Gongol.com Archives: May 2014
Alibaba wants to go public in the US -- but fakes are an unsettled problem
It's one thing to follow a competitor's lead and to try to improve upon what's already out in the market. It's quite another to try to rip off the look and feel of another good -- the trade dress, as it were -- and try to pass off a copycat item as if it were the original. It is that shameless ripping off of the originals that makes so much of the ongoing Chinese intellectual-property theft into such a terrible thing.
The United States is falling far behind in digital-warfare capabilities
Among other things, the Department of Defense buys things on such a slow timescale that they're only able to purchase technology that's more than a generation out of date
Google shows off its progress with the self-driving car
This is exactly the kind of thing that Google should be building its internal systems to promote -- applications for technology that fall well outside the company's standard lines of business (like search engines), but that could stand a massive dose of new computing power and programmatic thinking. The value of a truly self-piloted automobile would be enormous to society -- freeing up millions of person-hours every day for more useful purposes, preventing thousands of deaths and injuries annually, and providing means of independence to people who can't currently get from place to place on their own.
Your tax dollars at work
A perfect walk through the history of local-television news openings
(Video) Through the lens of WBZ-TV in Boston
