Netizen: Internet access

Showing posts with label Internet access. Show all posts

Thursday, February 04, 2016

Android Phones Should Machine Record All Talk

Android phones should machine record all talk on all Android phones all over the world and feed all that to AI, so as to later enable voice search in all languages. Literacy is over rated. What if all knowledge could be translated into every human language? And not just in writing but orally. Literacy is primitive tech. I like it, but it should not be the gatekeeper it is. You should be able to access all knowledge orally. Too many human brains are going to waste right now. Human beings should not have to do robot work. Planting rice is robot work. And Android phones should be solar and drone powered. The drones give you the Internet access and solar gives you energy. There is no wire in sight. If everybody is armed with a phone, we could provide police service to every human being at a much lower cost. Much, much lower cost. 911 would be an app on your phone. Your phone knows who you are, and where you are. We should build a world government, and get every human being to directly vote. You vote on your phone, you have a biometric ID. You press your thumb during the vote week, and you vote through the vote app. Barack Obama should run for President Of The World. POW-WOW. Everyone should have ready credit on your phone. You graduate high school, you get credit. The credit shows up on your phone. Google sends "checks" to your phone for all the data it collects on you, from which it makes money. And there is a Universal Basic Income. Food comes from Iowa. Iowa and the Caribbean, and Bihar. 911 is number one. Education. Voting. Credit. And you unleash unprecedented creativity.

Would it not be great? To have a directly elected President Of The World? Black lives matter, and every vote counts.

Wednesday, January 13, 2016

Productivity And Political Innovation Going Hand In Hand

English: The Communist States (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

A lot of Silicon Valley types, when they talk about massive increases in productivity they see before their eyes coming in the near future, forget to realize that there will have to be accompanying political, social and policy innovation. There has to be. Imagine every part of your body grew, but not your thumb. Your thumb got stuck at age one. That won't be pretty.

If we could grow 100 times as much food, maybe it will make sense to give everyone food stamps. Everyone who wants them can have them. Why not? We can already give everyone free internet access. Nanotechnology should do the same to housing. It should become super cheap to build houses. You could be buying houses like you buy computers today. It is not a 30 year plan. It is one simple transaction.

Maybe we will end up communist. Like China, a communist country, has ended up being uber capitalist, or "socialism with Chinese characteristics." To each according to his/her need, at least for the basics of life, like internet access, food and shelter. Even a minimum basic income. If your accessing the internet is making people money, maybe you should get a cut. You should definitely get a cut for your personal contribution to Big Data. We as people are more indispensable to the Internet than computers and routers. The Internet is dead without us.

Friday, January 08, 2016

Facebook's Out On Free Internet Could Be A Mobile Browser

The second logo for AOL, used from 2006–2009 (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

Facebook’s First Effort at Free Internet Is Just Another Walled Garden

With its Aquila unmanned aircraft and laser technologies, Facebook has demonstrated the ability to deliver data at a rate of tens of gigabytes per second to a target the size of a coin — from 10 miles away. This is 10 times faster than existing land-based technologies. With interconnected drones, it will, within two or three years, most likely be able to provide Internet access to the most remote regions of the world....... And then there are low-orbit microsatellites, which Oneweb, SpaceX, and now Samsung are building. These beam Internet signals by laser to ground stations. In June, Oneweb announced that it had raised $500 million to develop and launch several hundred satellites that will provide global broadband coverage. ...... Google is launching Loons in Indonesia and Sri Lanka. It was also supposed to launch them in India, but India’s defense, aviation, and telecommunications ministries raised technical and security concerns and stopped the project. When the telecom providers figure out that with unlimited, inexpensive, Internet access, their cell and data businesses will be decimated, they too will place obstacles in the way of these technologies.

Free Basics protects net neutrality

To connect a billion people, India must choose facts over fiction ..... We have collections of free basic books. They’re called libraries. They don’t contain every book, but they still provide a world of good. ..... We have free basic healthcare. Public hospitals don’t offer every treatment, but they still save lives. ..... That’s why everyone also deserves access to free basic internet services. ..... We know that for every 10 people connected to the internet, roughly one is lifted out of poverty. We know that for India to make progress, more than 1 billion people need to be connected to the internet. ...... in India and more than 30 other countries. We launched Free Basics, a set of basic internet services for things like education, healthcare, jobs and communication that people can use without paying for data. ...... More than 35 operators have launched Free Basics and 15 million people have come online. And half the people who use Free Basics to go online for the first time pay to access the full internet within 30 days. ....... Free Basics is a bridge to the full internet and digital equality. .....

more than 30 countries have recognized Free Basics as a program consistent with net neutrality
and good for consumers. ........
Instead of recognizing the fact that Free Basics is opening up the whole internet, they continue to claim – falsely – that this will make the internet more like a walled garden.
..... Instead of recognizing that Free Basics fully respects net neutrality, they claim – falsely – the exact opposite. ...... This isn’t about Facebook’s commercial interests – there aren’t even any ads in the version of Facebook in Free Basics.

