Details at http://www.vta.org/xbus Gilroy to Lockheed Light Rail in just over an hour, with wifi http://www.vta.org/schedules/SC_121.html There is zero reason to not have self-driving, 100% solar-powered, electric-engine buses running in synchronized pods well before 2030. Only reason forecast is not for 2020 is widespread institutional mailaise and incumbent energy interests working to slow progress. This too is evidence for how industrial era capitalism continues to hobble Accelerating Sustainability.

Michael Silverton voted up an answer.Nagib Tharani, Entrepreneur. Foodie. Forro (Brazil) Addict. ... As Stephen Elop elegantly put it, Symbian won't cut it. It is far easier and far less costly to "jump" than to try and evolve it. Having two or three different OS's for different segments is also a messy situation, and frankly they don't have the resources. They need to choose a single OS and run with it.With that in mind, the likely candidates are Windows 7 Mobile, Android and HP/Palm. The Meego platform is more a hobby platform and lacks the critical ecosystem capabilities or more appropriately ecosystem potential that Stephen referred to. I'm not really sure on the partner strategy for Palm or their financial commitment to building an ecosystem so it's down to Android or Win Mobile 7. Let's look at each:Android. Whether we like to admit it or not, Google's Android is largely following Microsoft's OLD Windows mobile strategy. That is to say they have released a product that can be massively customised by carriers. This ultimately leads to huge fragmentation and a support burden.If Nokia were to drop Symbian for Android, it would end up another me-too manufacturer.  Android is also the most likely candidate that will be embraced by low cost Asian manufacturers, further diluting Nokia's brand amongst an ever larger pool.Their only ability to innovate would be on hardware. Their revenue would come largely from handsets which means they have an incentive to prevent or delay upgradeability of legacy handsets to get users to upgrade to the latest and greatest models. Google is trying to address this with a carrier billing approach and to retain more control of the UI experience and hardware specifications.Windows Phone 7 (a hideous name that has absolutely nothing to do with Windows) is actually a decent phone. I had an opportunity to play with it in the US last month. It needs a lot more work, but I do believe Microsoft has a vested interest in seeing this succeed. Performance to date has been poor so a large player like Nokia potentially has some leverage.So should Nokia become just another Windows 7 phone user? A-la-Android? No. We know how that game plays out.Nokia should request full exclusivity of Windows 7 in exchange for dumping Symbian. Then, and only then will they genuinely have a chance to compete in an area dominated by Apple: The fusion between software and hardware to create an elegant user experience. Nokia has some fantastic hardware design talent, and they have a level of of understanding about the interworking between mobiles and switches that should in theory give them an edge in releasing enhancements like NCFD or "Network Controlled Fast Dormancy". (Fancy term for optimising the network control signalling between a phone and a mobile tower to improve battery life - in some cases by as much as 50%)Microsoft has a great development tools, and critically... /familiar/ development tools. This can be leveraged to great effect.It's a risk of course, putting all your eggs in one basket with an untested mobile platform and Microsoft's questionable ability to execute. But I don't believe the alternatives offer any real benefit other than the chance to stem the tide of defections already underway. Nokia needs to make a bold move and I believe this would be it.See question on Quora

“Capitalism has worked phenomenally. Look at North Korea versus South Korea, or China before and after 1979. Capitalism has shortfalls. It doesn’t ... take care of the poor, and it underfunds innovation, so we have to offset that. We don’t have to [ask] whether capitalism is wrong.” - Bill Gates: 'I wrote Steve Jobs a letter as he was dying. He kept it by his bed’ - TelegraphThis is precisely the premise of our work in these pages. It's not about whether an abstract system is right or wrong, but whether or not it's accomplishing all of our human objectives. Industrial capitalism worked for the stage of civilization that the so-called advanced west traversed over the past 150 years; it's simply not adequate for the next leg of the journey. We can and should immediately offset poverty and homelessness with Basic Income and continue to evolve toward maximum human flourishing.

The most ancient of readers will recall when “Ma Bell” tried to charge us for connecting a second rotary-dial phone to the same line, in the same home. So obviously full of #FAIL on a thousand metrics. Grown ups in general will remember when incumbent DSL internet providers in the 1990′s tried to charge us for using a home hub or router to share our land line internet connection with more than one computer. Absurd, right?

When we access telecom services, we're paying for a signal, a service, which has nothing to do with the devices connected to that service. Just like electricity or water. Today's oligarchs want to charge us extra to use water from the tap when filling different shaped glasses, pitchers, carafes; or charge more if the water you get from the spigot is intended for cooking, drinking, or cleaning.

This oligarchic, bit-measured (they don’t even really exist, except as energy, humans!), device-centric contrivance is and always was nothing short of an abomination to common sense; the equivalent of having to pay extra for plugging in a toaster or blender to household electricity. Electricity has peak use and hence a kind of “congestion” too, yet nobody would ever dream of paying extra every time they plug in another desk lamp. Here’s the latest example from VerizonWireless, foisting precisely that model onto a captive, closed market: Galaxy Nexus by Samsung: “Data packages may not be used to tether your smartphone or basic phone to a computer or tablet, or as a Wi-Fi hotspot, unless you subscribe to Mobile Hotspot/Mobile Broadband Connect.”

