The first thing he yelled was "show me your badge." I didn't know I wasn't allowed to ride them if I didn't work there. I was riding on the sidewalk on Shoreline at about 11 PM.
I tried to ride one of the bikes from one Google building to another once and a black security SUV pulled up and started yelling at me. They aren't very good bikes anyway- they are fixies which are kind of useless for rides longer than a block.
I believe everyone physically able to should try running 13.1 mph on a treadmill just to get an understanding of just how fast these athletes run for two hours. It is incredible.
I believe the Gates Foundation has already put an enormous amount of thinking and research into determining the most effective use of a large amount of funds to improve the overall state of the world. My opinion is that you would probably rationally be better off investing that money or building a corporation to try and turn it into billions and then donate that to Gates.
CryEngine is amazing technology and CryTek is a great company. I believe there must be merit to this. Star Citizen is also a very cool project and so I hope they work things out together. I want both companies to be very successful.
I think Xanadu is great and it will be one of those things that proves itself in the future. Perhaps whatever replaces the web someday will resemble it.
I bet that someday we will move to a distributed web hosted on something like the blockchain, with redundancy and revision history, and that will begin to resemble Xanadu. It reminds me of sort of a "Star Trek" vision of how things should be, but not how things actually are in this disorganized world.
I think that it's sort of like the Dynabook or early AI or VR, in that it's the correct vision of the ideal result of a technology, but was way too ahead of its time and the technology just wasn't ready.
Google is not evil. They provide fantastic services and value and have made the world a much better place. Mistakes will be made and they will correct them.