I am confused. What's free basics? What does it do? How? Is it restricted? Is it like AOL? AOL was not restricted. You could go all over the Internet through AOL. Most people didn't. They spent most of their time in AOL Messenger, but that's another story. Is Zuck's Free Basics like AOL? I don't get the impression he is using drones for the purpose.

I think the solution is two-fold. One, beam high speed internet from the sky straight to the smartphone. And have a Facebook browser on that phone that has code that communicates to the Facebook Internet beam from the Gods, and lets you go online, but the browser is customized for a Facebook experience. You still can go everywhere, but it looks and feels like Facebook. And Facebook serves ads.

That way Google could be competing to provide free internet from the high and above to the same smartphone. Next thing you know they are competing on speed. My broadband is faster than yours. The next logical step after that would be free smartphones. Sundar Pichai is so smart I think he could build $20 phones. Google could earn 20 bucks from ads in, like, 20 weeks flat.

Facebook should build a mobile browser.

Tuesday, August 11, 2015

Not Mars

I don't feel any imminent danger that unless Homo Sapiens also colonize Mars, it is too great a risk. As of now, I don't believe in Singularity either. But I do see a lot of great things happening along the way. Like, truly, amazing, world changing great things. Man on the moon mission also gave people appliances.

But I see great promise in Elon Musk sending 4,000 satellites into low orbit to beam Internet to every corner on earth. And I see great promise in the Asteroid Belt. That is where he has to go to become a trillionaire.

Indians could use a little more gold.

Mars? I am way more excited about the earth's surface.

Saturday, August 01, 2015

Musk's Cross Pollinating Ways

English: Elon Musk at the panel Tribeca Talks: Revenge of the Electric Car, for the 2011 Tribeca Film Festival. (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

