Google 'Solve For X' Website Goes Live 80
alphadogg writes "Google on Monday released a website and video regarding its Solve for X project, which the company says is 'a place where the curious can go to hear and discuss radical technology ideas for solving global problems.' It's got a TED-like think tank feel to it, but possibly with oodles of Google resources behind it. It appears related to Google's up-to-now largely secretive Google X research lab that the New York Times recently shed some light on."
Priority #1: (Score:2, Funny)
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Re:Priority #1: (Score:5, Funny)
The terrible truth is that the Thing on Trump's head is, in fact, Donald Trump. The grotesque fleshy appendage below, commonly believed to be his actual body, is really the partially consumed remains of a deformed orangutan. That Thing, as it were, is a partially-sentient trans-dimensional parasite, using its host for the purposes of locomotion, sustenance, and reproduction: which it accomplishes by implanting slug-like larvae into the ears of human hosts between the ages of 17 and 32. The larvae then gestate for approximately 23 years, using that time to invade the central nervous system, and at the moment of maturity seize full motor and sensory control from the victim, leaving their former host a helpless, but conscious witness to the atrocities their former bodies will then commit.
The day of reckoning will come, Trump shall rule this world, and his Glory shall build an Empire to span our universe. All shall know Him and tremble at his Might and Power. We shall be His eternal servants, in life His serfs, in death His sustenance. Those few deemed worthy may even be given the Great Honor of serving as Trump's Host for some years, until our flesh is no longer fit to carry His Magnificence and we are ceremoniously cast into the sun as tribute to our Master.
All Hail Trump.
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Lots of solutions already, they are just ignored (Score:5, Insightful)
In the video they asked for the cure for cancer, and it turns out most cancer can be prevented with adequate vitamin D, eating lots of vegetables, and avoiding some lifestyle risks.
Global warming can be dealt with by renewables and probably LENR (cold fusion) and if all else fails, Thorium power (but it is not clear it is all from fossil fuels as much may have come from topsoil destruction by poor farming practices, or that global warming is entirely a bad thing compared to delaying a next ice age).
Massive unemployment can be dealt with through a "basic income", an expanded gift economy, improved subsistence technologies like 3D printing and home gardening robots, and/or by better participatory planning at all levels of government.
The biggest issue Google, like the rest of us, needs to wrestle with is the one in my sig below -- the irony of technologies of abundance being used to fight over perceived scarcity, or worse, to create artificial scarcity.
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Next, scarcity is a way for salespeople to promote fear and need.
There is no irony, only sales.
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Soviet Russia called, Gorbachev wants his joke back.
WTF? Is that a new "sponsored link"? (Score:1)
What the fuck is up with the second link? It appears to be a NetworkWorld advertisement, er article, for a network virtualization company, and contains no references to Google or anything related to the rest of the summary.
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I finally get it (Score:5, Funny)
Good Idea! (Score:5, Funny)
Sounds like a good idea! How long til they pull the plug?
I'm surprised (Score:3, Insightful)
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they lost me at "fridge that can order food". by now I'm kinda hoping that is code for something else? it was funny the first time that was brought up ages ago, but now it's becoming scary... I say fuck that, instead I'd prefer robots that a.) grow food and give it to hungry (not to mention starving) people and b.) shoot anyone who is too lazy to go to the grocery store :P
Re:fridge that can order food (Score:4, Informative)
Just wait till they hook it so that they can give you more ads.
"You liked Fettucini Alfredo, did you know we also do Spicy Southwest Macaroni and Cheese?"
Re:fridge that can order food (Score:4, Funny)
I'm sorry Dave. I can't do that.
(Your supposed to be on a diet, remember?)
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They lost me at "the dinner plate connected to social networking sites". Although they don't mention toilets in a similar vein, I'm thinking it can't be too far from their twisted minds.
Do. Not. Want.
On either end of either end....
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Ah-oh! CmdrTaco's toilet clogged up
(crying-bigeyed-toilet.jpg)He still needs 5 more plungers. Click here to help CmdrTaco
But seriously, don't we already have enough peopling shitting into our FB streams?
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Yeah. To open the article with such stuff, and then think that the following "These are just a few of the dreams being chased" sounds awesome and epic, instead of the zenith of stupidity, well... to each their own.
