You can now send money with Gmail.

You sure YOU don't work for the NSA? The recording capability is what it is, but the reading capability is whatever you can put in a $100 consumer drive operating at 100MB/s with 1 error in 10^14 bits accuracy. What you can do with a >$1 million electron microscope at 1/1000th the speed at 1/1000th the accuracy is another matter. You might not want a 0.1 MB/s drive that corrupts a bit every megabyte but for forensics that's plenty. Never mind that all modern drives just pretend to offer you a linear disc, in reality it remaps a whole sector if a single bit fails. How much compromising info can you write in 4023 out of 4024 bits of a 4K sector? It's not useless but everything you hope to achieve with erasing is better achieved with encryption. Nor are they mutually exclusive, if you want to wipe your encrypted drive for that extra unrecoverable feeling go ahead.

Since that's dependent on handset manufacturers and carriers, both of whom have an incentive to get you to buy a new phone rather than upgrade your existing device, Google has come up with an alternative that mostly achieves the same result -- Nearly all important "OS" upgrades these days are actually updates to the application libraries, so old devices get the most important updates whether the OS is updated or not. This really started in earnest with 4.0, so people on pre-Ice Cream Sandwich devices are still lagging, but from that point on it matters a lot less whether you have the current OS.

I doubt anything has a future in the home, to the home it'll be fiber (23% here in Norway now and rapidly rising) that plugs into a box in the closet that splits it off into TV, phone, wireless and copper wire internet service and so on. GigE over copper is plenty for in-home distribution, even for compressed 4K material unless you've got a big family all watching different things with quad-BluRay quality. Anywhere you're likely to want an Ethernet port you have wall sockets, so no point in powered varieties. Nobody cares about having a 10GbE home network and it'll take forever until you have >1GBit internet connections. Now I'm not going to go 640kB on you and say forever, but for the next decade I see absolutely no demand for anything more.

If anything the trend is the other way around, you supply power and everything else is wireless even over short distances. That the latest standards have poor range and don't penetrate obstacles well means they work better in apartment buildings due to less interference. Actually in my building it works so well that I'm starting to wonder if it's deliberate, non-interfering materials in apartment-internal walls and blocking materials in walls to adjoining flats. Doesn't seem to have any effect on cell phone signals though, but I receive my own wireless AP extremely well and the others much weaker - I suspect out the window to other buildings in sight. It's the interference that kills wireless performance.

Many companies have paid ridiculous amounts of money for code that doesn't work, particularly custom and semi-custom code. The NHS in the UK scrapped a >10 billion GBP - that's 16 billion USD - national healthcare system. Vertical integrators that have a stranglehold on certain professions are often full of horrible, horrible code. Insane amounts of spaghetti code have been made by cheap outsourcing companies to go into "commercial software". Closed source has its gems. Open source has its gems. But as a broad generalization it's the pot calling the kettle black, both have a huge spread. Often it's just good vs better or bad vs less mediocre and the question to pay or not depends on whether a $50k+ worker could be 1% more effective - that's $500 - with that tool or not.

Personally I find there's a difference of layers, closed source software doesn't sell unless it looks good on the surface with user interface and hand-holding documentation, comes with buzzword compliance, feature checklists and fancy demos of the capabilities. Open source is more grab it, put it through its paces and see if it works for you. Doesn't have to be so pretty to look at, but be a solid workhorse with detailed technical documentation but often a high learning curve. It's usually more about manpower though than anything else, often you realize there's five open source developers trying to compete with a hundred closed source developers and it's not so much a better of the quality of the coders but simply about being outgunned.

Do you have any evidence to the contrary? At all?

Not to mention the perpetrator-victim relationship, in the UK and most of Europe a knife is enough. Depending on where you are in the US if you tried to rob anyone with a knife chances are you'd get the wallet while you're up close then get held or shot at gunpoint as you're trying to get away. If you have to assume your victim might have a gun (legally or illegally) the only "safe" way to rob them is to control them at gunpoint from start to finish. As I understand it guns are not that terribly hard to acquire here in Europe but they are usually overkill to commit the crime and they rarely let you get out of a situation you couldn't escape with a knife. Unless you intend to kill but most murders around here happens in close relations with victims in "stabbing distance", not gang violence on the street. And of course to an armed robbery you send armed police...

Google Fiber doesn't sniff traffic.

He's a crank. Sure, it might be possible that some things are not all as they seem but he's on a roll that everything is some sort of conspiracy or false flag operation. Nothing is as simple as crazy religious fundamentalists shooting up an easy low-security target for huge publicity and terror factor.

Google Fiber doesn't.

Since pretty much all residental connections I know of block outgoing port 25 I don't think most of the world has "internet access" the way you define internet access. Good luck in your quest to redefine it.

I disagree. Strongly.

My company (Google) uses videoconferencing extensively; every conference room is a video conference room with high-quality screens and cameras, and every meeting that involves people in multiple sites is a video conference. The VC system (which is the same tech in Google Hangouts, er, Video Chats) integrates with the calendaring and room booking system so everything gets linked up automatically. Anyone can project their screen to the VC with a few keystrokes. The result is extremely productive, especially when combined with Google Docs.

However, I still fly to remote sites to meet physically with the teams I collaborate with, and do it on a regular basis. A couple of times per year to overseas locations, and at least quarterly to the nearer sites, and drinking and dining boondoggles have nothing to do with it (I abhor business dinners). Why, then? And why does the company gladly fund and even encourage these trips?

Because they're necessary. VC is great for exchanging information, but very bad for building personal relationships. Meeting someone in person, even if all you do is have exactly the same meeting you would have via VC, dramatically improves the working relationship -- even if it was good to begin with.

Why this is, I don't really know. I do notice that physical co-location reduces the formality of the interaction in subtle ways. I think part of it might be the unnoticeable but still present latency in VC communications. The lag may only be 30 ms, but I think that 30 ms matters in the spontaneity of interaction. I think most of it is probably just that people become more real to you when you shake their hand and smell their BO (or, hopefully, lack thereof). Whatever the basis, the fact is that it's hard to make a human connection with an image on a screen.

And, much as I hate it, a night or two out socializing and discussing things completely unrelated to work (bringing spouses along really helps to ensure that) does a great deal to cement those relationships.

Once you've made those human connections, VCs are great vehicles for communication. But until you have a sense of the people on the other end, VCs are inherently less effective even in the best of times, and when things become stressful and have the potential to become antagonistic, the human connections are what make collaboration possible.

Bah. You have no idea what you're talking about.

First of all, a house can have power lines and still be solar powered. Many solar-powered homes use the grid as their storage facility. Most of them actually generate more power than they consume, net, but the grid tie is still very valuable.

Second, if you get out in the sticks (there are a lot of mountain homes), there are many houses which are not connected to the grid at all. Not that they wouldn't like to be able to use grid storage, but it's simply not available without paying tens of thousands of dollars to run lines out to them. These homes use large banks of batteries for storage.

Gilbert: There is one difference. In a democracy, the people have some say in the matter through their elected representatives, and in the United States only Congress can declare wars.
Göring: Oh, that is all well and good, but, voice or no voice, the people can always be brought to the bidding of the leaders. That is easy. All you have to do is tell them they are being attacked and denounce the pacifists for lack of patriotism and exposing the country to danger. It works the same way in any country.

It's not exactly an accident that the NSA legitimized their mass surveillance through the PATRIOT act.