Stephen Hawking: The afterlife is a fairy tale (but your brain might go on)

Speaking at the premiere of a documentary about his life, the famed physicist said the human brain might be able to be copied and therefore preserved. But the body? No chance.

In the next life, we will all correct the things we got wrong in this one.

We'll be better, nicer people, calmer and more knowing. Or we'll be horses in a field, grazing away our days.

Please, keep fantasizing. But it isn't going to happen. At least according to Stephen Hawking.

He knows that many fantasize about an afterlife. But he'd like to answer that with: "Oh, phooey."

Actually, what he said at a premiere of a documentary about his life was: "I think the conventional afterlife is a fairy tale for people afraid of the dark."

As the Guardian reports, Hawking said he's had to live his whole life with the threat of an early death. So he has tried not to waste time.

Hawking has never been much of a believer in God. Earlier this year, he gave a speechoutlining how everything was created without a deity.

In 2010, he explained to Diane Sawyer that science and religion were entirely irreconcilable.

He did, though, offer a tiny glint of hope in his movie speech for those who fancy that they'd like a do-over.

It's not one that will please Celine Dion. For though Hawking believes our hearts will not, in fact, go on, our brains might. At least in some form.

He said: "I think the brain is like a program in the mind, which is like a computer. So it's theoretically possible to copy the brain on to a computer and so provide a form of life after death."

But what kind of a life would that be? We'll soon be living in Googleworld. Google is rather keen to take our brains over and use them for its own devices. (Quite literally.)

So all that will be left of us to preserve is a history of our searches and our mental record of being driven around in a Prius.

 

Pebble smartwatch goes on sale at AT&T on September 27

The customizable smartwatch spreads its reach as it becomes available on the mobile carrier's Web site and in select retail stores.

The Pebble smartwatch.

 

AT&T announced that it will be hawking the Pebble smartwatch come September 27. It will be the first mobile carrier to sell the watch, which not only tells the time but also wirelessly connects to users' smartphones.
Pebble was one of the first smartwatches to debut after its massive Kickstarter campaignlast year. The watch reached its funding goal of $100,000, and then quickly surpassing it to raise a total of $10.2 million.

The $150 Bluetooth enabled smartwatch can alert users to e-mails and social-networking updates, as well as display caller ID information. The watch face is made of e-paper technology, allowing users to see what's on the display in direct sunlight. It's also water resistant.

AT&T has touted itself as the "exclusive" carrier of the smartwatch, but it's been available at Best Buy for a couple of months now. Pebble will be available on AT&T's Web site and in some of its retail stores on September 27 and will eventually roll out to more AT&T stores in October.

 

!! Clinton Global Initiative !!

 Hosted by President Bill Clinton, the 2013 Annual Meeting
will bring CGI members together under this year's theme of
“Mobilizing for Impact,” which focuses on involving the right people
and resources needed to drive effective action on global challenges.

CGI's 2013 theme, Mobilizing for Impact, explores ways that CGI members and member organizations can be more effective in leveraging individuals, partner organizations, and key resources in their commitment efforts. Mobilizing the right entities—and allowing them to reach their full potential—creates lasting and scalable success. This builds on CGI’s 2012 theme, Designing for Impact, which encouraged the design of purposeful commitments from the outset.

 

Clinton Global Initiatives - from New York

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

At $72B, Bill Gates is richest American for 20th straight year

And as usual, Forbes' latest list of the wealthiest 400 Americans includes a tech industry who's who, from Ellison to Zuckerberg to Musk.

It's hard to think of a year in which Bill Gates wasn't at the top of the Fortune 400 list, considered as the definitive annual list of America's richest.

And so it goes: the Microsoft co-founder continues to be the wealthiest American for the 20th year in a row, according to the list, thanks to his total net worth of $72 billion, up $6 billion from 2012.

In second place comes Warren Buffett with $58.5 billion, up $12.5 billion from 2012. Despite the 25 percent increase in personal wealth year over year, it's still a notable distance away from Gates, who remains a major shareholder in the company he co-founded.

Oracle chief executive Larry Ellison is worth a massive $41 billion, remaining flat year over year, and pegs in at third place. 