Just take the space elevator, which they cite as another example (I guess that puts "plate that twitters what you eat" and "space evelator" on the same level if you will, another indicator of pure brain power)... apparently it'
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That'd be a typo/mistake actually :P But oh well, the fun is in the chase...while I had you, we were something very special, baby. And they cannot take that away from us!
Also, it's "misspelled". But you knew that.
Good luck with that... (Score:1)
I predict it will be nothing but kiddie lulz, penile enlargement spam and Android ads...
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Don't neglect the little guy...
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So, the question everyone is asking is: (Score:4, Funny)
The question everyone is probably asking themselves is "what countries is this censored in?".
Re:So, the question everyone is asking is: (Score:5, Insightful)
The question everyone is probably asking themselves is "what countries is this censored in?".
More to the point, "How can we leverage the massive potential of the internet to improve communication and erode the power of regimes built on fear and ignorance when even the most trusted tech companies seem eager to roll over for every authoritarian whim promulgated by a developing market?"
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I'm not allowed to ask that question in my country * you insensitive clod!
* i.e. The USA
We need a new Bell Labs (Score:5, Interesting)
The beauty of the old Bell Labs was that to a certain extent, basic research was OK and appreciated. I couldn't imagine any corporate lab today producing anything close to the quality and quantity of fantastic work that came out of Bell Labs. Google certainly has the resources to do it, but the big question is would the shareholders appreciate the long-term value of such an asset?
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But Bell Labs wasn't a "corporate lab" in quite that since, since it was run by a company with a government-granted monopoly.
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Well I would think that Google stock holders would be more concerned that Google does not pay out stock dividends. As far as long term value you can’t beat holding a lot of patents in your corporate portfolio. Also I can think of worse things to spend all their cash on.
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There's no legal way to patent public research.
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Google or Apple have the resources to come very close to Bell Labs, but I think Google lacks the conviction and Apple simply lacks the intellectual curiosity*. A true Bell Labs model of R&D requires recognizing extremely talented people and simply letting them go do their thing with only the slightest pretense of reasoning behind it. A friend of mine is writing about one part of Bell Labs history, and was telling me how pretty much anything music related was allowed because music is a kind of sound and
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Bell labs was only functional because the AT&T monopoly had quite a bit of cash to blow, and was, well, a monopoly. Google is a hairs breath away from that point, but still...
Close but the really important lesson is basic research is hyperprofitable if you are and will always remain a govt granted monopoly. However we have at least one real world example of a govt granted monopoly being broken up in the 80s into the baby bells and small etc (later to recombine like a horror movie, much to the horror of their customers). Therefore basic research is a terrible idea, because despite megacorps owning the govt, there is a chance they'll be broken up before being able to cash in on
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I believe Microsoft Research does a lot of basic research. Ostensibly to put into products, but few have made it into what Micros
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Bell Labs won a Nobel prize for the transistor for work that they did before anybody knew whether it was anything more than a cute electronics trick. I don't see anything of that level coming out of Microsoft Research.
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If it was basic research in support of research and development for Bell products and services. (I.E. that could eventually make money.) Seriously, Bell Labs was a corporate lab, with all that implies - not a pie-in-the-sky research facility. They researched so many things, because they were (for the day) a high tech company, and not only did telecommunications require a variety of technologies (everything
Google announces closing of Solver for X (Score:5, Funny)
Google today announced the closure of the Solve for X website immediately. A Google spokesperson said the site had not obtained a "large enough marketshare to warrant its continued development" and that they "valued everyone's participation utp to this point." Google suggested Google+ as an alternative website where the discussion can be continued, and said that with their next projects they plan to announce the cancellations prior to launch to spare users any more inconvenience.
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Mod up!
This is pretty close to the truth. I can't count the number of Google projects where I never even heard about them until I saw an article on Slashdot announcing their closure.
Ah, that's easy. (Score:2)
Solve for X
X = X;
Ship it!
No, seriously, this is C++, and the operator= function contains the solution's implementation, which reads results from a text file generated by parsing a google.com wget with Perl -- make sure you catch the IO exception...
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You would appreciate the Google calculator thought-experiment, wherein you create a simulated CPU backed by HTTP requests to Google calcuator... and then implement a web browser on top of it.
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Nah, just an idea I thought up one malicious day..
X: How to reconcile privacy and internet use? (Score:2)
A: Dismantle Google.
Solve for X is already registered trademark (Score:1)
My previous client Carrier Access used "Solve for X" in all of its marketing.
