free to contribute some actual facts to the discussion. Posting anonymously and making unsupported vague assertions doesn't really advance the discussion.

True.

But the stations have nearly wiped out news reporting. It's all done as cheaply as possible, because they view "news" as overhead required by the FCC as a technicality. It's been a long time since they considered it a responsibility (which it is legally). The FCC should pull some station's licenses, since they're not doing what they should to be granted access to the public airwaves.

Me, too. It was cheaper for me to get fantastic internet (100 Mbps), Netflix, Hulu and iTunes, than it was to pay the ever-inflating cable TV bill.