- Musk Says Tesla Will Pay Off Its Loans in Half the Time
Tesla’s CEO claims the company is a success, and partially credits the DOE loan program.
Speaking alongside Steven Chu at the Advanced Research Projects Agency for Energy’s annual summit outside of Washington, D.C., Elon Musk, the CEO of Tesla Motors, confidently declared that his company, which received a $465 million loan from the U.S. Department of Energy, is a success story, and said the company would repay the loan in half the time it is required to. The loan is due by the end of the decade.
- An Autopsy of a Dead Social Network
Following the collapse of the social network Friendster, computer scientists have carried out a digital autopsy to find out what went wrong
- Stanford Researchers Build Complex Circuits Made of Carbon Nanotubes
A simple sensor circuit made of hard-to-handle but promising carbon nanotubes is a first step in making the materials practical for computing.
Researchers at Stanford University have built one of the most complex circuits from carbon nanotubes yet. They showed off a simple hand-shaking robot with a sensor-interface circuit last week at the International Solid-State Circuits Conference in San Francisco.
- Facebook Nudges Users to Catalog the Real World
Taking aim at Google, the largest social network wants a database describing as many things as possible.
More than one billion people visit Facebook each month, mostly to see photos and messages posted by friends. Facebook hopes to encourage some of them to do a little work for it while they’re there. By asking people to contribute data—from business locations to book titles—and to check one another’s work, Facebook is building a rich stock of knowledge that could make its software smarter and boost the usefulness of its search engine.
- The “Six Strikes” Copyright Alert System Is Toothless
What will stem piracy?
When I was a wee college sophomore, about a decade ago, my Intro to Photography professor was made an example of. The Recording Industry Association of America filed a federal lawsuit against him and 260 others who it claimed were “major offenders” and had illegally downloaded 1,000 copyrighted music files or more. I wasn’t very Napster or Torrent inclined already (and am generally a fairly risk-averse person), but the move scared me off piracy for good. More to the point, as a working writer, I’m come to feel strongly about the need to be paid for what one creates.
- House of Cards and Our Future of Algorithmic Programming
Netflix knew why its original TV series would be a hit—based on data about the viewing habits of its 33 million users.
Plenty is being made about how Netflix made its first original TV series, House of Cards, available all at once online, and what that portends for the future of television consumption. But this is nothing new. People now expect to fit entertainment into their own schedules. It seems inevitable that on-demand entertainment will eventually eclipse weekly scheduled broadcasts.
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