I think this is a symptom of technology slowing down. They can't make the phone go faster or have a better screen or have a new sensor, so they start doing crap like this. I think now we are at a point with computer technology where we were in 1970 with space technology. We have had decades of rapid progress and we think it will continue into the future indefinitely, but things are about to stagnate in a major way. There is no clear path forward for CPU technology from 14nm. Intel missed a technology generation, extreme ultraviolet lithography is not ready for prime time yet. PC sales are slowing down, phone makers aren't able to come out with anything new or exciting. Winter is coming.
   

More evidence that technology is slowing down and they have to change standards to get people to re-buy new sets of incompatible accessories which will get people to spend any money.

I worked for a company that had similar scam problems. These scammers are able to pull off these scams at absolutely massive scale and they've been doing it for years against everyone and anyone. They find any little rinky dink offer and exploit the living crap out of it. They have so much talent that you wonder why they don't conduct actual legitimate business.

This is actually going to be the biggest problem with robots that actually work in the way that sci-fi envisioned. If people can train them to do illegal acts, there's going to be a heck of a lot of government regulation and only the government and only the specially licensed and vetted who will be allowed to train them.

Industrial uses of energy use up a lot more than consumer uses. The average aluminum smelting plant can use hundreds of Megawatts.

It seems that the number one issue rich people with lots of money want to solve as they get older is population growth. It's kind of disturbing. That's why Elon Musk is such a breath of fresh air. He actually wants to do something to save the human race that doesn't involve negative population growth.

HP's memresistor project "The machine" is going to so thrash this technology to hell and back. They are talking about petabytes of data as fast as ram. You won't need to have a separation between ram and disk anymore. They already have prototype and they should show up in a few years.

http://fortune.com/2016/03/02/...

"Ideas are more powerful than guns. We would not let our enemies have guns, why should we let them have ideas."
  --Joseph Stalin

The big flaw in their plan is that biometrics are not secret and cannot be changed. If you are tracking people who do not want to be tracked, like prisoners, criminal suspects or parolees these are really good attributes. The endpoints also have to be trusted clients, which is also a tricky to enforce security model. If someone can steal or reverse engineer a trusted terminal it will lead to uncontrollable fraud.

It's a bit like having everyone pay with their SSN if your SSN was irremovably tattooed on your wrist.

I hate to break it to you guys, but this kind of thing is real mind control, and we'll even like it. Brain chemistry IS literally reality. It's where the rubber hits the road. We'll put these implants in people and ask them if they are happy with the chip and they'll say they are if the chip generates dopamine for them.

I can see a future where we put people in solitary confinement in a box that they can't stand up in and as long as they get the dopamine from their chip they'll prefer it there vs anywhere else. We'll even call it humane.

We all know that video game addiction can reach some pretty amazing levels. Even way back in the early days of Multi-User-Dungeons (MUDs) I knew some people who were so addicted to these games that they wouldn't leave the house for weeks just to play them non-stop. With VR entering the picture how deep will the addiction and weirdness go?

Right now for any reasonably popular multi-user game there are huge subcultures on youtube, reddit and elsewhere dedicated to the finest intricacies of the game and literally thousands of hours of recorded game play. With VR I wonder in what weird ways will this all intensify.

What about the social aspects of this? Are people really going to VR helmets at Starbucks or other public settings?

Healthcare spending in the U.S is already double, as a percentage of GDP, as any other industrialized country. Hard to believe, but spending more money is not the solution!

We should ask him to get the CTO of Bitcoin to implement the spec and to break his contract with the mining cartel. That will fix everything. /s

You know the whole Ad Business relies on a trusted client security model. The client is trusted to be looking at your ads and not clicking on them if it's not interested. Now that someone has started to do wide scale hacking of that client it's no longer trusted. It's amazing they made it this far with the whole thing.hanging together.

I have been following the Syrian Civil War and reading http://reddit.com/r/syriancivi... is about the best there is. It's got a lot better content than anything they write in the New York Times or any other mainstream news. It's basically the perfect news feed: Lots of different opinions from all sides. Occasional analysis, minute by minute updates, etc. I can't imagine how a newspaper could do a better job.