The principle here is people can agree to surrender some of their privacy for safety. The problem isn’t that searching my bits is a greater violation than searching my atoms, but that it’s not useful. Right now there’s no pattern of bits I can carry with me to blow up a plane and in any event I could easily bypass the search.
I’m not thrilled by the social contract, but it’s a good deal more convenient than driving across country.
Twenty years ago, Nicholas Negroponte pointed out the irony that when he passed through Singapore customs, they searched his atoms but not his bits.
Is being searched before you get on a plane or enter a customs checkpoint some kind of hideous infringement of your civil liberties? No!
There’s no problem with this in principle. The problem is that it’s silly, and it causes a privacy and security violation while not accomplishing anything.
It's definitely not easier to manually set a timer than it is to use Siri. Also, you can do multiple timers at once and they follows you around (versus being screamed at because the timer in the kitchen is beeping and no-one has noticed for half an hour and now the fire alarm is going off).
If there’s one thing Apple did, with Steve Jobs, other than build fantastic user experience out of mature but unapproachable technologies, it was communicating the fact that it had done so. Not only has Amazon failed to do this, the writer has as well.
I think it’s pretty cool that, in theory, I could say “Alexa, turn on the oven to 450” and it would (a) turn the correct device to the correct setting and (b) remind me when it was ready (or if it’s being super duper smart, tell me that it was 2 mins or so away from being ready) so that I could stagger over to the kitchen, pull a pizza out of the fridge or freezer, unwrap it, and stick it in the oven. All I need to do is have a bunch of speakers bugging my home, a new oven, ideally probably not two new ovens or not a new oven and a new toaster oven because god knows what will happen, and all this stuff networked.
Or I can walk over to the oven, turn it to 450, and say “Hey Siri, set timer for ten minutes” and wander off. When my wrist buzzes, I go stick a pizza in the oven and I say, “Hey Siri, set timer for thirteen minutes” and go do stuff.
I don’t need a new oven. I don’t need to worry that I’ll pick the wrong oven. I’m not inviting Amazon to parse all my conversations. I don’t need to learn a new magic phrase.
Oh and imagine the hilarity when you try to sell or rent your house and the internet gets turned off. We had a smart sprinkler system which, when we sold the house, we essentially had to rip out because it was easier to install a conventional replacement than figure out how to talk to it without an active WiFi.
If I understood the details I would never have signed the contract. At the time I was pretty desperate for a job (I’d moved to the US from Australia and my own company had gone belly up and I was living in Santa Barbara with a mortgage).
The exit was in 2005, and several hundred million was not bad (although it came after a failed effort to go public for somewhere north of a billion). I was very new to the startup game and had comparatively little at stake and didn’t understand any of the language but I was invited to some gatherings of engineers who had been screwed by the deal.
My impression is that founders or early investors often have a lot of ability to dilute the value of stock prior to making a deal (there’s description of similar shenanigans early in “Chaos Monkeys”)
I joined a successful startup about ten months before it was acquired for several hundred million. The deal somehow led to a lot of employees losing their options (myself included). There was some discussion of a lawsuit but it fizzled.
Energy storage technologies are all about nasty chemistry. Nasty chemistry is where the energy is. Commercializing the chemistry isn’t easy or everyone would do it.
No clue if these guys are viable but the science is solid.
You do understand that the whole point of hydrides is addressing hydrogen’s storage issues (energy density and need to store under pressure). Using hydrides with fuel cells was what everyone expected electric cars to use before lithium ion batteries took off.
Interesting idea. But is the cloud version a complete image (perhaps out of sync)? If so then it’s a performance disaster, if not it’s very fragile.
It seems to me what we really want is a cloud file system with local cache (like Dropbox or iCloud conceptually) so that if our local device is vaporized we have a pretty much up to date logical store alive and well (and we can work on any number of machines). The word “swapping” seems to me to be based on the virtual memory model which means that if anything goes wrong you have two disconnected piles of crap.
At a file level you could theoretically have a giant file that is never wholly local, but how useful is this as a feature in real terms?
Is there a single example in business of someone taking a huge amount of money, and plopping a famous CEO in charge of a dozen people and saying "go" and generating a successful business? (Let's set aside investment funds, obviously. I guess Meg Whitman could just hire some iconoclastic traders and tell them to manage the $2B while her 10 staff clone YouTube.)
There are quasi-legendary cases in history (think Spartan and Byzantine super-soldiers) of a tiny band with no resources executing ludicrously successful military campaigns, so I guess it's not completely impossible.
I’m not thrilled by the social contract, but it’s a good deal more convenient than driving across country.