When the current generation who grew up on Star Wars go away, will it remain in public memory like paintings or music, or even cinema? And that too at Chicago, home to excellent museums.
Me thinks there is no permanence to Star Wars. Its already looking dated and silly.
Meanwhile '2012 A Space Odyssey' still feels fresh.

I am a web developer, now working on Android.
I use Android Studio (far better than Eclipse). With HAX - hw accelerated execution - enabled and emulator running in fast virtual mode I don't notice much difference between any run/debug on any virtual device and debug/run on a Weblogic/Websphere/Tomcat server on top of some CMS/Commerce Engines.
Both are slow, but not unreasonably slow.
May be when the apps get complex there might be a difference.
I don't see how a simulator will make a huge difference, but I can see how upgrading from my current i3 processor to an i7 and running the whole shebang on some type of RAM DISK might make a difference.

In real life scenario, your produce reaching "another market in another city/town" is remote and you making a profit from all that effort is even more remote.
This is why I said you are spouting nonsense from some text book which makes sense in some make belief world.

Lets not debate on "real world understanding".
The scenario you described is from some text book.
In real life its not usually the above...if there are brokers then they usually collude on price, or fix the price. So any benefit of reaching broker X or broker Y is not there.
The situation will be better if there are no brokers. But that's not going to happen.

Read what I wrote...I did not say it was "not useful"...I said the benefits as far as finding better prices for produce is hyped up.
Of course, better communication is overall better.

I think the above benefit is overrated.
In practical terms if you have produce to sell, especially perishable items you have to worry about shelf life more than a better price at a market far away from you.
For non-perishable items - I am from a state which is the largest producer of rubber - even before internet and smartphones the farmers used to get the market prices from newspapers. And you don't need to check the prices more than once a day, you are not playing high frequency trading with your crop.
Now, powerpoint presentations from clueless MBAs will always show "farmers fetching higher prices from smartphones" as a reason for technology. I think smartphones are a great way to communicate, but you need not add "better prices for poor farmers" to the mix.

True, but Amazon is getting into an area where it has no core-competency. Its expertise is stocking and selling stuff.
The Amazon E-Reader worked because no other serious electronics company made a decent device - my first E-Reader was a Sony PRS, back in 2005, it sucked, but it sucked less. And E-Readers are for only reading. Still, even if Microsoft took that market seriously - for that you needed someone who is capable of throwing more than chair at the helm - Amazon would have found their Kindle a hard-sell.
A smartphone is a different animal. I understand Amazon needs one of their own, running some flavor of Android, but I don't see any reason they will create something different, a device we want to carry around with us, almost our primary identity as far as devices go. Will it be a good phone, yes. But you need to create a great phone - at least a Xiaomi or a Moto G.
This will be like the Facebook phone or the Facebook home screen...I don't think even the unwashed masses working at Facebook, the true believers themselves cared for that phone.

May not be President, but he deserves the Nobel (way more than most, including your current guy holding one for who knows what!)

Marissa Mayer is the same class as Carly Fiorina, Meg Whitman and others. They are going to remembered for blowing up their own organizations. What all these nincompoops have in common is a "severe lack of imagination". There is no cure for that.
She's is right about the bubble...she's in one.
The cheapest car in the world - TATA NANO - failed to make a mark. The other bubble car - Mercedes Smart is a failure in every sense of the word.
And the Google bubble car will be as popular as Segway.

Seems Amazon and Google see the writing on the 'internet wall'.
Their core products/services are not going to bring them anymore revenue than what they get now, and can shrink further when nimble competitors or new ideas happen. So the only way is to branch out.
Google thinks it will be driver-less cars, automation, internet balloons, thermostat etc., while Amazon thinks it will be AWS, cloud and so on.
Surprisingly both these behemoths are not branching into life sciences. May be no has made good impressive power points yet.
The one company terribly lost is Apple. They are buying into an arthritic rapper!!!

True, its about desperation, not necessarily an extra layer of 'internet trust'.
The US is unique in developed economies - luxuries are cheap...big screen TV, a car and so on. But necessities are expensive...healthcare, decent education, and to an extent housing.

US might be a plutocracy, but not a society about to collapse.
US has a great middle class, and even with the current crises, they are yet to get into lower class/poor. And even when you are poor, you don't starve.
Unless a huge shift occurs and the current middle class starts starving the collapse you are worried about won't happen.
The Arab spring occurred in countries where the middle class was not really strong - in numbers and social indicators. In Tunisia a man self immolated out of the tragic circumstances of not being able to feed his family. This seminal event kickstarted the uprising.
Saudi Arabia for all purposes is ripe for spring cleaning, but the middle class gets a lot of handouts from the rulers and they get fat and lazy. So there will be a lot of diabetes and heart attacks, not society collapsing.

Here's why you are wrong on all counts.
First of all, you happen to *know 3 Indian IT* workers and you arrive at a conclusion on how good/bad/patriarchal they are. If this is not *generalization* then I do not know what is !!!
Second, India is a large country, our population is 1 billion. There will be ten or twenty Indian IT programmers for every Russian you can find. Plus, Indian IT companies are majorly into US market, there is no Russian equivalent of an Infosys, TCS, Wipro and so on. With that large pool of talent, you are going to find few who are horribly mediocre. Its simply law of averages.
There are excellent programmers, good and mediocre. They include Indians. And that's all.

Internet is yet to obliterate Asian - especially Indian -magazines.
Caravan - http://www.caravanmagazine.in/
Open - http://www.openthemagazine.com...
The above two are new ventures, here are some older ones...
India Today - http://indiatoday.intoday.in/
Frontline - http://www.frontline.in/
And no one has mentioned New Yorker - probably the best over the years.

If you have the exploit, you can exploit the exploit.