I've been too early a few times. I was working on secure operating systems in the late 1970s. Proof of correctness in the early 1980s. My major work on the Internet was in the early 1980s. I was working on robotics in the 1980s, and legged robots in the 1990s. I was working on automatic driving in 2003-2005. I figured out how to stop search spam in the 2000s. I have issued patents and published papers on most of this. None of this generated much money.

(Fortunately I also did one of Autodesk's early products, and got pre-IPO stock because they couldn't afford to pay me. I also did the first ragdoll physics engine that worked, and made money off of that.)

In some ways, it's harder now, because there are so many people doing stuff in computing. In the 1980s, the number of people who knew how to make a big program work was quite small. Now everybody can do that. The few people who knew anything about AI had been to Stanford, MIT, or CMU. Now everybody serious takes machine learning class, and you can download good code for it.

There's plenty of opportunity to make money out there, but much of what people are working on is, well, pretty banal. "The best minds of my generation are thinking about how to make people click on ads. This sucks." - Jeffery Hammerbacher, Facebook.

Here's an opportunity to think about. Replace Facebook, and all the various messaging services and streaming video services, with a pay service that costs about $1 a month, with no ads. Computing has become so cheap that you can now undercut "free with ads" on price. Think of a social network as a package like Wordpress - host it anywhere, it talks to everybody else, and it just works. The authentication and spam problems are tough - solve them. There have been a few attempts at federated social networks, such as Diaspora, but the people behind them have no clue how to make them usable or popular. "Ello" is making progress on popularity, but their UI sucks and it doesn't do much. Fix all that.

If you want to do socially useful hardware, look into handheld medical devices. The medical industry tends toward big, heavy equipment designed by doctors. Dean Kamen has made a lot of money downsizing some rather clunky medical devices. Also, the UIs of systems used by doctors for medical records are awful. Doctors used to dictate medical notes. Now they have to type them, worst case on touchscreens. Make that work with voice recognition that understands not only medical terminology, but has access to the patient record for context.

Another possible area - the paperless police car. Cops hate doing paperwork. There's also a movement to make cops carry cameras. Come up with a system which takes the cop's video and audio, and fills in all the info a cop needs to book somebody. Tie the collected video and audio to that for later review if necessary. It would both help to keep cops honest and let them focus on doing their job instead of their paperwork.

So there are a few technically challenging things to do. Quit trying to find the next "Yo". That's like hoping to win the lottery.

Just to put this paper in an appropriate historical context, I wrote it back when I was trying to convince NASA that flying Lisp on a spacecraft would not be a completely insane thing to do. The Powers That Be had already mostly accepted that it would be OK to fly Java, but they thought Lisp was too big and slow. This study and paper were designed specifically to address those concerns.

This is the hardcore version of the more common "Google for help on something and get your own blog post/Stack Overflow answer coming up"! :-)

Lead paint and lead gasoline are shocking examples of corporate misbehavior.

Interior lead paint was banned in many European countries by the 1920s because of the obvious health risks. But in the US the lead manufactures responded to health concerns with "Dutch Boy" lead paint, deliberately marketed to appear safe enough for a child to use. They actually had advertising campaigns promoting lead paint for childrens' toys, cribs, and bedrooms. Household lead paint not banned in the US until 1978, and it now a major concern and cost for people living in older homes.

The health risks of leaded gasoline were also obvious to many, and ethanol was known as a safe alternative anti-knock additive in the 1920s. General Motors and Alfred P. Sloan tried to hide the risks of lead paint via front groups and manipulation of regulatory agencies.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TLoixnECec0 Video about Dutch Boy paint advertising to children.

http://www.theatlantic.com/health/archive/2013/04/why-it-too... David Rosner is the Ronald H. Lauterstein Professor of Sociomedical Sciences and a professor of history at Columbia University. Gerald Markowitz is a Distinguished Professor of History at John Jay College and CUNY Graduate Center. Their most recent book is Lead Wars: The Politics of Science and the Fate of Americaís Children.

http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2013/jan/07/violent... Yes, lead poisoning could really be a cause of violent crime, by George Monbiot

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2013/08/03/lead-paint-lawsuit-... Lead Paint Makers Could Face The Same Fate As Big Tobacco

http://www.thenation.com/article/secret-history-lead The Secret History of Lead

First you have to void your warranty to properly dual boot now this? They want to drop support for a file format so they can make renaming drives easier?

I'm actually in the market for a new laptop/netbook. I was very close to purchasing a ChromeOS device as I work primarily on a desktop and have a laptop for travel but its pretty old, heavy and battery unfriendly. Then I found out I had to void the warranty to properly dual boot.

Seems like a giant fuck you to the Linux community given how much Google has benefited from Linux(ChromeOS even runs on the Linux kernel) and they put out laptops that are more locked down than your average windows laptops? Pretty disappointing.

I am assuming the write protect screws are there at the behest of Google.

ChromiumOS developers can't even implement a script to relabel EXT volumes? No wonder their kernel tree is such a mess, they must barely know what they're doing.

Also, I'd say you can safely assume that those 1-2% of users that use EXT volumes externally(which by the way, is a LOT of people, several million at least) are developers, and this will surely piss them off.

We have half of the solution required for this - there exists a per-feature based permission model that the applications are already using.

The second half is simple but requires a change on the device side - if an application needs feature X, Y and Z, then the choices shouldn't be limited to grant access or not install the application, but there should be a third choice per each feature called "fake that access being granted".

If an app claims to need access to my SMS messages, then there are two reasonable options:

1. I want the app to read my SMS, as it does something that I want with them; so I enable that feature.

2. I don't want the app to read my SMS for whatever arbitrary reason that doesn't matter and doesn't need to be justified to anyone. If the app cooperates with the refusal, then it stops at that, but if the app wants to read my SMS against my will (and, say, tests this ability to enable some unrelated feature) then that's hostile behavior and all of my hardware and software should assist me in thwarting that hostile behavior - e.g. by simulating fake data to the app, by falsely claiming to have sent SMS / made a call, etc.

The other options (including the current scenario where my device cooperates with the app developer against me) aren't reasonable and should be eliminated.

More people should understand that hospitals are messy. Really messy. From wiping vomit to feces to rolling over patients to changing chucks to wiping down monitor cables to handling bottles of saline that you may inadvertently leave out in the open for others to touch to not disposing spare gauze that may be contaminated to forgetting to wipe down your stethoscope to tearing your gown off as you rush to see another patient, etc etc etc. There are any number of people going in and out of a patient's room, performing a wide array of tasks, handling an even wider array of objects. Add to that the often hurried nature of hospitals and you get an environment prone to breaches of protocol.

I say this not to incite panic, but to provide insight that many might not have. It is more likely that during the thousands of interactions that this patient saw, the messiness led to a breach, instead of the virus infecting via a vector we've not yet realized.