A Google search reveals its usage in many of their product manuals:
+"solve for x" +"carrier access"
They were purchased by a California-based company called Force 10. I wonder if they will allow Google to use their trademark. Every time I hear "Solve for X", I think of cell site backhaul. I haven't RTFA yet, so wondering if the Google concept is anything close. :)
Re:Solve for X is already registered trademark (Score:4, Informative)
Evidence:
http://www.delta.com/ [delta.com]
http://www.deltafaucet.com/ [deltafaucet.com]
http://www.deltamachinery.com/ [deltamachinery.com]
http://www.deltadental.com/ [deltadental.com]
http://www.delta.edu/ [delta.edu]
http://www.deltasociety.org/ [deltasociety.org]
http://www.deltacycle.com/ [deltacycle.com]
http://www.deltacreative.com/ [deltacreative.com]
http://www.deltacollege.edu/ [deltacollege.edu]
http://www.deltastorage.com/ [deltastorage.com]
http://www.deltatargets.net/ [deltatargets.net]
http://www.madebydelta.com/ [madebydelta.com]
http://www.deltachildren.com/ [deltachildren.com]
http://www.deltawaterfowl.org/ [deltawaterfowl.org]
http://www.deltamarine.com/ [deltamarine.com]
http://delta.ncsu.edu/ [ncsu.edu]
http://www.deltasrestaurant.com/ [deltasrestaurant.com]
http://deltamotion.com/ [deltamotion.com]
http://www.deltaeducation.com/ [deltaeducation.com]
http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0910860/ [imdb.com]
http://www.deltapress.com/ [deltapress.com]
http://www.deltatire.com/ [deltatire.com]
http://www.deltarf.com/ [deltarf.com]
Yet another failure, like Wave? (Score:2)
It's official: Google has become Microsoft (Score:1)
Sounds like /. on steroids (Score:2)
And by that I mean tons of people, all who think they're smarter than all the others seeing who can piss the furthest up a rope.
MTV labs (Score:2)
I coped with the music-drenched video by tapping along with a little box of paper clips that was near to hand.
GoLoG Park: sounds like some kind of tense, lightly-fictionalized Russian tragedy. I want to believe, but first impressions are lasting impressions.
On Google (Score:3)
solve for X (Score:4, Funny)
will this help me solve my problems with X Windows?
Let me be the first to say... (Score:2)
You can't use technology to solve social problems.
A large number of the "big" problems (hunger, poverty, homelessness, addiction, oppressive dictators, bad laws, etc) are social in nature. Technology will not help solve them.
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Oh, I don't know; men like Browning and Kalishnikov have built technology which helps solve some of those issues. (naturally causing a few of their own)
Re:Let me be the first to say... (Score:4, Informative)
"You can't use technology to solve social problems." [citation needed]
Hunger, poverty, homelessness, oppressive dictators and bad laws are all a LOT better now than they were a hundred or two years ago, mostly because of technology: the printing press, reliable cheap lighting, mechanized agriculture, everything that went into the industrial revolution....
Now addiction, well, it's always been around, but it used to be pretty much the province of the rich. Nobody else could afford it. Now that we're all rich (yes, if the homeless guy can afford to enough cigs and booze to be addicted and still eat enough to stay alive he's rich), such vices are open to a lot more people.
Is it just me (Score:1)
How is it possibly considered a good business model to keep shotguning the market with these half assed plagerized products.
FOCUS google! FOCUS! You were supposed to take down facebook!
No RSS feed. (Score:3)
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Google+ has no Atom or RSS feed either. You're supposed to sign up with your real-life identity to get updates. They're trying to kill the open web, do you think they want to support feeds?
X? (Score:1)
But X is the independent variable. Wouldn't a better name be 'Solve for Y'?
No Internet explorer? (Score:1)
Ok I get it Chrome vs IE blah blah blah. I will even agree Chrome outperforms IE in a lot of aspects. But come on. The site "doesn't work" in IE9. The reason i say put that in quotations is because if you change the user-agent string in IE to chrome, all of a sudden the site works like a charm. Ok Google, let's stop being petty.
how to stop freedom (Score:2)
Ask people how to have it and then subvert the ways.....
Cures for cancer already exist, so why ask?
solving pollution issues already have many solutions, so why ask?
etc...
Maybe the real solution is to publish all the solutions so everyone will know and get pissed off at those preventing a better world.
And who better to publish than a "do no evil" company? If it still genuinely exists.