How about if they can program the headlight to avoid the pupils and irises of people? That could be cool.

I don't think it's that simple. Your next door neighbor states she knows you, and says where you live to someone, and she must pay you $100,000? Your housepainter lists you as a reference, but you own the data so he must pay you?

It bothered me when I lived in a very small town and everyone in the town was a busybody and gossiped about where I went. It bothers me that technology makes that nosiness scaleable to worldwide proportions. But I can't see making how to monetize privacy without all the benefits accruing to the people rich enough to sue for them.

Usually mining and extraction are the greatest energy and pollution generating periods of a device's life. Not greater than the entire lifecycle of use and disposal, unless the product is used less than 10 years. if its used less than 5 the impacts of mining can be even greater than the product 's use. Don't crash and total your Tesla or Prius. http://science.howstuffworks.c...

What's interesting with this home-battery is that this its use may not achieve any real energy savings, like a hybrid motor (which contributes captured friction) or like solar. Or maybe there is some lost energy in off peak hours and it contributes to efficiency, but that will be lost if the use of the product scales and every house has one. But the point is that the rare earth batteries must be mined in China, meaning a portion of the energy is being diverted to coal burned in China.

Any sources for the stats in Wired or Daily Mail? No? Because the original source has vanished.

Here is a link to research of peer reviewed articles which traces the claims made in Wired (actually repeating what a photographer said, Wired did not make the claim) and Mail scalar.usc.edu/works/reassembling-rubbish/mapping-e-waste-as-a-controversy-from-statements-to-debates-1?path=e-waste-mapping-a-controversy

And here is the UN funded 2012 study of the imports to Ghana which found 91% reuse. http://www.basel.int/Portals/4... This was the study that caused BAN.org (the NGO) to backtrack on their claims.

As for who I am, former Peace Corps volunteer, degree in intl relations, former head of recycling for Massachusetts DEP, consultant to EPA, and founder of WR3A.org which has part of a 3 university $469K research grant on used electronics imports, managed by Memorial University (USC Long Beach and Pontifica UCP Peru also part of the research).

The press release also refers to reporters who attended, including Author of NYT Bestseller (Junkyard Planet) Adam Minter of Bloomberg. I was most impressed however with the Dagbani geeks and nerds who gave us the tour of the site and the import containers with the reused equipment. But finding a news journal like Wired or Mail which actually interviews actual African businesspeople, I'm afraid I can't find quickly. But here is an essay from one of the Technicians who came with us (not Dagbani speaker, he's from Volta region) http://www.isri.org/news-publi...

You can also try doing math on an envelope to see which source to follow. The cost of shipping 700 televisions (what can fit in a sea container) is $10k (purchase of TVs, shippping and customs) or $14 per TV. They contain about $2 in copper. Oh, and Joe Benson, the guy in UK jail? His cost of disposing the bad ones, the ones he was supposedly avoiding recycling costs for? $0, he showed regular trips to recycle the ones he didn't want to pay $14 to ship.

Here is another source, Heather Agyepong (of UK but parents were from Ghana), who visited last summer and reported the same thing, that the "dystopia" and "dumping" was basically not to be found. http://www.okayafrica.com/phot...

No, they should mod you up. It is easy to write snarky and cynical comments... they can generate them without having to RTFA. Obviously Facebook makes its money on eyeballs / participants. Why can't this just be a win-win? By expanding access to higher speed internet, Facebook increases its potential market. What's the difference between that and increasing distribution of any product a segment of the marketplace needs?

The USA Highway system was built in part by the distribution needs of corporations. But we are all free to drive our cars and motorcycles on it. Should we not have built the roads because a corporation was going to profit from it? It's called "development".

Right that was the Macbook Air

So you can hook up to an external monitor OR charge your Iphone OR make a powerpoint presentation! In 2016, it will be even lighter when they reduce the number of letters in the alphabet for the keyboard.

Major Major Major Major will be hard to find, as he always slips out the back window when approached in his office.

Looking forward to squaredance instructions in public boolean http://www.ebaumsworld.com/vid...

"whop him low and whop him high, stick your finger in his eye, kick him in the shin, hit him in the head, hit him again if the critter ain't dead"

(I grew up in northwest Arkansas and am allowed to make this joke /= trolling)

World is really big. When a neighorhood becomes too rich, the repair jobs grow across the tracks. In fact Foxconn was originally a repair/upgrade operation, which eventually grew to accept contract manufacturing. Of the 7 billion people on earth, 1 billion are about as rich as you are, and of the other 6 billion, about 3 billion of them have access to knowledge of transmission motors.

My grandfather was a subsistence farmer and carpenter who grew up in a log cabin in the Ozarks. He explained to me how a transmission works. If my grandfather knew how a transmission worked, why should I disbelieve that assembly line workers at Ford know how a car's transmission works?

You on the other hand appear to have inside dope on the knowledge (or lack thereof) among 650,000 Foxconn employees, and aircraft assemblers, and Ford employees must be much greater than mine. I could only have presumed it varied by employee, based on their time working in the factory or their curiosity about their employment.

Being barely able to explain something which you now understand is progress if you began knowing nothing. I agree with Hodet, it seems like you are struggling for a negative comment when if you aren't interested you could perhaps just close and go read another story. Myself, I feel only better informed by knowing the number of parts in the Toyota transmission, and seeing them in a functioning scale model than I was before watching the film, but could not explain how it works. As for one of the 650,000 workers at the Foxconn factory, I didn't know they all had the same level of understanding how an iPhone works, but I would presume the average employee knows better than most Chinese people do.