Musk, it should be noted, had no experience building rockets. All he knew about space exploration had been gleaned from books and training manuals. Vance describes in gleeful detail Musk’s improbable quest to build a NASA-worthy rocket essentially from scratch. “I am a billionaire. I am going to start a space program,” Vance reports him saying to the man he enlisted to go with him to Moscow to persuade the Russians to sell him an intercontinental ballistic rocket, which he planned to use as a launch vehicle. When that didn’t work out—Musk thought the Russians were trying to get him to part with too many millions of his billion-plus fortune—he crunched some numbers and determined that it made more sense to build the rocket himself. It would be low-cost, low-orbiting, and designed to ferry satellites into space on a regular schedule. The idea, he told the first employees of his new company, Space Exploration Technologies (SpaceX), was to become the “Southwest Airlines of Space.” ....... the spirit of a Silicon Valley start-up—learn by doing and do it around the clock—and like those start-ups, it would take advantage of exponential increases in computing power. Software developers would tap into that power to design and build the company’s avionics, while the rocket’s components would be assembled, as much as possible, from equipment purchased off the shelf. ...... because of Musk’s relentless and successful pursuit of the best young engineers and coders and the unremitting demands he placed upon them, it would be made. ...... it, too, fell back to earth. The company was burning through Musk’s money; its margin for error was narrowing while Musk’s reputation as yet another rich guy with a vanity space program was growing ........ Finally, in 2008, six years after Musk declared his galactic intentions, and four and a half years after he said it would happen, the SpaceX Falcon 1 became the first privately constructed rocket to reach orbit. As Vance tells it, the human costs were at least as high as whatever number of dollars had come from Musk’s pocket (one estimate put it at $100 million) ......... Some of these people had spent years on the island going through one of the more surreal engineering exercises in human history. They had been separated from their families, assaulted by the heat, and exiled on their tiny launchpad outpost—sometimes without much food—for days on end as they waited for the launch windows to open and dealt with the aborts that followed. So much of that pain and suffering and fear would be forgotten if this launch went successfully. ............ The portrait of Elon Musk that emerges from these pages is of a man of visionary intellect, fierce ambition, and fantastic wealth, who is emotionally bankrupt. “Many of us worked tirelessly for him for years and were tossed to the curb like a piece of litter,” one former employee told Ashlee Vance. “What was clear is that people who worked for him were like ammunition: used for a specific purpose until exhausted and discarded.” ......... Loyalty was expected but not honored. Fear of getting publicly dressed down by Musk—or worse—was rampant. “Marketing people who made grammatical mistakes in e-mails were let go,” Vance reports, “as were other people who hadn’t done anything ‘awesome’ in recent memory.” And then there was the employee who “missed an event to witness the birth of his child. Musk fired off an e-mail saying, ‘That is no excuse. I am extremely disappointed. You need to figure out where your priorities are. We’re changing the world and changing history, and you either commit or you don’t.’” ........... Musk’s severe rationality and emotional detachment, as well as his preternatural ability to master complex subjects quickly, have led to an ongoing joke among denizens of certain Internet forums that he must be an alien, beamed down from space. (No wonder he’s so keen to colonize Mars!) In fact, the man has all the attributes of a classic narcissist—the grandiosity, the quest to be famous, the lack of empathy, the belief that he is smarter than everyone else, and the messianic plan to save civilization. Steve Jobs comes to mind, though Jobs’s ambitions were pedestrian compared to Musk’s. ........... Twelve electric vehicles besides the Tesla Model S were brought to market in 2014 and fourteen were released in 2015. One of them was conceived and designed in Croatia. ....... He has applied to the Federal Communications Commission for permission to test a satellite-beamed Internet service that, he says, “would be like rebuilding the Internet in space.” ............ While SpaceX’s four thousand circling satellites have the potential to create a whole new meaning for the World Wide Web, since they will beam down the Internet to every corner of the earth, the system holds additional interest for Musk. “Mars is going to need a global communications system, too,” he apparently told a group of engineers he was hoping to recruit at an event last January in Redmond, Washington. ......... fifth mode of transportation ..... Musk’s critics—and he has many—are quick to point out that he is merely piggy-backing on existing technologies, not inventing them. There were electric cars before there was Tesla, rockets before there was SpaceX, solar panels before there was SolarCity, and even pneumatic tube travel has a long, if spotty, history. Yet as true as this is, it misses the point of what Elon Musk is doing. By now it is a cliché to put the words “Silicon Valley” and “disruptive innovation” in the same sentence, but disruption is precisely the point of every one of Musk’s ventures. He has made disruption itself his business plan and it is working. It required a lot of hubris to take on the aerospace industry and the automobile industry and the utilities, but he did, and he is, with precipitous consequences. Will they be precipitous enough to catapult the man to Mars, ten years hence?

Saturday, March 21, 2015

The TV Industry's Deadtree Newspapers Moment?

If Google Fiber is going to be so profoundly profitable for Google, why is the roll out not much faster?

Google is about to make the sale of TV ads much more like ads on the web ..... "If you're a local business in Kansas City, just as with digital ads, you'll only pay for ads that have been shown, and can limit the number of times an ad is shown to a given TV" ...... Google clearly wants to turn the shotgun approach of broadcast advertising into a sniper's bullet. Which is good for advertisers, but less great for the networks selling airtime. ..... Google's new program will no doubt drive the cost of ads way down.

Tuesday, December 23, 2014

Vivek Wadhwa: The Smartest Dude In Silicon Valley

(reprinted without permission)

If I am an optimist, it is because Vivek is looking into his crystal ball. I want this guy on my company's Board so bad!

"New trillion-dollar industries will come out of nowhere and wipe out existing trillion-dollar industries."

2014 is ending, but this wave of technology disruptions is just beginning

Dec 22, 2014 23,004 Views 732 Likes 153 Comments

Changes in technology are happening at a scale which was unimaginable before and will cause disruption in industry after industry. This has really begun to worry me, because we are not ready for this change and most of our leading companies won’t exist 15–20 years from now. Here are five sectors to keep an eye on:

1. Let’s start with manufacturing.

Robotics and 3-D printing have made it cheaper to manufacture in the United States and Europe than in China. Robots such as Baxter, from Rethink Robotics, and UR10, from Universal Robots, have arms; screens which show you their emotions; and sensors that detect what is happening around them. The cost of operating these is less than the cost of human labor. We can now have robots working 24×7 and doing some of the work of humans. Over time, these robots will become ever more sophisticated and do most human jobs. The manufacturing industry is surely going to be disrupted in a very big way. This is good news for America, Europe, and parts of Asia, because it will become a local industry. But this will be bad for the Chinese economy — which is largely dependent on manufacturing jobs.

In the next decade, robots will likely go on strike, because we won’t need them anymore. They will be replaced by 3D printers. Within 15 to 20 years, we will even be able to 3D print electronics. Imagine being able to design your own iPhone and print it at home. This is what will become possible.

