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Sounds good!

well of course money is trust, and even more loans and credit and even more stock and bond markets. It all represents trust and expectations. However since the first banks 500 years ago and the first loans etc. etc., and as well the fact that bonds and currencies bring down whole countries (Greece lately), and are mainly controlled by large financial centres and (central) banks, banks have always been on the winning side no matter what and that isn't going to change easily. So if you are talking about these new currencies it would be a new era, not just a new currency. So should Greece convert its debt to bitcoins ;P ?

well, from 1936 to 1993 the central bank of france was owned by the state and was supposed to serve the general interest...

no much news in regard to the january's talk of Dordain althought just a thought : what if ESA tries to make money - as CNES does - rather than just spending it ?

really bad interview in my view ... btw: how is CNES making money and how much?

CNES is known to be a semi-autonomous agency in the sense that it can auto-finance parts of its activities. Besides the money coming from the state, money comes from the participation of CNES in private companies (e.g. Arianespace) and its own activities (e.g. SPOT among others...). It is about 400M€ per year (almost a class-M mission in Cosmic Vision). For the figures (in French): http://www.cnes.fr/automne_modules_files/standard/public/p4354_c050f7963b54a839a843723401bfddf2budget.pdf

When you finally get bored asking "what is love?", ask: "what is money?" There's of course a bit of propaganda, but one thing seems to be true - one day, the system *will* collapse.

That is about € 14e9 - enough to pay more than a million YGTs for half a year. Could we use maybe just half a million YGTs for half a year to build a similar platform and keep the remaining € 7e9 for ourselves? Keep in mind that WhatsApp only has 45 employees (according to AllThingsD: http://goo.gl/NtJcSj ). So we would have an advantage > 10000:1. On the other hand does this mean that every employee at WhatsApp gets enough money now to survive comfortably for ~5000 years or will the inevitable social inequality strike and most people get next to nothing while a few get money to live comfortably for ~1000000 years? Also: Does Facebook think about these numbers before they pay them? Or is it just a case of "That looks tasty - lets have it"? Also (2): As far as I can see all these internet companies (Google, Facebook, Yahoo, WhatsApp, Twitter...) seem to make most of their income from advertising. For all these companies together that must be a lot of advertising money (turns out that in 2013 the world spent about $ 500 billion on advertising: http://goo.gl/vYog15 ). For that money you could of course have 20 million YGTs roaming the Earth and advertising stuff door-to-door... ... ...

The whole valuation of those internet companies is a bit scary. Things like the Facebook and Twitter ipo numbers seem just ridiculous.

Facebook is not really so much buying into a potential good business deal as much as it's buying out risky competition. Popular trends need to be killed fast before they take off the ground too much. Also the amount of personal data that WhatsApp is amassing is staggering. I have never seen an app requesting so many phone rights in my life.

A critical view on Prof. Markram's Blue Brain project (in German).

As far as I know it's sort of like "Let's construct an enormous dynamical system and see what happens"... i.e. a waste of taxpayer's money... Able to heal Alzheimer... Yeah... Actually I was on the conference the author is mentioning (FET 2011) and I have seen the presentations of all 6 flagship proposals. Following that I had a discussion with one of my colleagues about the existence of limits of the amount of bullshit politicians are willing to buy from scientists. Will there be a point at which politicians, despite their total ignorance, will realise that scientists simply don't deliver anything they promise? How long will we (scientists) be stuck in the viscous circle of have-to-promise-more-than-predecessors in order to get money? Will we face a situation when we'll be forced to revert to promises which are realistic? To be honest none of the 6 presentations convinced me of their scientific merit (apart from the one on graphene where I have absolutely no expertise to tell). Apparently a huge amount of money is about to be wasted.

It's not just "Let's construct an enormous dynamical system and see what happens", it's worse! Also the simulation of the cosmological evolution is/was a little bit of this type, still the results are very interesting and useful. Why? Neither the whole cosmos nor the human brain at the level of single neurons can be modelled on a computer, that would last aeons on a "yet-to-be-invented-extra-super-computer". Thus one has to make assumptions and simplifications. In cosmology we have working theories of gravitation, thermodynamics, electrodynamics etc. at hand; starting from these theories we can make reasonable assumptions and (more or less) justified simplifications. The result is valuable since it provides insight into a complex system under given, explicit and understood assumptions. Nothing similar seems to exist in neuroscience. There is no theory of the human brain and apparently nobody has the slightest idea which simplifications can be made without harm. Of course, Mr. Markram remains completely unaffected of ''details'' like this. Finally, Marek, money is not wasted, we ''build networks of excellence'' and ''select the brightest of the brightest'' to make them study and work at our ''elite institutions'' :-). I lively remember the stage of one of these "bestofthebest" from Ivy League at the ACT...

does he also have to pay property tax?

so how does that state get his money from this type of economy? where is the VAT in there?

Last time I checked the "state" was still loosing money. But their main income is the sale of resources. Mostly new land, but I believe at some point they wanted to sell their initial planet too.

One of the authors of the STL (C++'s Standard Template Library) explains generic programming and slams Java.

