But environment has a huge influence over biology. Think of a goldfish floating around in a bowl on your kitchen countertop. Now look at these babies. I think that is a good analogy for the stimulating effect of environment on the modern mind. Think of how hard it was for the first europeans in the west to recognize the natives as fully human. I realize the conventional wisdom is that these europeans were practically deranged by prejudice. But it is also true that, due to circumstances, the natives had an extremely impoverished range of experiences and knowledge, relatively speaking. It is hard to understand how the same brain that considered throwing a spear to be inventive could later travel to the moon, with little biological change in between, but that shows how enormous is the effect of environment (to include culture, literacy, trade, etc).

Sure, any organization has internal conflicts of interest when somebody is tasked to train their own replacement etc. That half billion in savings is mainly going to be salaries after all.

It's awful that universities have to do a "remedial year" to fix shortcomings in K-12

"Awful" is a strong word. In the past these students would have become blue-collar workers and never learned the material at all. Now that path is largely gone, so we're trying to help more people reach higher. (This is not just a glass-half-empty philosophical distinction; the percentage of students who enter college has gone way up in the last century including the last 20 years.)

I'm curious if this approach has any inherent advantages over implantable insulin pumps (which have been around for a few decades), and why they haven't take off wildly (for all the benefits you mention).

It appears to be nothing but CGI at this point.

I quote: "Once the prototype of the product is ready..."

Excuse me for being unimaginative, but if nothing else it will enable 4k television. 20-40 mbits per stream will use up plenty of bandwidth.

FTTH is between $1,500 and $3,000 in suburban markets which is recouped by annual customer commitments. The only way these costs are made affordable is through government subsidies.

Pfft, those prices are right in line with the total price for a two year contract on an iPhone, which I don't have but lots of people do. I've had Comcast cable Internet (@home initially) for 14 years now, which is somewhat over $15,000 in total. Customers are laying out enough money is being laid out to justify some re-investment now and then.

According to the FAQ on their homepage:

Why are you using the name Bolex? Isn't that trademarked?

We're working in partnership with Bolex International, SA. The collaborators on this project are based in Los Angeles, Toronto, China, and Switzerland.

What is the nature of "working in partnership," I don't know. Hopefully it's a close partnership, because otherwise it seems like you'd be crazy to buy such a complex product from somebody who never made one before, when there are already entrenched, world-class competitors.

Well, Linux is still tied to X11. Which means the window manager is separate from the graphics display interface, leading to a profusion of different user interfaces and fragmentation of developer effort.

Now, I know perfectly well we could dicker about whether or not X11 is technically part of Unix, and whether X11 has hobbled or helped the adoption of unix-based systems. But mainly I find it interesting how many have tried and failed to displace X11 on Linux. Apple, on the other hand, pulled it off, and now there's an entire ecosystem of popular software for Quartz or Cocoa or whatever it is. Microsoft's pivot from DOS to Windows-NT was also huge, and key to the long-term profits they have enjoyed.

So my point was that re-use and commonality aren't always good. The organizational ability to junk something good to create something even better is necessary at times.

Convergence is the past, IMHO. Prior to the iPhone, mobile developers tended to resist the idea of custom development for specific platforms. The idea was to use Java everywhere, or some semblance of the Windows API, and to use markup languages to let the client determine presentation. Then Apple said, "screw it, we're going to optimize everything for end users on this specific platform, and let content developers and code developers cope." And it worked. With Metro, Windows is still pursuing unification, and it's (still) not working. Not unlike the transition of Unix to the PC era, which never did work out. (OSX owes practically nothing to Unix at the UI level). And Web Standards bodies are mostly ignored now. Cross-platform applications are almost always beat out by native ones. All somewhat sad, but again, true IMHO.

I think the main problem with new technologies like tracking in smartphones (or even the Web in its current form) is that there is practically no way to opt out, because you don't even know who is collecting what information about you in response to any little action you take.

Let's say I want location-aware reminders on my google glass ("you said you wanted Monkey's Uncle Ale, well this store you're walking by has it for $X") OK. Does that mean all reminders I create are mined for shopping-related keywords? Does it mean my location over time is recorded and sold, and to whom?

"Weeding out naysayers" is a advice that should be applied very carefully IMHO. Anybody who's worked around engineers and been on slashdot a while can get the point - there are plenty of guys who never heard an idea they didn't hate, who only ever see problems and never opportunities. On the other hand, I imagine a few level-headed and empowered naysayers could have done a lot of good at Enron and Bear Stearns. I am not sure if there is really a principled way to tell the difference defeatists and prophets though. I spent a good part of this morning reading Sundown in America, and the reader replies to it, and trying to decide whether the guy is loony, or America is doomed.

It is like everything in modern life... how do you build a lathe without a lathe? Or a generator without electricity? It would take a thousand years to start from nothing and get back to where we are now.

Those were amazing times. I got a Dell Pentium 90 mid-1995, and it was over $3000. (To this day it is still the most expensive thing I've ever bought besides a home and cars/motorcycles). But the amazing part is that within a year it was somewhat outdated. But it got me through my CS program and so, I think, repaid itself many times over :)

I am starting to feel like a relic, because in my world, running a buch of feature-rich applications on a powerful computer with a large screen still seems like a great thing to do most of the time. All I see on the web is how "most people" don't use the full power of Word/Powerpoint/Outlook, therefore it should be removed. And then Microsoft comes out with Metro just to confirm my fears.

It's nice to see an application (yeah, I typed out the whole word!) slammed for being too simplistic.