2. The reinvention of finance.

We are already witnessing a controversy over Bitcoin. Many technology and retail companies are supporting it. Crowdfunding is shaking up the venture-capital industry and making it less relevant because it provides start-ups with an alternative for raising seed capital. We will soon be able to crowdfund loans for houses, cars, and other goods. With cardless transactions for purchasing goods, we won’t need the types of physical banks and financial institutions that we presently have. Banks in the United States seem to be complacent because they have laws protecting them from competition. But our laws don’t apply in other countries. We will see innovations happening abroad which disrupt industries in the United States.

3. Health care.

Apple recently announced Healthkit, its platform for health information. It wants to store data from the wearable sensors that will soon be monitoring our blood pressure, blood oxygenation, heart rhythms, temperature, activity levels, and other symptoms. Google, Microsoft, and Samsung will surely not be left behind and will all compete to provide the best health-data platforms. With these data, they will be able to warn us when we are about to get sick. AI-based physicians will advise us on what we need to do to get healthy.

Medical-test data, especially in fields such as oncology, is often so complex that human doctors cannot understand it. This will become even more difficult when they have genomics data to correlate. Over the last 15 years, the cost of human genome sequencing has dropped from the billions to about a thousand dollars. At the rate at which prices are dropping, the cost of sequencing will be close to zero in a few years and we will all have our genomes sequenced. When you combine these data with the medical-sensor data that the tech companies are collecting on their cloud platforms, we will have a medical revolution. We won’t need doctors for day-to-day medical advice any more. Robotic surgeons will also do the most sophisticated surgeries. We’re going to disrupt the entire health-care system.

4. Now take the energy industry.

Five years ago, we were worried about America running out of oil; today we’re talking about Saudi America — because of fracking. Yes, fracking is a harmful technology; nevertheless it has allowed America to become energy independent and will soon make it an energy exporter. And then there is solar energy, which some people have become negative about. But it is a fact solar prices have dropped about 97 percent over the past 35 years, and, at the rate at which solar is advancing, by the end of this decade we will achieve grid parity across the United States. Grid parity means it’s cheaper to produce energy at home on your solar cells than to buy it from utilities. Move forward another 10 or 20 years, and it will costs a fraction as much to produce your own energy as to buy it from the grid. This means that the utility companies will be in serious trouble. This is why they are beginning to fight the introduction of solar. If solar keeps advancing in the way it is, it will eclipse the fossil-fuel industry. Solar is only one of maybe a hundred advancing technologies that could disrupt the energy industry.

When we have unlimited energy, we can have unlimited clean water, because we can simply boil as much ocean water as we want. We can afford to grow food locally in vertical farms. This can be 100 percent organic, because we won’t need insecticides in the sealed farm buildings. Imagine also being able to 3D print meat and not having to slaughter animals. This will transform and disrupt agriculture and the entire food-production industry.

5. Communications.

Yes, even this industry will be disrupted. Note how AT&T, Verizon, and Sprint have seen their landline businesses disappear. These were replaced by mobile—which is now being replaced by data. When I travel abroad, I don’t make long-distance calls any more, because I just call over Skype. Soon we will have WiFi everywhere, thanks to the competition between companies such as AT&T and Google to provide superfast Internet access. We will be able to make free calls over open WiFi networks.

***

In practically every industry that I look at, I see a major disruption happening. I know the world will be very different 15 to 20 years from now. The vast majority of companies who are presently the leaders in their industries will likely not even exist. That is because industry executives either are not aware of the changes that are coming, are reluctant to invest the type of money that is be required for them to reinvent themselves, or are protecting legacy businesses. Most are focused on short-term performance.

New trillion-dollar industries will come out of nowhere and wipe out existing trillion-dollar industries. This is the future we’re headed into, for better or for worse.

Saturday, December 20, 2014

Can Poverty Be Cured?

Percent poverty world map (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

I think it can. And the cure is within reach. We already have the know how.

A poverty cured world is one without hunger, because the world already produces enough food, but will now also learn to distribute. It is a world where 5% of the people are taken care of in terms of their basic needs, just because. 100% employment is actually bad. You need some churn in the economy. Another 2% might not even be in a position to work, and they are taken care of. And there is willful employment for the other 93%. Everyone has internet access through their cheap smartphone. The Internet is in the air.

Basic food, basic shelter, basic clothing, internet in the air, basic education, basic health. The costs are not that high. But it is we that are so disorganized. And the Internet itself can be that organizing tool, the best there can be.