Telecom oligarchs are the slum lords of bandwidth. They only build the bare minimum and then do everything they can to raise rents at the fastest possible pace while putting off improvements until someone takes them to court. The biggest #WIN for oligarchs, like slum lords, is that the vast majority of their tennants are in absolutely no position to be able to hold them accountable. The answer to carrier complaints of “bandwidth hogs” (i.e., Smartest Innovators on The Network) is the same as it ever was: open networks, open markets up to more competition to keep building more capacity, faster, so that more innovation can continue to improve the entire interdependent system.

Cisco’s John Chambers answered “the congestion question” in the 1990′s and it’s still true today, there’s no scenario in which installing sufficient capacity doesn’t successfully and effectively kick the congestion can down the road. Unlike politics, in technology, kicking the can down the road isn’t a bad solution at all; in fact, it’s almost always been the way we grow into where we’re going, from where we are, with what we have on hand.

The answer for consumers is to Just Say No and/or practice Peaceful Conscientious Resistance through superior understanding and knowledge of their own, including opening more unlicensed spectrum and building our own nationwide mesh networks.

If we don’t realize that energy companies are watching carefully, and will try to pull the same stunt with ephemeral photon from the sun that oligarch telecoms are attempting — in pretending data packet of photons consist of mass and cost — then we have only ourselves to blame. Once the optical fibers and microwave towers are in place, the marginal costs of moving bits are as close to zero as one can get without literally vanishing into oblivion. 

The bit-measured, device-centric telecom pricing phantasm is so ipso facto absurd that I can’t believe so many of us have spent 30 years explaining this in such excruciating detail, still to be met with a deer-in-the-headlights responses, more often than not. It’s just not that hard to grok; really it isn’t. I am definitely not that much smarter than the average bear; I know some really damned smart bears who remind me of this on a daily basis.

If supply and demand had anything to do with the way the world really works, then WATER should be priced like bandwidth and bandwidth like water. This is just one of the thousands of ways that we continue to see that the old capitalism has already passed, and the next capitalism, continues it’s evolutionary emergence. The olden ways were fine for the olden days and those days are long gone. It’s as fundamental as the Rights of Mankind to restate the aphormism that nobody can own the sun, the stars, the wind, or the sky. They are here for all, and apart from the initial cost of building the physical collectors and connectors, it’s all virtual FREE LUNCH. That’s what we mean by Apprehending Postscarcity. The world has changed.

To remix the late great Walt Kelly, “We have met the future, and it is us.”

submitted by reddit to blog.

It's so not about race. The core issue that killed #MLK was moving beyond superficial distinctions of color and creed, taking on the core malignancy of the human condition: escalating and unsustainable economic inequality. King's evolving political advocacy in his later years ... paralleled the teachings of the progressive Highlander Research and Education Center, with whom King was affiliated. King began to speak of the need for fundamental changes in the political and economic life of the nation. Towards the time of his murder, King more frequently expressed his opposition to the war and his desire to see a redistribution of resources to correct racial and economic injustice. Though his public language was guarded, so as to avoid being linked to communism by his political enemies, in private he sometimes spoke of his support for democratic socialism. In one speech, he stated that "something is wrong with capitalism" and claimed, "There must be a better distribution of wealth, and maybe America must move toward a democratic socialism."Of course, the word distribution has long since become an emotionally hijacked firestarter keyword of the fundamentalist tinfoil hat lexicon; and actually, it's perhaps not the most accurate word to describe the challenges of a sustainable postscarcity circulatory system. Notwithstanding, a preponderance of economic scholarship over the most recent half dozen decades or so has gradually converged on the most logical first step, variously described as Basic Income, Universal Basic Income (UBI), Basic Income Guarantee (BIG), and similar language-specific nomenclature that crosses virtually all ephemeral cultural and language boundaries.Follow, learn, and join the rapidly rising global #BasicIncome trend on twitter:@BasicIncome@RentaBasica @RevenuDevie@BasicIncome_J@Grundeinkommen @BINewsAnd if all that is still not enough to bring you up to warp speed, here's Captain Picard: Make it So.

Too much data making immediate and inevitable changes seem overwhelming? Maybe a little make believe will help those trapped in the current make believe world.

But wait, there's more.

Maybe all the data on this site is too mind numbing. Let's try something different.

Subscribe to VLABVideos to get the latest in emerging venture developments.

