I find it disappointing that people find that reaction acceptable. Just like the fact that facebook bans Adsense ads in apps. Unless facebook can come up with an excuse such as "Your ad violates the trademarks of google" this is a ridiculously childish reaction.
Interesting. Let's see how his first startup goes, and how it ends up. Remember the crunchpad? The main problem i see with him is that he's not technical. Also how popular are his conferences/blog going to be if others see him as a competitor? Anyway, best of luck to his endeavors.
While i can see people moving from facebook or to google+ (a lot of my friends already do), i dont know anyone who quit linkedin for g+. FB and google pretty much feed on each other. And i dont think it will stop there. G+ is just the second "real name" nonprofessional network , maybe in 3 years there will be a new cool toy and everyone will jump ship once again.
Assuming you dont believe in mind-body duality, why would it not be representable in algorithmic form, since it can be mapped all the way down to deterministic chemical reactions?
There's a lot to be figured out before neuroscience even becomes a "proper" science, with laws and all. Even the most sophisticated methods have not been able to figure out fundamental things like plasticity or the nature of neural code. Neuroscience needs its own LHC-level projects. I mean it's surprising that we can figure out what happens to physical particles down to attosecond resolution, but we still use crude manipulations and indirect measures to figure out how plasticity works. But one can be optimistic, in the past decade there has been impressive progress in optogenetics. And another thing: science many times evolves in leaps.
The whole idea of neuron level manipulation is of course science fiction, but it's not so implausible as the author presents it to be. You could simulate experience by just stimulating the afferent nerves or some relatively organized structures like the hippocampus. It's just been demonstrated that you can use a machine to restore the memory encoding process http://www.eurekalert.org/pub_releases/2011-06/uosc-rmr06121... .
The implementation at browserid.org returns the email only. So there's no way to change the email without visiting all the sites you've registered in using browserid.
Do an online poll and ask people "Do you know your openID" vs "Do you know your email". Users are trained to use emails for login, and that's a significant investment already.
OTOH, facebook id != identity, neither is twitter username. There will always be some id that you won't be able to change. But you are right that email is a bad choice, and i was surprised they give away the email address to developers. They should provide the browserid.org ID only.
They give you a token, you do a GET request to browserid.org with it and get the user's email, that's all. The user has to register their email with browserid.org first.
Your hypothesis would be valid if facebook wasnt running an open ads platform. Would it be OK to ban the political ads they don't like either?