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Nice write up about why businesses need to worry about QC sooner v. later. Glad to see more spreading the word.


It’s coming sooner than you think.

By Greg Satell

Greg Satell is a popular writer, speaker and innovation advisor. Previously, he served as Senior Vice President – Strategy & Innovation at Moxie Interactive, a division of Publicis Groupe, one of the world’s leading marketing services organizations as well as Co-CEO of KP Media, a leading publisher of magazines and websites in Ukraine, including the newsmagazine Korrespondent and the web portal, Bigmir.

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At Quora, I occasionally role play, “Ask the expert” under the pen name, Ellery. Today, I was asked “Is it too late to get into Bitcoin and the Blockchain”.

A few other Bitcoin enthusiasts interpreted the question to mean “Is it too late to invest in Bitcoin”. But, I took to to mean “Is it too late to develop the next big application—or create a successful startup?”. This is my answer. [co-published at Quora]…


The question is a lot like asking if it is too late to get into the television craze—back in the early 1930s. My dad played a small role in this saga. He was an apprentice to Vladamir Zworykin, inventor of the cathode ray tube oscilloscope. (From 1940 until the early 2000s, televisions and computer monitors were based on the oscilloscope). So—for me—there is fun in this very accurate analogy…

John Logie Baird demonstrated his crude mechanical Televisor in 1926. For the next 8 years, hobbyist TV sets were mechanical. Viewers peeked through slots on a spinning cylinder or at an image created from edge-lit spinning platters. The legendary Howdy Doody, Lucille Ball and Ed Sullivan were still decades away.

But the Televisor was not quite a TV. Like the oscilloscope and the zoetrope, it was a technology precursor. Filo T. Farnsworth is the Satoshi Nakamoto of television. He is credited with inventing TV [photo below]. Yet, he did not demonstrate the modern ‘cathode ray’ television until 1934. The first broadcast by NBC was in July 1936, ten years years after the original Baird invention. (Compare this to Bitcoin and the blockchain, which are only 7 years old).

Most early TV set brands died during the first 10 years of production: Who remembers Dumont, Andrea and Cossor? No one! These brands are just a footnote to history! Bear in mind that this was all before anyone had heard of Lucille Ball, The Tonight Show or the Honeymooners. In the late 1950s, Rod Serling formed Cayuga Productions to film the Twilight Zone in New York. Hollywood had few studios for dramatic television production, and the west coast lacked an infrastructure for weekly episode distribution.

Filo T. Farnsworth demonstrates an advanced television receiver

Through the 1950s (25 years after TV was demonstrated), there was no DVR, DVD or even video tape. Viewers at home watched live broadcasts at the same time as the studio audience.

The short answer to your question: No. Absolutely not! It’s not too late to get into Bitcoin and the blockchain. Not too late, at all. That ship is just pulling into the dock and seats are mostly empty. The big beneficiaries of blockchain technology (it’s application, consulting, investing or savings) have not yet formed their first ventures. In fact, many of the big players of tomorrow have not yet been born.

Philip Raymond is a Lifeboat columnist and contributor to Quora. He is also co-chair of Cryptocurrency Standards Association and editor at A Wild Duck.

New report: rise of the machines: the dyn attack was just A practice run.

As the adversarial threat landscape continues to hyper-evolve, America’s treasure troves of public and private data, IP, and critical infrastructure continues to be pilfered, annihilated, and disrupted. The Mirai IoT botnet has inspired a renaissance in adversarial interest in DDoS botnet innovation based on the lack of fundamental security-by-design in the Internet and in IoT devices, and based on the lack of basic cybersecurity and cyber-hygiene best practices by Internet users.

http://icitech.org/icit-publication-the-rise-of-the-machines…ctice-run/

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If you want to use one of today’s major VR headsets, whether the Oculus Rift, the HTC Vive, or the PS VR, you have to accept the fact that there will be an illusion-shattering cable that tethers you to the small supercomputer that’s powering your virtual world.

But researchers from MIT’s Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory (CSAIL) may have a solution in MoVr, a wireless virtual reality system. Instead of using Wi-Fi or Bluetooth to transmit data, the research team’s MoVR system uses high-frequency millimeter wave radio to stream data from a computer to a headset wirelessly at dramatically faster speeds than traditional technology.

There have been a variety of approaches to solving this problem already. Smartphone-based headsets such as Google’s Daydream View and Samsung’s Gear VR allow for untethered VR by simply offloading the computational work directly to a phone inside the headset. Or the entire idea of VR backpacks, which allow for a more mobile VR experience by building a computer that’s more easily carried. But there are still a lot of limitations to either of these solutions.

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Shift 2: Open-source code, Node, and frameworks

Once widely considered a toy language, Node has quickly taken over the web and fostered an incredible open-source community. For those who are unfamiliar, Node is a way for JavaScript to run on a server. What’s so incredible about Node is that the same developers who were only writing client-side code (front-end web development) can now write backend code without switching languages.

In addition, there is an incredible community that rallies around and thrives off of open-source contributions. The infrastructure and open-source packages are very powerful, allowing developers to not just solve their own problems, but also to build in a way that solves problems for the entire community. Building a software product with Node today is like playing with Lego blocks; you spend most of your time simply connecting them.

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SpaceX, the aerospace company founded by the Mars-hungry tech entrepreneur Elon Musk, just made a big move to enshroud the planet in high-speed internet coverage.

On November 15, the company filed a lengthy application with the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) to launch 4,425 satellites. (We first heard about the filing through the r/SpaceX community on Reddit.) That is a hell of a lot of satellites.

According to a database compiled by the Union of Concerned Scientists, there are 1,419 active satellites currently orbiting Earth.

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We’re only starting in this space.


Synthetic Biology (SynBio) includes a large field of applications. Within this area biochemists combine engineering concepts and techniques with biology to design new genes that produce a specific protein. When this protein is an enzyme, bacteria and yeast in which such a gene is implanted can produce specific chemicals through a fermentation process. A large and growing number of businesses is active in this field. This became apparent once again at the EFIB-conference in Glasgow, last October. The workshop was chaired by John Cumbers, founder of the American SynBioBeta, an internet-site dedicated to sharing information and news on synthetic biology.

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DAILY VIDEO: Microsoft Starts Quantum Computer Development Program; Cerber Ransomware Expands Database Encryption Attacks; IBM Debuts Watson Internet of Things Services Practice; and there’s more.

Today’s topics include Microsoft’s plan to build a Quantum computer, Trend Micro’s find that the Cerber malware is seeking out database files to encrypt and hold for ransom, IBM’s new Watson internet of things services for the automotive, electronics and insurance industries, and the release of the Microsoft Office Online Server update.

Microsoft is on a mission to build a quantum computer, and the company has appointed Todd Holmdahl to manage the project. Holmdahl is the corporate vice president of Microsoft Quantum, a unit dedicated to turning the company’s quantum computing research into real-world products.

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