Lifeboat Foundation

Twenty-five years after the introduction of the World Wide Web, the Information Age is coming to an end. Thanks to mobile screens and Internet everywhere, we’re now entering what I call the “Experience Age.”

When was the last time you updated your Facebook status? Maybe you no longer do? It’s been reported that original status updates by Facebook’s 1.6 billion users are down 21 percent.

The status box is an icon of the Information Age, a period dominated by desktop computers and a company’s mission to organize all the world’s information. The icons of the Experience Age look much different, and are born from micro-computers, mobile sensors and high-speed connectivity.

Continue reading “The Information Age is over; welcome to the Experience Age” »

I personally can confirm that QC is not being worked on and advance by just a couple groups such as D-Wave and IBM. The questions/bumps in the road that we will all face is threefold:

1) how do we standardize the QC? right now (like most innovation) is done in siloes and limited cross-collaboration across government, labs & universities, and commercial companies. 2) governance and compliance; how will these need to change across multiple areas 3) id & mitigate all impacts instead of after deployment (don’t be reactive) because we will not have that luxury due to hackers.

There is a temptation to lump quantum computing in with technologies such as fusion power in the sense that both have been proposed for decades with the promise of tremendous leaps in performance.

Continue reading “Researchers Making Progress With Quantum Computing” »

Old article from 3 yrs ago shared by MIT on Los Alamos Q-Net. Cannot wait for it; I believe we’re reading for it.

A quantum internet capable of sending perfectly secure messages has been running at Los Alamos National Labs for the last two and a half years, say researchers.

The question breaks down into two parts:

1. For what public benefit? —and—
2. No, it cannot be achieved in this way

Governments are in the business of regulating certain activities—hopefully in an effort to serve the public good. In the case of business methods and activities, their goal is to maintain an orderly marketplace; one that is fair, safe and conducive to economic growth.

But regulation that lacks a clear purpose or a reasonable detection and enforcement mechanism is folly. Such regulation risks making government seem arbitrary, punitive or ineffective.

«— This is money. It is not a promissory note, a metaphor, an analogy or an abstract representation of money in some account. It is the money itself. Unlike your national currency, it does not require an underlying asset or redemption guarantee.

Continue reading “Can Bitcoin be defeated by legislation?” »

By David Glance Director of UWA Centre for Software Practice, University of Western Australia

Pharmaceutical companies typically develop new drugs with thousands of staff and budgets that run into the billions of dollars. One estimate puts the cost of bringing a new drug to market at $2.6 billion with others suggesting that it could be double that cost at $5 billion.

Continue reading “Garage Biotech: New drugs using only a computer, the internet and free online data” »

Here in the Lifeboat Blog, I have the luxury of pontificating on existential, scientific and technical topics that beg for an audience—and sometimes—a pithy opinion. Regular Lifeboat readers know that I was recently named most viewed Bitcoin writer at Quora under a Nom de Plume.

Quora is not a typical Blog. It is an educational site. Questions and numerous answers form the basis of a crowd-sourced popularity contest. Readers can direct questions to specific experts or armchair analysts. A voting algorithm leads to the emergence of some very knowledgeable answers, even among laypersons and ‘armchair’ experts.

During the past few weeks, Quora readers asked me a litany of queries about Bitcoin and the blockchain, and so I am sharing selected Q&A here at Lifeboat. This is my professional field—and so, just as with Mr. Trump, I must resist an urge to be verbose or bombastic. My answers are not the shortest, but they are compact. Some employ metaphors, but they explain complex ideas across a broad audience.

Continue reading “Bitcoin Pundicy: A Lifeboat Perspective” »

If aliens sent you an encrypted binary message, could you answer? René Heller, an astrophysicist at the Max Planck Institute for Solar System Research, wants to hear from you.

Last month, Heller posed a hypothetical question as part of the #SETIDecryptChallenge: “Suppose a telescope on Earth receives a series of pulses from a fixed, unresolved source beyond the solar system,” he wrote. “It turns out the pulses carry a message.”

The encrypted message is a vast sea of 0’s and 1’s. You can see it here, but here’s a GIF for your convenience.

Continue reading “This Astrophysicist Posed an Alien Challenge and the Internet Is Racing to Solve It” »

The debate over which bathroom transgender people can use has been taking over the Internet and our social conversations for weeks now, and it’s getting a bit ridiculous. Transgender people have always used the bathroom that they feel comfortable with, whether it’s the bathroom that belongs to the sex they were born with or not, and there have been no problems.

In the heat of this debate, Americans are not only divided on the issue but collectively distracted from bigger, more important issues, such as the fact that there are three nuclear disasters occurring throughout the nation that have been getting no media attention.

One major disaster that will soon come to head all started with a fire at the Bridgeton Landfill in Missouri that has been burning for five years. Despite this extremely long length of time, authorities say that this fire is nowhere close to being contained. What’s more is that St. Louis County officials have reported that they have an emergency plan in place because the fire is closing in on nuclear waste dump.

Continue reading “Americans Distracted By The Transgender Bathroom Argument While 3 Nuclear Disasters Unfold” »

Google wants you to browse the internet with your contact lenses.