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Archive for the ‘internet’ category: Page 219

Mar 29, 2018

FCC approves SpaceX plan for 4,425-satellite broadband network

Posted by in categories: Elon Musk, internet, satellites

SpaceX has a green light from the FCC to launch a network of thousands of satellites blanketing the globe with broadband. And you won’t have too long to wait — on a cosmic scale, anyway. Part of the agreement is that SpaceX launch half of its proposed 4,425 satellites within six years.

The approval of SpaceX’s application was not seriously in doubt after last month’s memo from FCC Chairman Ajit Pai, who was excited at the prospect of the first U.S.-based company being authorized to launch a constellation like this.

“I have asked my colleagues to join me in supporting this application and moving to unleash the power of satellite constellations to provide high-speed Internet to rural Americans,” he wrote at the time. He really is pushing that “digital divide” thing. Not that Elon Musk disagrees:

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Mar 25, 2018

An Investor’s Primer: 5G, the Internet of Things, and Augmented/Virtual Reality

Posted by in categories: internet, virtual reality

Get started with these growing tech trends here.

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Mar 23, 2018

The price of the internet is the space race nobody knows about

Posted by in category: internet

Spectrum warehousing lets corporations control the price of the internet in the developing world.

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Mar 22, 2018

Lana Awad is engineering the neuro-tech that will transform humanity

Posted by in categories: biotech/medical, business, Elon Musk, engineering, internet, military, neuroscience

Perfect vision is great. But like any advantage it comes with limitations. Those with ease don’t develop the same unique senses and strengths as someone who must overcome obstacles, people like Lana Awad, a neurotech engineer at CTRL-labs in New York, who diagnosed her own degenerative eye disease with a high school science textbook as a teen in Syria and went on to teach at Harvard University.

Though they see themselves as clear leaders, visionaries with all the obvious advantages—like Elon Musk and Mark Zuckerberg, for example—can be blind in their way, lacking the context needed to guide if they don’t recognize their counterintuitive limitations. This is problematic for humanity because we’re all relying on them to create the tools that increasingly rule every aspect of our lives. The internet is just the start.

Tools that will meld mind and machine are already a reality. Neurotech is a huge business with applications being developed for gaming, the military, medicine, social media, and much more to come. Neurotech Report projected in 2016 that the $7.6 billion market could reach $12 billion by 2020. Wired magazine called 2017, “a coming-out year for the brain machine interface (BMI).”

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Mar 22, 2018

Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey says Bitcoin will be world’s ‘single currency’

Posted by in categories: bitcoin, internet, mobile phones

Speaking at London’s British Library, Dorsey said; ‘The world ultimately will have a single currency, the internet will have a single currency.

‘And I believe that it will be bBtcoin’, he said.

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Mar 17, 2018

Stephen Hawking Lived Beyond His Body

Posted by in categories: computing, internet, sustainability

For all of us, the act of being and thinking requires a network of complex support. The late physicist’s disability made it visible.

Midnight. As I was browsing the internet, I saw, like shooting stars, emails suddenly appear and disappear from the right-hand corner of my computer screen. The first from CNN announcing the death of Stephen Hawking, the second from an editor at The Atlantic asking me to write about him.

I had written about the man for 10 years—as a biographer of some sort, or an anthropologist of science to be more precise, studying the traces of Hawking’s presence. But now I felt a powerless inertia, unable to write anything. I didn’t think I would be affected by his death, but it touched me deeply. I was overwhelmed by the numerous articles that started to appear all over the world doing precisely what I had studied for so long and so carefully: recycling over and over again the same stories about him. Born 300 years after the death of Galileo Galilei, holder of Cambridge’s Lucasian Chair of Mathematics (once held by Isaac Newton), and now … died on the same day Albert Einstein was born. The life paths of history’s most iconic scientists intersected in weird ways. The puzzle seemed complete: Hawking had fully entered the pantheon of the great.

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Mar 16, 2018

Pentagon Wants Silicon Valley’s Help on A.I.

Posted by in categories: government, internet, military, robotics/AI

On Thursday, Robert O. Work, a former deputy secretary of defense, will announce that he is teaming up with the Center for a New American Security, an influential Washington think tank that specializes in national security, to create a task force of former government officials, academics and representatives from private industry. Their goal is to explore how the federal government should embrace A.I. technology and work better with big tech companies and other organizations.


Older tech companies have long had ties with military and intelligence. But employees at internet outfits like Google are wary of too much cooperation.

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Mar 12, 2018

John Oliver explains Bitcoin, Blockchain & Crypto (with precision & clarity)!

Posted by in categories: bitcoin, cryptocurrencies, economics, finance, internet

John Oliver is a crossover who bridges the art of a comedian with the reporting and perspective of a liberal political pundit. Even detractors acknowledge that Oliver addresses serious issues with unusual wit and humor.

I never thought Oliver could (or would) tackle the topic of cryptocurrency—at least not with value to the viewer. It is too geeky, and too esoteric. (It also cuts into my mission of evangelism and education). smile

He did, and he sparkles! Feel free to jump past the fluff. The Bitcoin tutorial starts at 3:40. Of course, my friend, Shechter, in Long Island New York will bust a gut over what Oliver says at 9:40. It is not only clear and concise, it is accurate and terribly funny!

Whether you are a Bitcoin newbie or a seasoned blockchain coder, this is the video you have been looking for. This one is durable.

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Mar 12, 2018

What sets cryptocurrencies apart from each other?

Posted by in categories: bitcoin, cryptocurrencies, economics, finance, internet

Today, I was asked to answer this question at Quora:

What sets each cryptocurrency apart from the others?

“Cryptocurrency” is a broad term. It refers to payment coins, of course—such as Bitcoin and Litecoin. But, because most tradeable tokens attain an asset value, the word is often used to refer to smart contract devices, such as Ethereum, a host of other blockchain based tokens, functional Internet-of-Things tokens, and even ICOs (Initial Coin Offerings). Since people treat ICOs and IOT tokens as investment instruments even if they are useless as a payment mechanism, they all fall within the realm of a cryptocurrency.

So, before addressing the question, let’s distinguish between Altcoins and ICOs. I assume the question refers to Altcoins, and not ICOs…

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Mar 11, 2018

Building a Bitcoin ATM is easy, but…

Posted by in categories: bitcoin, cryptocurrencies, economics, finance, internet

A new section about Bitcoin ATM business models
has been added. Jump to “UPDATE – July 2019

The good news is that building a Bitcoin ATM is easy and less expensive than you might expect. But, offering or operating them engulfs the assembler in a regulatory minefield! It might just be worth sticking to selling bitcoin on PayPal (visit this website for more information on that). You might also wish to rethink your business model—especially user-demand scenarios. See our 2019 update at the bottom of this article.

A photo of various Bitcoin ATMs appears at the bottom of this article. My employer, Cryptocurrency Standards Association, shared start-up space at a New York incubator with the maker of a small, wall mounted ATM, like the models shown at top left.

What is Inside a Cryptocurrency ATM?

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