We’ve known for years that most Americans support the National Security Agency’s mass surveillance apparatus. Poll after poll shows that about roughly 53 percent of Americans think the government should prioritize investigating terrorism over privacy.
For decades, top colleges got by on reputation alone, because there wasn’t good data on how their graduates actually fared in the job market. Many just assumed Harvard graduates were the top contenders, because the Ivy League school was so selective.
In just a few years, a handful of Silicon Valley ridesharing companies have created a new market that’s worth multiple times the entire U.S. Taxi industry.
As the bank accounts of Silicon Valley swell, so too does their appetite for lobbying the government. According to the Center for Responsive Politics, over the last 25 years, lobbying has spiked almost 2,000%, from 800K in 1990 to over 60M in 2012.
Apple unveiled its highly anticipated health-tracking Watch today, along with a breakthrough initiative to vastly increase the research resources of the global medical community. With a new app, ResearchKit, millions of Apple users can now offer crucial data on their daily habits to approved medical researchers.
If history is any indication, we could be finally reading Hillary Clinton’s secretive personal emails sometime after the 2016 election. The law responsible for permitting the public to demand access to undisclosed information, the Freedom of Information Act, is a notorious bureaucratic snail.
Some of us dream about what the future will be like. Others have billions of dollars at their disposal to make it a reality. When one of these few ultra-rich technology folks opines about the future, my ears perk up.
Forbes released it’s annual list of the world’s billionaires and it shows that America is increasingly becoming a nation of self-made elite. Since Forbes started keeping track in 1984, the number of completely self-made billionaires (who grew from little wealth)
Netflix usually takes up about 30% of all Internet bandwidth in the U.S. Yes, a single Internet company is responsible for nearly a 1/3rd of all the Internet’s resources. So, the total resources available to all Internet users is heavily dependent on Netflix, alone.
