The Computer History Museum gets $10,000 if she loses, I guess they should start planning an exhibit on old Russian computer technology.
But to be less smug for a moment why anyone would think this is beyond me. While the Russians did achieve significant technological advances in the 20th century, and implemented an impressive education system with regard to mathematics and computer science there are so many other factors which play into this. Namely Russia obtaining a score of 2.7/10 for corruption in 2002 from the Corruption Perceptions Index and sliding down to 2.1/10 in the most recent ranking putting them in 158th place. Further they are ranked 143rd on the 2010 Index of Economic Freedom. India with 87th on corruption and 124th on economic freedom, not great, has plenty of English speakers and a more impressive computer science educational infrastructure, as well as being cheaper. The stories of people dying in Russian prisons after resisting corrupt government shakedowns are just horrific and I am not aware of any Indian equivalent. But I suppose if you invest there as she does, you need to talk it up.
It turns out that great software developers are not enough to be the world leader in software development. But it's easy to imagine why someone might think they could be, especially by 2012.
We've got a while, but it feels like an appropriate bet.
Like 'HTML5' or 'hacker,' 'REST' is a totally destroyed, meaningless term. I'm attempting to be pragmatic about it. Better to effectively communicate than hold onto intellectual purity.
This seems like a risky one to bet against, at least from a technical perspective.
I suppose it is true that it was still a pretty open question whether anyone would manage to negotiate licenses with the media producers to do VOD, but Bell doesn't even touch on that issue.
It could have easily been derailed the studios wanting to try and run the business themselves, ISPs who are also cable companies throttling it, national broadcasters lobbying to block it legally.
It also said profitable - I thought even Amazon wasn't profitable yet?
I'm just hoping that in 80 years I won't be alive to see my comment becoming horribly wrong, with people laughing at it while a processor flies them across the world.
You're right: building an automatic car is much harder. It's counterintuitive, but speed or altitude are irrelevant if the problem space is sufficiently simple. Additionally, risk doesn't scale linearly. If a plane crashes at 800km/h, all people on board will die; if a car crashes at 130km/h, you'll see a very similar result.
“Large Hadron Collider will destroy Earth.”
I don't know if the site is only temporarily down, or if it's been abandoned, but it's a shame if the latter. The idea behind Wrong Tomorrow was chiefly to hold pundits accountable for their frequently bad predictions. You can read his site announcement, where he explicitly mentions sites like Long Bets and how Wrong Tomorrow differs from them:
Back in July, Maciej told me
> It's not abandoned, but I had to take it down since a sister site on that server was getting high traffic, and needed the resources.
I began copying over predictions from Wrong Tomorrow and Long Bets to http://predictionbook.com/ and I found that a bunch of Wrong Tomorrow predictions were corrupted/unavailable, and told Maciej about them; no reply. So I think it's safe to say that Wrong Tomorrow has been pretty much abandoned.
"...The net works differently than that... and Content owners have missed (and will continue to miss) it for 3 reasons: 1) Technophobia coupled with crippling ego (too cool to look dumb they fear the pipe) 2) Misguided content protectionism (go back and watch 'The Power of Myth'... again! It's the 'story' damnit!) ..."
This is 8 years old (and proven somewhat wrong), and we're still saying it, in some form today.
Will Google be around?
POSTED BY [redacted] ON AUG 28, 02002 AT 07:03PM PDT
I think it will be more interesting to see if Google
will be around in five years? Or better yet will we
still be searching for information using search engines
and keywords?
"Service Temporarily Unavailable
The server is temporarily unable to service your request due to maintenance downtime or capacity problems. Please try again later. Apache/2.2.11 (Ubuntu) Server at www.longbets.org Port 80"
NetFlix claims to have more than 13,500 titles and more
than one million members. You order the movie on the
Internet, you just can't watch it until all of the bits
of the movie arrive. They just happen to be delivered
to your mailbox and you have to put the bits into your
computer or dvd player.
-- Posted by David B. Peterson on May 16, 02003 at 12:32AM PDTVint Cerf challenges with, "At some point, laptop or smaller devices with high quality displays and suitable access controls for intellectual property will make the sale and consumption of books, sound and movies through these devices practical." He goes on to cite the "iPOD" as an example.
“Over a ten-year period commencing on January 1, 2008, and ending on
December 31, 2017, the S & P 500 will outperform a portfolio of funds
of hedge funds, when performance is measured on a basis net of fees,
costs and expenses.”
Cached version: http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:cyGf1Tn...
Also interesting in this context: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1887215
Connecting the Internet to the television is one of its great accomplishments.