It's little surprise that the technology industry is rated as the second-largest sector in which to see billionaires. Almost 50 names on the list are considered in the technology industry, taking a slice of 12 percent of the overall wealth pie.

Amazon's Jeff Bezos is ranked in 12th place with $27.2 billion, and just behind him are Google co-founders Larry Page and Sergey Brin at 13th and 14th place respectively, worth a combined $49.3 billion. 

Mark Zuckerberg, who ranked in at 20th place, becomes one of the youngest billionaires in the list -- beaten only by Dustin Moskovitz, who is only a few days younger than Zuckerberg. The social networking giant's founder has an estimated wealth of $19 billion, thanks to Facebook's rebound on the stock market after an initially dismal year.

Current Microsoft chief executive Steve Ballmer ranks in at No. 21, up two places on the same list last year, who is now worth an estimated $18 billion. Ballmer recently announced his retirement from the software company, and a replacement will be sought in the next year.

Carl Icahn, who failed to acquire computer maker Dell as part of the company's privatization wranglings, is back in the top 20 list for the first time since 2008. Dell's chief executive, Michael Dell, is ranked in at 25th place with $15.9 billion. 

Meanwhile, everyone's favorite genius-turned-entrepreneur Elon Musk, who founded Tesla Motors, is now ranked in at 61st in the table, with a total personal wealth of $6.7 billion.

According to Forbes, the combined wealth of America's richest is worth about $2.02 trillion, or roughly equivalent to the total gross domestic product (GDP) of Russia.

 

Talking space droid Kirobo yaps away on ISS

"One small step for robots," says deceptively friendly Kirobo, a conversation droid designed to liven up the ISS.

"Robots take their first step for a future of hope," the first talking space robot has said in its inaugural message from the International Space Station.

Kirobo's voice sounds more like a squeak than the mighty baritone of say, Megatron, but the 13-inch droid's message heralds a new era for astro-companions.

Made in Japan, Kirobo arrived at the ISS last month after a Japanese H-IIB rocket ride. It'll orbit our planet for about a year and a half, and ISS crews will have to learn to love its nasal whine.

The message was recorded on August 21, but has only just been released. As seen in the vid below, a floating Kirobo announces the date, then says his message while taking a "step" in zero-g.

As it speaks in Japanese, there are several ways to translate the bot's words. But "surrender Earthlings or face annihilation" would be a stretch.

Kirobo is a conversational companion robot designed to process natural language, and has voice-recognition software provided by Toyota. It was developed by Tomotaka Takahashi of Robo-Garage and collaborators.

It will take verbal orders from Japanese astronaut Koichi Wakata as well as remote-control commands from Earth.

Since other astronauts will have to learn some Japanese to interact with it, Kirobo could well prove to be the most entertaining thing aboard the ISS since guitar-strumming Canadian commander Chris Hadfield.

Topsy indexes entire tweet history for search, analysis

By ingesting all of Twitter, Topsy becomes a top destination for deep dives into social data.

Topsy is backfilling its social search engine to include every public tweet ever published on Twitter, the company will announce Wednesday. The inventory addition means the company's analytics tools can now go all the way back in time to Twitter's first tweet, penned by co-founder Jack Dorsey on March 21, 2006.

Twitter inventor Jack Dorsey's first eight tweets, as surfaced by Topsy

Founded in 2007, Topsy, an index of the social Web, started out as a social search company that has since become adept at sentiment analysis and has outlasted a number of now defunct social search startups. Along the way, Topsy has become besties with Twitter, powering the information network's indices for the 2012 presidential race and the 2013 Oscars.

The release positions the company as a top destination for deep dives into social data. To drive home the point, Topsy said it now houses more than 425 billion tweets, videos, images, and blog posts, which adds up to more social data than Bing or Google.

"By adding a full historical index, now we can look even further back to the very first tweets 7 years ago, meaning our users have access to the best, most accurate view of the world's social conversation," Topsy co-founder and CTO Vipul Ved Prakash said in a statement.

The company said its expanded collection of tweets will be available to its paying customers at no additional fee. The tweet infusion also comes at no extra cost to Topsy, Jamie de Geurre, senior vice president of product and marketing, told CNET, meaning that the startup is getting more bang for its buck.

