If you are saying that 2/3 of the world exists in 2nd or 3rd world conditions due to a failure of charity, you are assuming that charity can overcome corrupt governments and overt oppression. There is a balance between personal responsibility, charity, and government. In many areas of the world, families operate under the premise that they must care for their own. The younger generations are raised by the older and then it flips to the younger caring for the older when the time comes. When the left says that government will take care of everyone, I don't know if they know they are lying or not. It's something they tell their base so they don't feel bad about not personally doing anything to help their neighbor.

The summary says that Crowdfunding Fatal Flaw is that fact that "not every campaign ends up getting funded". THAT IS NOT A FLAW. This is how it should work. The failure rate, according to the cited research is 90%. That is the crowd determining what is good/necessary to fund. When people actually give their own money to a program, they can decide what important it is to them. When a bunch of Congressmen/women get together and decide to fund programs with somebody else's money, it becomes very easy fund things that add up to $18T in national debt and counting. The national debt is doing a hockey stick. Maybe Meals on Wheels and Medicaid aren't the right things to cut, IDK, but somebody's got to start cutting something.

I waited until Apple Series 2 and bought my first one. I love it. I use it for 2 things all the time that take away just a enough annoyance that it makes me smile every time I use it.

It's not a must have item by any stretch, but like keyless entry on your car, if you make enough money to spoil yourself occasionally, it has its place. My 2 things: 1) Text messages...reply by voice is excellent and accurate for me; 2) Calendar...it's on my home screen and shows my next appointment...love it. Beyond that, I the Activity (fitness) app, Phone call feature (daily), and driving directions (weekly).

Right now, the smartwatch is the least intrusive device for extending human capability that you can get. Google glass was probably ahead of its time and may one day become the de facto interface between humans and assistive tech. Phones are great, but not hands free. To go hands free, I can only think of 5 options:
1) glasses,
2) something you wear (watch, Star Trek communicator, etc)
3) some kind of ear piece
4) some kind of AMZN Echo device that can fly around behind me all day, or
5) A chip in your head

Right now, the watch is winning, but is clearly not the end-all be-all. While VR is all the rage right now, and will have some killer applications, it's not something you can wear around all day. Like Tim Cook, I believe AR will be a bigger benefit to more people. It's the next evolution of the smartphone. It's going to be harder than VR to perfect, but when it is perfected, it will be that thing you turn around and go back home to get if you forgot it.

if Apple indeed ditches the 3.5, then > 50% of new smartphones will ship without a 3.5mm jack and they won't all be Apple. The 3.5 jack will become a legacy "feature" selling point like an SD slot or a replaceable battery. But then again, we might all have hover boards before this happens and I'd be wrong, and not for the first time, so flame on, amigos!

Ask Palo Alto. They seem to have a plan.

Surprise! Surprise! Surprise!

Good thing they don't give those people the codes to launch nuclear weapons or let them in on secrets that might hurt the US if they got into the wrong hands.

From what I've read, Scotland wants to declare independence in order to sell its soul to the EU.

"Raid"...is that journalistic hyperbole or for real? Are we talking husky dudes and dudettes in tactical gear storming a Google office here? In the US, at least in my experience in the Fortune 500, you don't have to "raid" an office for tax info. You have to gain access to their transaction data and tax data. That doesn't take a raid because the chances of Google fleeing the country for parts unknown is nil. Unless they do things differently in Spain and France, the data they're looking for ain't sitting around in boxes of paper or floppy drives in the office.

Yeah, right, what's next Apple, a car without wheels?!?! What are you going to do, make it, what, hover? I will never buy a computer without a 3.5" floppy! Or without a DVD ROM! Or a mouse! Or a monitor! Or a phone without a physical keyboard! Or, and I mean this especially, a car without wheels! ...said my good buddy, Lud.

Dropping the headphone jack seems boneheaded, just like dropping the serial port, just like dropping floppy drives, just like dropping DVD drives, dropping the physical keyboard on a cell phone, or the mother of all disses, dropping Flash. IIRC, Apple was one of the first, if not the first to drop those legacy techs. Could it just possibly be that they are doing it again? In 3 years, will the headphone jack, which seems absolutely irreplaceable today become what the floppy drive is today? Is it possible that Samsung and Google will jump on the bandwagon? I'm not saying it's a certainty, but I'm also not blind to Apple's past prescience for dropping stuff to make room for the next big thing. I'd recommend caution and an open mind to see what the future might hold.

Google's Page Rank algorithm probably has as good a shot as anything else.

Excellent! It takes all types to make the world go round.

If anyone has got a better idea than what Musk is doing, now is the time to speak up, get off your bum, and make it happen. Just realize that you will face plenty of doubters and haters on your journey, but hopefully you've got the guts to keep going forward despite that. Planet earth needs somebody to succeed. There will be some who fail unless none try. And the doubters and haters will be drunk on schadenfreude. But hopefully, someone will succeed in spite of government, free markets, etc. If you are paralyzed because the politics, markets, and weather are not just perfect, you don't even jump off the the Titanic, you just ride her down. So, yeah... - Drop in the ocean - Murica this and Murica that - Dumb Americans - Whatever your anonymous trash talk might be Your doubt and hate fuels the very fire of people of Musk's ilk. They love to prove you wrong. So thank you for degrading yourselves for the public good. America was built by dreamers and believers of the impossible dream. Thank God there are still some of those around and we haven't all devolved into trash talkers. Cheers! Byron

Instead of being evil, why don't these talented hackers turn their powers to something for the good of humanity, like maybe a Chrome Extension that would blot out the words "Kim Kardashian" on any web page. Of course, if they're looking for a vector for their dirty deeds, that would be huge.