Someone makes something great.

They are first-to-market.

Big Corp. buys them out, desiring only their IP.

All of the engineers who actually made the product (& company) valuable are fired.

Big Corp. squanders that first-to-market advantage to gain short-term profits.

Customers who've bought prior-generation products versions beg to have important improvements made to the line of tools.

Big Corp. ignores customer pleas while simply juicing the IP they bought, for every nickel they can get.

Big Corp. refuses to implement any improvements, new features, etc. because they can't. They fired the innovators and implementers to save on salary costs.

Yep, they essentially just find a ripe piece of fruit, and then juice it.

This is what small businesses in the US have been reduced to: fruit trees. Small companies take the risk of being inventive. When something proves to be valuable, it is bought-out, everyone fired, and the market for the product stagnates. I have been on both ends of this stick. I pleaded with a certain company, who sold a $650k tool, to make two minor engineering improvements that would essentially double the market for the device (it would be a tool for two markets, not just the one). These changes would have cost about $500 per tool. The end result? Well, since they had bought-out the small company that originally designed it, fired all the engineers and control-system programmers, the Big Corp. was literally incapable of implementing any improvements (or even bug-fixes) to the system. Recall that they fired all the engineers and programmers, and simply bought the IP and the market the small biz. had cornered.

To cap off this specific example — Another company that truly does innovate has, well, devised a tool that does "the thing" better, and costs 1/3 of what the Big Corp. is charging. They listened when I detailed to them engineering specs. for what customers needed in a next-gen tool. Well, the Big Corp. is about done juicing their piece of fruit, and this other company will soon take over the market . The Big Corp. made their millions, so they move on. I just hope that this "other company" isn't bought-out.

The sad result of this cycle is that American innovation in products is stagnated by Big Corps. that choose to simply juice innovative products, rather than actually improve them to grow the market. In the end, the customer & consumer lose. Oh, and the US as a whole.

I'd like to be able to search for regular expressions, or at least boolean. I'd like to be able to specify the context of a word, eg Java (geography), Java (coffee), Java (programming), or similarly the context for the search.

Clearly an upside of ubiquitous surveillance is that now towing companies can provide you with both loss of transportation *and* loss of employment. Be sure to call Advanced Towing for their excellent customer service!

OK then, quick free will/morality test:
1) You see a criminal beating an innocent child to death. You have with you a cell phone, a tazer, and a handgun. Do you intervene? Does your intervention mean the criminal doesn't have free will?

2) You see a criminal beating an innocent child to death. You're omniscient and omnipotent. In particular, you have the ability to teleport to a nearby location in the form of a human owning a cell phone, a tazer, and a handgun. Do you intervene? Does your intervention mean the criminal doesn't have free will?

Bonus question: If someone tries to flap their arms and fly, does their inability to do so impinge on their free will? Conversely, if there were a law of physics that prevented murder, would such a law of physics impinge on a person's free will? If your answers don't match, how do you tell the difference between a law of physics that impinges on free will and a law of physics that doesn't?

Not really.

I'd say there's a good argument that all of the information I give Google actually exceeds what a personal assistant would know about me. The real difference (thus far) lies in the assistant's ability to understand human context which Google's systems lack. But that's merely a problem to be solved.

Note, BTW, that I'm not saying everyone should want what I want, or be comfortable giving any search engine enough information to be such an ideal assistant. That's a personal decision. I'm comfortable with it... but I'm not yet getting the search results I want.

I think systems built by man that knows a sufficient amount about me, my interests and my needs can. We're not there yet, certainly, but the question was what I want... and that's it.

Put it this way: Suppose you had a really bright personal assistant who knew pretty much everything about you and could see what you are doing at any given time, and suppose this assistant also had the ability to instantly find any data on the web. I want a search engine that can give me the answers that assistant could.

Trouble is, the US Constitution is more like a guideline than a law, since there is no punishment for violating it. On the other hand, in non-US countries it would be possible to arrest the NSA agents for espionage, at least in theory, or at least publicly humiliate their agency by holding their agent until they say "pretty please".

I want a search engine that searches for what I want, not what I type, and not even what I think I want.

I just want the search engine to stop changing what I'm searching for. I don't want to have to quote every word like I have to do with Google to make sure that the word is actually in the page, and by "the word", I mean "the word I type, not a word that Google things may be similar to the one I typed". It's worst when you're searching for foreign words, product names, acronyms, or whatnot and Google tries to treat them as if they're English words and declines them or chooses synonyms.

"Did you mean X?" is fine. Even "Searching for X (see original results here)", if you're very confident that the person made a common spelling error or whatnot. But just going in and swapping out words as if this is expected behavior? Terrible. At least let me disable it if you want to do that...

Beyond all this: I do like how one can do simple commonn operations on Google - math, conversions, etc. The more of these the better IMHO, so long as they have a standardized format - be they tracking numbers, flight lookups, whatever. It's okay in my book to be a bit Wolfram-y.

Keep the interface plain, simple, the sort of thing that'll work on any browser, from a modern Chrome to a simple text-only browser. Only use javascript where it's not essential for the site to work. Here's an example of something that would be a good use of javascript: if you need to track clicks, like Google does, do it through javascript rather than by having a link redirect like Google does. I hate how I can't just right click and copy link on Google without getting some massive Google redirect link.

Just my thoughts. :)

No, because there is all kinds of intelligence that is not measurable by IQ tests. For example, a huge chunk of our brains is the visual cortex, but for some reason people don't consider it a sign of intelligence to be able to be able to distinguish basic objects like apples or elephants, or to recognize spoken words (especially with background chatter), or to hold a meaningful conversation. Yet anyone who's tried to have a computer do it knows what a PITA it is. Speaking of computers, just about every math skill is done better by computers, but almost no one considers a computer intelligent.

So at the very least you have 1) raw brain/computing power 2) specialized skills 3) knowledge/data/programming which is rather like precalculated solutions.

Not really ISPs, at least as we traditionally think of them. Mobile network operators.

The MNO in question isn't the middleman, it's the service provider. It provides service to the balloons, which relay it to regions that are too remote to service now.

No, most of these regions aren't served because it's uneconomical. It's not that no one is willing to invest, it's that it's not an "investment" if you know up front that the ROI will be negative. Putting up a bunch of cell towers to serve remote African farmers, for example, doesn't pan out economically because there's no way the farmers can afford to pay high enough fees to cover the costs of all the infrastructure. Project Loon aims to fix this by radically lowering the cost of serving those regions, to a point where it is economical, so the fees the people in the region can afford to pay are sufficient to make serving them profitable.

As for why Google is partnering with MNOs rather than deploying their own connectivity? I don't know but I'd guess a couple of reasons. First, I expect it will be feasible to scale faster by partnering with entities who already have a lot of the infrastructure in place, particularly when you consider all of the legal and regulatory hurdles (which in many areas means knowing who to bribe, and how -- Google, like most American companies, would not be very good at that). Second, by working through local companies Google will avoid getting into power struggles with the local governments. Google is helping their local businesses to grow, not replacing them.

(Disclaimer: I work for Google, but I don't know anything more about this than what I see/read in the public press.)

Apparently you don't know the meaning of the words "for fun".

Oh, also: Genius is simply raw potential. What someone does with that 'potential' is a different matter entirely.

As said long ago, "Genius is 1% inspiration, and 99% perspiration." I am loathe to quote that weenie, Thomas A. Edison, but the idea of his quote is accurate. It is what you do with that potential that matters.