"I'd rather not even *think* about developing a web application/webservice/web-whatever in standard C++... is it actually possible?? Perhaps with some weird Microsoft solutions... I bet your bank online services are written in Java. Certainly not in PHP+MySQL :)" Doing in C++ would be awesomely crazy, I agree :) But as I see it there are lots of huge websites that operate on PHP, see for instance Facebook. For the banks and the enterprise market, as a general rule I tend to take with a grain of salt whatever spin comes out from them; in the end behind every corporate IT decision there is a little smurf just trying to survive and have the back covered :) As they used to say in the old times, "No one ever got fired for buying IBM". "Industry has chosen Java not because of industrial-corporate marketing bullshit, but because of economics... it enables you develop robustly, reliably, error-prone, modular, well integrated etc... software. And the costs? Well, using java technologies you can set-up enterprise-quality web application servers, get a fully featured development environment (which is better than ANY C/C++/whatever development environment I've EVER seen) at the cost of exactly 0 (zero!) USD/GBP/EUR... Since many years now, the central issue in software development is not implementing algorithms, it's building applications. And that's where Java outperforms many other technologies." Apart from the IDE considerations (on which I cannot comment, since I'm not a IDE user myself), I do not see how Java beats the competition in this regard (again, Python and the huge software ecosystem surrounding it). My impression is that Java's success is mostly due to Sun pushing it like there is no tomorrow and bundling it with their hardware business.

OK, I think there is a bit of everything, wrong and right, but you have to acknowledge that Python is not always the simplest. For info, Facebook uses Java (if you upload picture for instance), and PHP is very limited. So definitely, in company, engineers like you and me select the language, it is not a marketing or political thing. And in the case of fb, they come up with the conclusion that PHP, and Java don't do everything but complement each other. As you say Python as many things around, but it might be too much for simple applications. Otherwise, I would seriously be interested by a study of how to implement a Python-like system on-board spacecrafts and what are the advantages over mixing C, Ada and Java.

what about ESA?

I said "more" because we already gave them money in the form of Sophia and Atlas :) If we want to be consistent in promoting "open" efforts (open innovation, open source, open governance, etc.) we should avoid Apple like the plague. They are far far worse than Microsoft in terms of closedness, secrecy, shady market practices and vendor lock-in. Just google a bit and you will find lots of example of their behaviour.

cant' really argue about the Apple practices, although I ve read some things. I think the NASA app is more like a news feed and nothing more. But that online crowdsourcing game we had in mind, now that would be cool in a mobile version - new mobiles also have accelerometers nowadays

Artes-20 embracing crowdsourcing and putting substantial money into it - at least its first step

Easy money.....

So an idea for a "product that could benefit society, protect our planet, or create jobs" is worth $20,000? And then they take the idea and earn billions? Well...

breakthroughs vs. accelerated deployment in climate change mitigation technologies.

indeed. puts me in mind of the often reinvented private ACT idea. actually there's a bunch of interesting looking articles on his website. http://www.khoslaventures.com/khosla/papers.html . No sps in the solar one as far as i can tell :) found this bit intriguing too in that, albeit presumably out of context, it doesn't make sense ""The solution to our energy problems is almost the exact opposite of what Khosla says," declares Joseph Romm, who is the editor of Climate Progress, an influential climate blog, and a senior fellow at the Centre for American Progress Action Fund, a think-tank. "Technology breakthroughs are unlikely to be the answer. Accelerated deployment of existing technologies will get you down the cost curve much more rapidly than a breakthrough."" found this seemingly not very well considered piece (to be fair a blog post) by the guy http://climateprogress.org/2010/07/02/is-anyone-more-incoherent-than-vinod-khosla/ . maybe he's written some more convincing stuff in this vein somewhere.

"Mr Khosla (...) is investing over $1 billion of his clients' money in black swans" Well, with his own money his approach might be a little different :-)

can we contribute in any way to this - or alternatively benefit from this research already now?

that bad! wow ....

You know me, I'm the bullshitter... You remember Kurzweil and his Singularity-nonsense. In a way this was very similar. Though I think Kurzweil and Markram are very different characters (The Singularity essentially is a religion, I can't see anything like that in Markram's claims) they seem to share an important point: they are both complete nerds that apparently never spent a single thought on the limits of science (in its English meaning) in general nor of their particular research field in specific. One may find this excusable, I don't. But even then, they make claims that the nerdest nerd must know that they are completely unrealistic and thus I just have to assume that they claim their nonsense on purpose. The reason in Markram's case clearly seems to be money. But all this does not mean that these nerds cannot produce valuable results.

How Google finally makes its money, we were having this discussion some time ago

I know, it is not a new concept, but apparently the guys from BMW put some money into it to make is series-proof. Could we - in principle - put something like that onto a spacecraft to solve thermal and energy problems at the same time?

José - I think that we might have a look and find out where are the exactly investing and how they spend the money ....

Summary of the critics: the project cannot but fail, its a waste of money that will dry funds for serious research and will thus create an enormous disappointment in the public opinion that is, ultimately, the real funder of the project

Told you from the very beginning...

related conspiracy: politicians know that P=NP but they do not let us know the proof

did you put money on this? I would love to see it :)

winners of the Future and Emerging Technologies (FET) Flagship competition (informally) announced

Hopefully the money wasted on the brain project will be offset by the gains on graphene... When I heard the proposals presentations on fet11 conference back in 2011, the graphene project was my bet.. Although its motivations were mostly political ("everyone else is working on graphene so if Europe won't do something, we'll soon be far behind"), in contrast to other projects it appeared to have well defined tangible objectives and gave hope of actually delivering something.

From Garretson ... À bit tendentious but nice read ...

actually its nice - perhaps without true patriotic/military backup lots of great things will never happen!

The more money they spend on this the less they spend on destruction and killing :-) so yes, most welcome ...