Also, change in technology may find itself outstripping society's ability (or willingness) to integrate it. In fact, I'd say it already is, and has been for quite some time.
We have the technology already to facilitate incredible intelligence - it's just extremely unevenly distributed, and stifled by lack of political will and social inertia.
What about Kinect? Microsoft is big and there are a lot of people who like Microsoft or at least some products of it despite you like that or not. E.g. I have not seen Windows programming company without Microsoft evangelist yet. There are even more people who are indifferent to technology (similarly to human rights, wars, environment issues, religion and etc.).
Therefore Microsoft making social is not futile while I'm not sure if they really need that.
It's interesting to hear that. I believe it was Bill Gates' advice that led Ballmer and co. to negotiate a buyout of Skype and comments were made in the same vein then as well.
The author's based his career around the ability to pervert search results - and apparently he's frustrated because this fucks up the results for everybody so badly that Google have to change their algorithm.
Sympathy? Not really. I hope he stubs his toe so hard they have to amputate his foot.
Say I create a follow-protected twitter account, which only I follow, write a couple lines of ruby to retweet stuff randomly to myself and a crontab entry for it ... did I miss anything?
As a motorcyclist, the sound of traffic is almost entirely a non-issue; I can wear canalphones with music at a volume where I can't hear any traffic noise, and still negotiate peak hour inner city traffic.
But then, as a motorcyclist I pay more attention than just about any driver (including myself when I'm behind a wheel). For example, I'm never surprised by a vehicle suddenly appearing in my rear view mirror on a bike, because I move my eyes in a reflexive pattern between the road and both mirrors every few seconds.
If you're really paying attention, sound is almost a non-issue on the road - but that puts you in a very small minority of road users.
Sadly, the article completely fails to mention the amazingly useful innovations made by tiling window managers like wmii, ion3 and xmonad.
Granted, they're not as new as Unity et al, but they offer a compelling, complete and fairly radical departure from tradition, and one that I really do miss on OS X.
Windows 1 used tiled windows (MS programmers didn't learn how to overlap windows until Windows 2) and Emacs has them since the 70's. I am not sure if tiling windows could be called innovation.
> I have taken it in the middle of the day, in the sun. I have taken it at night, in a dark room. I have taken it at a party (despite people saying its not a party drug).
I was kinda hoping you were going to run with that and turn that into a "green eggs and ham" tribute poem.
I should point out: when artists do sell their music as direct downloads, I buy them.
Perhaps the simplest restatement of this idea is simply a directory / store which sells DRM unencumbered digital media, passes as close to 100% of the profits to the artist as is possible, and falls back to displaying search results for alternate editions if they're not represented.
We have the technology already to facilitate incredible intelligence - it's just extremely unevenly distributed, and stifled by lack of political will and social inertia.