Whoah, I just googled it and Corning just (in the last week) released a USB3 optical converter/cable that's $109.99 for 10m. Maybe USB 3.1 will get us there - one connection to rule them all (even HDMI and ethernet).

That sounds interesting for piping TV throughout the home, but what about all the USB peripherals you need on a terminal? (Mouse, keyboard, USB connection for syncing your mp3 player, etc). I guess you could just solve the mouse/keyboard situation with a wireless peripherals if the range is sufficient, although bluetooth for one is not meant to work through walls.

Ah well, a thunderbolt dock is like $300 anyways, vs. $30 for a good USB3 hub. I think USB will beat out thunderbolt.

I'm just afraid those ridiculous prices won't come down until optical is the norm. $659 for a 30m cable? A 30m fiber network cable is $60.

No, terminal servers and thin clients are pretty useless on today's video-heavy applications.

Hey, it's 2014 and USB 1.0 was standardized 19 years ago, this tech ought to be good by now. That said USB3 is pretty good. The only thing I connect via Thunderbolt on my Macbook is the external display, and I'm not even clear on whether that's actually Thunderbolt, or just a faux Thunderbolt DisplayPort connector.

The article does not list "extended range" among the advantages, so I guess they are not switching over to the optical thunderbolt. Too bad, I think that would be a much bigger advantage than the 2x speedup (my MacBook already has 2 thunderbolt2 connectors). If optical thunderbolt ever catches on you could use it to attach multiple terminals to a computer, such as routing uncompressed low-latency video signals throughout your home. Last I checked, there still is not a good way to do this over gigabit ethernet.

How directly comparable are the megapixel figures anyways? To start with, I don't think Lytro has a bayer filter, and it is less sensitive to lens quality.

Boooo. Lytro is a genuinely innovative camera, and I applaud them for that. What the artistic payoff turns out to be, only time will tell, but it's worth exploring.

Psychology will never be as simple or predictable as Newtonian physics. On the other hand, the fact that "big data" is driven primarily by market forces (in particular, targeted marketing and automated trading) seem to give credence to the concept that information can be used to narrow probabilities somewhat. (Perhaps this is what you mean by "useful phenomenology"?)

Racial profiling is a good concrete example of this. Crime statistics are often used to rationalize race-based profiling, but it is key to realize that by taking this step you are moving beyond passively understanding the present, into using that information to shape the future, thus perpetuating a problem that should instead be solved.

You will almost never find a risk-free investment with a higher return than the interest rate on a loan. If you ignore the "risk-free" part, then you are equating a certain cost with an uncertain return, which is not correct. So the answer is not "always," but "it depends" on the usual factors - your time horizon, whether having more would help you as much as having less would hurt you, etc...

That reminds me of the old saw about the economist and his friend walking down the street. The friend spots a $20 bill on the street and says, "whoah, it's a $20 bill!" The economist, not even looking down, says "nope, if there were a $20 bill lying there, somebody would have picked it up already!"

According to the article the owner would have control over whether the phone gets wiped. My point, mainly, is that handsets are utterly dependent on infrastructure in any case, so the notion that this will give sweeping new powers to the government to suppress dissent are unfounded.

What you describe is probably exactly how the kill switch will be implemented. (How else would it be implemented?)

All the hyperbole in here is silly. Try not paying your phone bill and you will discover there is already a "kill switch." The questions at issue are administrative - how to share the list of stolen phones between carriers, set the criteria for putting a phone on the list, etc.

There's a digital edition too, but I presume that doesn't exclude the print edition, or your list will be empty.