Like Gnip, Topsy is one of four partners certified as a Twitter data reseller. Topsy is the only Twitter partner certified as both a data reseller and an analytics provider, Geurre said.

Stick a candle on it: Chrome turns 5

Google's browser celebrates its 5th Chrome-iversary, now a driving force behind cutting edge Web innovation that commands around 17 percent of the global market, and Chrome's not done with you yet.

                                                      Chrome cupcakes from a Google event in 2010.

Not long after Google delivered its Chrome browser to an unsuspecting world, Microsoft's CEO Steve Ballmer downplayed the significance.

"Open source is interesting," he said at a Microsoft conference in Australia, describing WebKit, the rendering engine that Chrome was founded on.

It turned out to be a lot more than merely "interesting." Google celebrates Chrome's five-year anniversary this week, while Ballmer just announced that he will be departing the hot seat at Microsoft within a year.

"After the first couple of weeks, people were writing us off as dead," said Erik Kay, a software engineer manager who's been on the Chrome team since before the browser launched.

To his credit, Ballmer wasn't alone in failing to recognize the significance of a product that seriously shook up a somnolent Web browser market. At the time of Chrome's launch, Microsoft's much-derided but dominant Internet Explorer commanded around 72 percent of the market, with Mozilla's Firefoxholding close to 20 percent, Safari taking just under 7 percent, and Opera and other browsers making up the remainder.

Why the Web?
Before Chrome, Google had one of the most successful, most recognized Web apps around: Google Search. But except for a toolbar and paying companies like Mozilla to make Google the default search in their browsers, it didn't have a product of its own to promote the Web with.

Chrome changed that, and is now one of Google's most profitable products.

"When users have been using Chrome, it tends to drive Web usage up, so it's display ads too, not just search ads. And it's a driver of Google Apps," said Sundar Pichai, the senior vice president in charge of Chrome, in a 2012 interview. Although Pichai wouldn't confirm it at the time, it's likely that Google's Traffic Acquisition Costs, the amount of revenue it must share with partners, goes down as more people use Chrome.

Grabbing market share and headlines
While Firefox had spent years slowly chipping away at IE's dominance, few people outside of Google expected Chrome to be a viable competitor. Chrome rocketed to more than 1 percent of the market just a day after its release, according to some reports. People were excited, and ready for something new in the browser world. Google said that Chrome's focus was on speed and simplicity, and it worked.

"We realized that for us to really drive applications, you need a great platform underneath, and in some cases deep integration with the hardware underneath," said Pichai. "For us the underlying platform was the browser, and having a say there was very important."

Chrome's big selling point was its speed, but that wasn't enough to sell it initially. It shed nearly two-thirds of its initial market share before the end of 2008. Fast and simple were good selling points, but people also wanted a browser that wasn't going to crash on them, and that could be at least somewhat extensible.

A few months later, with Chrome out of beta the browser began a rise that could be charitably described as "meteoric." Five years on, its market share still increasing on the desktop but much more slowly, and the browser is now used by nearly as many people as use Firefox. On the other side of the coin, Internet Explorer now sits around 56 percent of the market. It's doubtful that Chrome's gains are fully attributable to IE's losses, but many of them probably are.

                                   Use a little-known shortcut to remove URLs from Chrome's omnibar predictions.

Beyond speed
The market share shift came about because Google was able to develop a browser that lived up to its hype. Chrome's initial emphasis on speed and simplicity rarely wavered, and was soon joined by a focus on stability and security. Google wound up challenging assumptions in all four of those areas, and in the process built a browser with phenomenal reach.

One feature that proved to be a game-changer was the six-week rapid-release cycle. Browsers had been receiving major updates annually at best before Chrome. When Chrome launched, it was on a quarterly schedule, but doubling that meant that the browser updated security and stability fixes twice as fast.

