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"Imagine that your nation is entirely dependent on a belligerent and economically unstable foreign country for a precious commodity. Imagine that without that commodity, your entire society would grind to a halt. Got it? OK, now imagine that your nation is China, the belligerent nation is the US, and the commodity is CPUs."
"Here’s the history of two decades in one sentence: If the past 10 years have been about discovering post-institutional social models on the Web, then the next 10 years will be about applying them to the real world.
This story is about the next 10 years.
"
"Today’s football players have an edge that no athletes before them have possessed: They’ve played more football than any cohort in history. Even with the rise of year-round training, full-contact practice time on the field hasn’t increased — in fact, it has actually gone down, as coaches have tried to limit the physical punishment that the game exacts. But videogames, especially the ubiquitous Madden NFL, now allow athletes of all ages to extend their training beyond their bodies."
"A simple typo gave Michael Ivey the idea for his company. One day in the fall of 2008, Ivey’s wife, using her pink RAZR phone, sent him a note via Twitter. But instead of typing the letter d at the beginning of the tweet — which would have sent the note as a direct message, a private note just for Ivey — she hit p. It could have been an embarrassing snafu, but instead it sparked a brainstorm. That’s how you should pay people, Ivey publicly replied."
"But a small subculture of RadioShack nostalgics, including many former employees, have watched all this unfold with sorrow — if not a feeling of betrayal, then at least loss. The last nails are being hammered into the coffin of the little electronics hobby shop they once loved. And the cell phone seems to be an apt symbol for the superficiality and ordinariness they feel are taking its place."
"But a small subculture of RadioShack nostalgics, including many former employees, have watched all this unfold with sorrow — if not a feeling of betrayal, then at least loss. The last nails are being hammered into the coffin of the little electronics hobby shop they once loved. And the cell phone seems to be an apt symbol for the superficiality and ordinariness they feel are taking its place."
"This style of on-the-fly wagering while the game unfolds, known as in-running, didn’t exist in Vegas casinos when Cantor Gaming arrived. Other big casinos in town give sports gamblers a narrow range of betting opportunities and a limited amount of time in which to bet. That appalls Lee Amaitis, formerly co-CEO of Cantor offshoot BGC Partners and now president and CEO of Cantor Gaming. “When Wall Street first opens, everybody starts trading; in this town, when a game gets going, everybody stops betting,” he says. “That’s the dumbest thing I ever heard. The game is the market. Why not let people bet the market?”"
"The head of NASA visited China's manned space flight launch center during a trip to the country to explore possibilities for cooperation, the U.S. agency said Tuesday."
"Google is adding employees and redoubling efforts to win new advertisers in China."
nd so Hermione Granger, that charming grind, still goes to the Hogwarts library and spends hours and hours working her way through the stacks, finding out what a basilisk is or how to make a love potion. The idea that a wizard in training might have, instead, a magic pad where she could inscribe a name and in half a second have an avalanche of news stories, scholarly articles, books, and images (including images she shouldn’t be looking at) was a Quidditch broom too far. Now, having been stuck with the library shtick, she has to go on working the stacks in the Harry Potter movies, while the kids who have since come of age nudge their parents. “Why is she doing that?” they whisper. “Why doesn’t she just Google it?”
Read more http://www.newyorker.com/arts/critics/atlarge/2011/02/14/110214crat_atlarge_gopnik#ixzz1DwGpQqaZ
The phenomena of path dependence and lock-in can be illustrated with many examples, but one of the most vivid is the gear we use to launch things into space. Rockets are a very old invention. The Chinese have had them for something like 1,000 years. Francis Scott Key wrote about them during the War of 1812 and we sing about them at every football game. As late as the 1930s, however, they remained small, experimental, and failure-prone.
Russia's President has hopes for a new tech corridor near Moscow, but can the country overcome corruption, lack of innovation, and a slow-moving state sector?
Peter Thiel wants to save the world. Or, at the very least, to "take our civilization to the next level," as he frequently puts it. Almost every problem--the shortcomings of our political and educational systems, the lingering financial disaster, market bubbles, energy crises, the failed promises of the developing world, resource-based wars--stems from what he calls "stalled technological innovation."
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