When the tinfoil hat brigade says that our economy is a Ponzi pyramid, they're essentially right. After U.S. President Lincoln was assassinated (perhaps in part because he printed the Greenback; the people's currency), the banksters hijacked the system. "So it was a large fraud that was backstopped by a sort of over-fraud." - Ellen Brown. Cue the 20:25 mark to get the 30 seconds prior that provides context for that quotation. Where thinking people of conscience can legitimately differ is considering the matter of which form of social capitalism, or free market socialism, which mashup of an adaptive mixed economy to implement in order to address the resulting unsustainable resource skews, to provide sustainable currency circulation -- not distribution -- via a Basic Income, or similar program that ensures consistent, healthy, transpiration at the capillary level of the economic body. Regardless of what you might have been told by an abusive parent or others, you're smart. Probably very smart, or you likely wouldn't be reading these words. So, instead of spoon feeding you yet another forgettable Top 10, the subject of this post is your assignment: watch the full video. Do the homework. Write your list of the the top 5 Utter Fictions of Money and 10 Solutions that you discover in the comments here. We can do this. We can increment the system, raise it to a more sustainable, adaptive level without throwing out the baby with the bath water. That's the '++' of Capitalism++.

After listening to this cued up exchange, go back to the beginning and watch the whole presentation. #MustWatchETV
Um, wait. Ultimate irony, hypocrisy, or just some technical dumb-assery on my part? Very strange that the embed doesn’t appear to be working; even though the YouTube tools to create embed work as normal. WTF? Cannot Display Embed Above?

The Gravity Recovery And Interior Laboratory (GRAIL) arrived in lunar orbit today. It’ll enable us to learn more about the moon’s lumpy gravitational field and internal structure of the moon. This year, school kids will begin controlling the lunar platform and snapping pictures of the moon using the UCSD Moonkam. Pause to consider. This will be the only boring, drab, normal world that today’s 12 y.o.’s have ever known. Their world view: “Yes, of course I can personally control and perceive the universe through sophisticated robotic platforms orbiting other bodies in space; who can’t? Duh.” It’s always boggled my mind that these are the kinds of everyday experiential and perceptual deltas that so-called normals utterly fail to incorporate into their puckered expectational world model. Yet millions of everyday futurists like us immediately, instinctively echo, “Duh? No Duh!” I’ve always wondered how and why is it that so many humans can immediately and vividly comprehend just how rapidly the perspectives of today’s 12 y.o. will come to shape the entire world, while so many others believe that 12 y.o.’s (or children of any age, 12 to 62) are powerless snot-faced punks to be “put in their place.” May 2012 also be the year of the 12 y.o. Let’s listen and learn where the future is going from the people who are right now best positioned to decide and execute such visions. It ain’t you and it ain’t me. We’ll be long gone, six feet under, while they may be setting foot on moons orbiting the sixth planet from the sun, without the slightest reservations about whether or not robotic embodied cyborg reality is reality. It’s all RL.

Steve: “I want to be someone powerful. A towering historic figure.” Lucifer: “Here’s the deal, Steve, you get to create the world’s most valuable company, but upon attainment your soul is mine.” Steve: “Tell you what, I’ll make our logo the bite of the forbidden fruit, just to seal the deal.”

“Decrease suffering. Reduce misery. Increase well-being. Build flourishing.” – Martin Seligman

“For testing special clothing.” Right. Got it.

“PETMAN is an anthropomorphic robot developed by Boston Dynamics for testing special clothing used by US military personnel. PETMAN balances itself as it walks, squats and does calisthenics. PETMAN simulates human physiology by controlling temperature, humidity and sweating inside the clothing to provide realistic test conditions. PETMAN development is lead by Boston Dynamics, working in partnership with Measurement Technologies Northwest, Oak Ridge National Lab and MRIGlobal. The work is being done for the DoD CBDP. For more information about PETMAN visit http://www.BostonDynamics.com.”

From the video, in 2011: Whopping increase in app creation and downloads: – ONE BILLION apps downloaded worldwide each month – $3 BILLION paid by Apple alone to independent apps developers Surge in use of social media mobile platforms: – 166 PERCENT increase in Facebook Mobile users in the first half of 2011 alone – 103 MILLION wireless tweets were posted each day – ONE BILLION Foursquare check-ins – 26 PHOTOS were made “hipstery” on Instagram every second Ongoing explosion in data traffic: – EIGHT TRILLION texts were sent – up 1.1 trillion from last year – 1800 PERCENT increase in traffic on U.S. networks predicted in just four years Unprecedented competition and choice: – MORE SMARTPHONES purchased than PCs in the United States – MORE WIRELESS SUBSCRIPTIONS than people – TWO BILLION networked mobile devices by 2015 – 4G SERVICES being rolled out by at least six carriers in 2011 alone Massive potential for job creation and economic growth: – 2.4 MILLION American jobs supported by wireless – $27.5 BILLION investment in U.S. mobile networks by wireless carriers – 500,000 JOBS & $400 BILLION to U.S. GDP with additional 500 MHz of additional spectrum

The ability to buy oatmeal for breakfast. Vegetables for lunch. Rice and beans for dinner. Without coming up short for rent.