I see this(others recent Gmail changes) as tactical measures that google is taking to save its image in light of steep growth of privacy friendly startups(proton mail, duckduckgo, etc.). But my take is that they aren't going to get too war with this until they really commit themselves to preserving users privacy. Unfortunately, likelyhood of this change in thinking of Google executives is very low as its an up hill battle against the revenue they earn selling users data.
So Korean would be the Guinea-pigs for testing affects of 5G on human health. I can foresee tech companies/regulators in rest of the world silencing health concerns on 5G by quoting Korea as example.
What application/use-case really require a lower than sub-second(what we already have) latency? I can only think of cloud gaming. Are we betting future on cloud on just gaming?
It's a widely held belief that response times directly influence revenue. Lots of web pages don't load in less than a second. Every bit helps. Increased performance means that you can do more work before hitting your target, meaning you can deliver more complex things.
I think its logical step on the part of Google. They invested in integrating Widevine in Chrome and they want it to be a distinguishing feature of Chrome. Why do you expect a profit seeking company to help their own competition?
I agree with possible psychological components is several health conditions. But saying that all acupuncture treatments are placebo is contradicting your first point, besides there are scientific studies that explains mechanisms behind acupunture.
What scientific studies would those be? And by what standards are they scientific?
Until a randomized controlled study can demonstrate real differences between acupuncture conducted with real needles and sham needles, I will happily call it a placebo. Ditto for acupuncture conducted per the way that acupuncturists think it should be conducted and acupuncture conducted per the way that they think it should not. Those studies have, in fact, been conducted. Acupuncture did not, in fact, do anything detectable. I am therefore on the side of calling it a placebo.
Cancer is no where close to "well identified disease". Bacterial infection is one as we understand what causes it and that's why we have been successfully able to bring down the number of bacterial infection cases by educating folks on how and what to avoid. Its not the case for cancer(or we intentionally ignoring the cause here) whose numbers are rapidly increasing every year.
We have a pretty good idea of what causes cancer, and unfortunately, time and random chance are the biggest factors. You can lower the odds by following some recommendations but unless something else kills you first (probably your heart), you will get it eventually.
Also, once it's there, we know it's there, and we know exactly how to cure it: destroy all the cancer cells. The hard part is doing it without killing you in the process, and making sure that not a single cell is left in the end.
I feel that Google brought in a shift in thinking of internet companies. In pre-google era, companies operated like an government office, once they gain marked foot hold they virtually stop enhancing their products. Google and other successful startups have taught us that a tech company is prone to fall if it doesn't innovate.
Very true, cousin worked there in early 80's, probably not best source, but was first that jumped out and common knowledge amongst those old enough and into tech at the time to remember.
Was the aspect how they engaged with government bureaucracy and managed to in effect define a work culture that is so far removed from governmental bureaucracy, that you wonder what the early days was like.
I disagree. For example AV had image search before google, not very good but not for lack of effort. If anything the lack of focus on the core web search because attention was elsewhere to improve AV in other ways was it's undoing.
I agree with your point on need for a strong middleman that can look after interests of its customer and defend against greedy sellers who are after customer's data and money. I would love to see Apple expand its role further and spearhead initiatives to safeguard interests of buyers from behemoth internet service/product providers, something that we desperately need.
I don't understand inspite of having working p2p protocol why we don't yet have an good p2p alternative to dropbox that just works without any setup hassles. Closest working thing I know of is BitSync but that too requires an mediator server.
Because Dropbox is a file storage service, not a file distribution system. The typical use case is that an uploaded large file will be downloaded a single time by someone else, at different times when computers are online.
This requires an intermediary system with very high availability and performance, which in P2P can only be implemented by duplicating data on a dozen or so systems.
Since files must be private and there is no commonality like in BitTorrent, it follows that running a P2P Dropbox would consume 5-10 times the storage and bandwidth of it's centralized counterpart for the same useful service.
I'm out of the loop for a few years now, but isn't NAT hole punching still one of the biggest problems? AFAIK, there is still no reliable solution that works without an accessible 3rd party server.
Ipfs doesn't take much setup, but it's global sharing - so you'll have to bring your own access control (eg: encrypt the files, and use à key distribution/sharing scheme of some sort).
Seems like you have yourself answered your question in your list line. One browser owned by one organization could hijack whole internet for its own interests. Just like in any other necessary item we need multiple supple options are good for creating healthy competition.
