SUGGESTED BOOK: Abundance: The Future Is Better Than You Think by Peter H. Diamandis and Steven Kotler ISBN-13: 978–1451614213
QUOTATION: “…Again, yesterday holds tomorrow hostage .… Memory is past. It is finite. Vision is future. It is infinite. Vision is greater than history…”
SUGGESTED BOOK: Abundance: The Future Is Better Than You Think by Peter H. Diamandis and Steven Kotler. ISBN-13: 978–1451614213 Regards,
Readers who visit the Chicago Sun-Times today will notice something they aren’t likely to have seen before: a bitcoin paywall separating them from their content.
The Chicago Sun-Times is the ninth-largest newspaper in the United States, and the first major US publication to trial a bitcoin paywall.
Instead of paying for a subscription, as patrons of the The Wall Street Journal or the Financial Times do, Chicago Sun-Times readers who visit the site on 1st February will be asked to donate bitcoin payments to the Taproot Foundation, or tweet about the nonprofit, in order to read articles.
QUOTATION: “…Digital code is what drives rapid speed growth today. It allows mergers like AOL Time Warner … It drives the Internet, TV, music, finance, IT, news coverage, research, manufacturing. A few countries and companies understood the change. That is how poor countries like Finland, Singapore, and Taiwan got so wealthy … So quickly … But a lot of folks just did not learn to read and write a new language … And even though they produced more and more goods, particularly commodities … And even though they restructured companies and governments … Cut budgets, raised taxes, built large factories and buildings … They got a lot poorer. (In 1938 the richest country per person in Asia was … the Philippines. In 1954, according to the World Bank, the most promising Asian economy was … Burma. Both remain commodity economies … Both are sidelined from the digital revolution … And you probably would not like to live in either country). Your world changed when you went ‘On Line.’ One day you used a fax or e-mail … And it soon became hard to conceive of living with only snail mail. If you understood this change early … And invested or worked in some of the companies driving the digital revolution … You are probably quite well off … (as a country and/or as an individual). If you came late, as a speculator, without understanding what a digital language does, or does not do … You probably lost a lot of money during the year 2000. Your world … and your language … are about to change again. The two nucleotide base pairs that code all life …A-T, C-G … Have already led some of the world’s largest companies … Monsanto … DuPont … Novartis … IBM … Hoechst … Compaq … GlaxoSmithKline … To declare that their future lies in life science. They have abandoned, sold, spun off core business divisions … And launched themselves into selling completely new products … Which is why so many chemical, seed, cosmetic, food, pharmaceutical companies … Are partnering, Merging, Growing. Some life-science companies will crash spectacularly … Others will get larger than Microsoft and Cisco … (Companies that are already larger than the economies of most of the world’s countries.). The world’s mega-mergers are going to be driven by digital and genetic code. Consider what is about to happen to medicine. You currently spend about nine times as much for doctors and medical interventions … As you do on medicines and prevention. In the measure that we understand how viruses, bacteria, and our bodies are programmed … And how they can be reprogrammed … Treatment will shift from emergency interventions … Toward deliberate and personalized prevention … (Just as dentistry did.). And we may end up spending just as much on pharmaceuticals as we do on doctors. These medicines do not have to be pills or injections … They could be a part of the food you eat every day, your soap or cosmetics … Perhaps you will inhale them or simply put various patches on your skin. (This is why Procter & Gamble is thinking of merging with a pharmaceutical company, why L’Oreal is hiring molecular biologists, and why Campbell’s is selling soups designed for hospital patients with specific diseases.)…”
RECOMMENDED BOOK: Revolutionary Wealth: How it will be created and how it will change our lives by Alvin Toffler and Heidi Toffler ISBN-13: 978–0385522076
Do you want to fly on a suborbital space plane? What about a rocket launch all they way into orbit? A new commercial spaceflight training company wants to help you develop the right stuff for flying to space. Waypoint 2 Space — a Houston-based company aimed at helping commercial astronauts train for spaceflight — just received Federal Aviation Administration safety approval for their plan to train would-be astronauts. Officials with the company hope to start training commercial spaceflyers for private trips to space in spring of this year. People holding tickets aboard a private spacecraft or space fans interested in learning how to fly to space are eligible to purchase a training package.
DAILY QUOTE: By Michael Anissimov utters, “…One of the biggest flaws in the common conception of the future is that the future is something that happens to us, not something we create…”
RECOMMENDED BOOK:
Radical Evolution: The Promise and Peril of Enhancing Our Minds, Our Bodies — and What It Means to Be Human by Joel Garreau ISBN-13: 978–0767915038
Google (NASDAQ:GOOG) confirmed that it purchased DeepMind on Monday. The Mountain View, Calif.-based company reportedly paid upwards of $500 million for the artificial intelligence (AI) firm.
So what is Google getting for its half a billion? A company that’s very good at making computers that think and act as humans do. DeepMind has not yet developed any commercial products. Its main asset appears to be its personnel, including dozens of experts in machine learning, a branch of AI that attempts to teach computers to think like humans. It’s best-known project was a computer system it taught to master Atari video games.
It seemed like it was only a matter of time before e-commerce giant eBay and its payment platform PayPal addressed the sale and use of Bitcoin on its sites. And, despite concern from government regulators, it appears the company believes in virtual currencies — so much so, that it will soon start allowing their sale on its UK site.
Last week, PayPal President David Marcus tweeted “To clarify: we have no policies against using PayPal to sell Bitcoin mining rigs. We don’t support any currency txn whether fiat or BTC… for a host of regulatory issues. But we treat BTC and any FX txn the same way. We’re believers in BTC though.”
The Sacramento Kings NBA teamjust became the first major professional sports franchise to accept Bitcoin, according to an announcement from payment processor BitPay.
Starting Thursday, BitPay spokeswoman Jan Jahosky said Kings fans can use bitcoins to buy merchandise at the team shop — located at the Sleep Train Arena.
Customers will be able to shop online for tickets and merchandise with bitcoins by March 1.
Box Brands has launched the first-ever burrito-making robots at two locations on Santa Monica Boulevard — inside Mobile and 76 gas stations.
The orange Burritobox offers 6 types of burrito, including a breakfast burrito, and several sauces. The customer selects the burrito desired and which sauces from a touch-screen menu, then swipes a credit card. One minute later, the machine dispenses a hot “hand”-rolled burrito.