In mimicking a mobile app's seamless updates that just occurred without the user having to go download the new version, Chrome was able to accomplish several goals at once. Not only did it become less noticeable when Google shipped those pesky but important security and stability fixes, but fans got accustomed to regular updates, and Chrome's own engineers were able to focus on introducing new features like the private browsing "Incognito" mode, automatic page translation, sandboxing, Native Client, and supporting the messy and unfinished alphabet soup of next-generation Web technologies like HTML5, CSS3, newer JavaScript APIs, WebGL, and WebRTC with relative ease.

As it stands today, Chrome is a leader in pushing for future-tech Web technologies, and thanks to Chrome OS, which runs the browser as the operating system and the Web is the only platform available, Google has become even more heavily invested in developing the Web to compete with the native code that powers proprietary OSes.

The Web as platform -- no, really
While developers have said for years that the Web is the platform, Google took that literally and in 2009 transformed Chrome into an operating system. Suddenly, the Web was the only platform that the computer could run, or needed to run.

This Web-centric approach also became the first time that Google took an aggressive hand in co-developing hardware, with the prototype Chrome OS laptop Cr-48. It was a step heavily cribbed from Apple's designs, but that wouldn't matter over time as Google expanded its Chromebook partner base to include Acer, HP, and Samsung, and designing internally the high-end Pixel.

This year, Chromebooks have defied PC sales trends by grabbing 20 to 25 percent of the sub-$300 laptop market in the US.

Occasional tarnish on Chrome
One of the most remarkable things about Chrome is that Google rarely has Google made any missteps with the browser, but that doesn't mean they don't exist.

The most notorious blemish on Chrome's record was its sponsored post campaign, which actually violated at least one of Google's own search engine rules.

Marketing shenanigans aside, the browser's development has been tight. One unforced error is Google's decision to restrict Chrome to Android 4.0 Ice Cream Sandwich and above. Android's heavily-critiqued fragmentation and the lack of Chrome by default will slow the browser's mobile adoption since many Android users still have pre-Ice Cream Sandwich handsets.

Another issue that could blow up in the years to come is that new technologies developed by Chrome have rarely received a warm welcome outside of Google. Chrome's Native Client for faster and safer porting of native code to the Web is still used only by Chrome. The new Dart programming language isn't even well received by the Google faithful themselves.

Smaller mistakes include support for Google Gears, which was eventually phased out in favor of HTML5. To its credit, Gears -- for getting Web apps to work offline -- went public a year before Chrome debuted.

Google was notoriously slow to adopt Do Not Track, which is growing in importance for Web privacy advocates but hardly a major feature. It also makes some people uncomfortable that Google Search in the "Omnibox" combined search-and-URL bar sends your search result data to Google by default.

Shiny future for Chrome
Five years on, Chrome is a cross-device Google gateway, the only major browser available on Windows, Mac, Linux, Android, and iOS. The iOS version, which doesn't contain the full browser stack and so is a more limited version of the browser, nevertheless gives Google services a shot at making some inroads with Apple's baby.

Google's co-development of WebKit with Apple and others ended recently when Google decided to fork WebKit to create its own rendering engine, Blink. This could go a long way towards staving off the fear that some people had of developers coding for WebKit, instead of the Web, as they used to have to do with Internet Explorer's Trident engine.

                                                          The Chromecast streams the Web to your TV

Google also just introduced an unexpected major hit, the $35 Chromecast HDMI dongle for streaming content from the Web to your TV. This could include Web pages, as evidenced by a recent build of Chrome on its Beta channel.

But as HTML5 standards solidify and the implementation of that technology proceeds, the big thing to watch Chrome for will be its push of the Web-as-platform. Chrome Packaged Apps, which allow the Web to run as an app independently of the browser, were introduced to Chrome's developer's channel earlier this year. They follow the Native Client apps that you can get from the Chrome Web Store. And Google will be interested in flipping those "stock Android browser" users over to Chrome as it brings the mobile versions of the browser closer to parity with the desktop versions.

For many people, though, the final verdict simply comes down to: which browser do you use as your default?

"We would've been satisfied if we had introduced enough competition to make all the other browsers better," said the longtime Chrome team member Erik Kay.

Comparing Web browsers from five years ago to those of today, 2008 to 2013, it's obvious that Chrome has radically altered the Web. The next five years could well be about Chrome radically altering your desktop.