Some recent saved favorites from Pocket:
PS4 And Xbox One Pose Major Problems For Internet Providers: As the Sony’s Sony’s Playstation 4 launched midnight today in the UK, there are some potential pitfalls that mean consumers might not get the most out of their systems unless they carefully consider their home network. Consoles used to be the easy option. – by Tamlin Magee – http://www.forbes.com/sites/tamlinmagee/2013/11/29/ps4-and-xbox-one-pose-major-problems-for-internet-providers/
Why China is fixated on the Moon: The Moon could be a “beautiful” source of minerals and energy, a top Chinese scientist has told the BBC. Exotic materials including helium-3 and the potential for solar power could prove invaluable for humankind, he says. – by David Shukman – http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/25141597
Secret Weapon in Mall Battle: Parking Apps: Phoebe Scott of Orange County, Calif., has a new routine before heading to the mall. She checks the parking lots on her ParkMe smartphone app “so that I can see what I’m up against, or if I need to change my plans.” If a lot is below 90 percent full, the trip is on. – by Jaclyn Trop – http://www.nytimes.com/2013/11/28/business/secret-weapon-in-mall-battle-parking-apps.html
Bitcoin under pressure: ALL currencies involve some measure of consensual hallucination, but Bitcoin, a virtual monetary system, involves more than most. It is a peer-to-peer currency with no central bank, based on digital tokens with no intrinsic value. – by From the print – http://www.economist.com/news/technology-quarterly/21590766-virtual-currency-it-mathematically-elegant-increasingly-popular-and-highly
Google files for patent on automated status updates to other social networks — Tech News and Analysis: In the dystopian novel The Circle, Google and Facebook have merged with other big tech companies to create a single, all-seeing and all-knowing social network. The work is fiction but a new patent application published last week makes the situation slightly less far-fetched. – by Jeff John Roberts – Tags: Google,patents,social networks – http://gigaom.com/2013/11/30/google-files-for-patent-on-automated-status-updates-to-other-social-networks/
Waiting for bitcoin to get boring: Something of a milestone was reached very early in the morning of Friday, November 29, a time when most Americans were either sleeping off their Thanksgiving excesses or out seeking Black Friday bargains. – by Felix Salmon – Tags: bitcoin,payments,technology – http://blogs.reuters.com/felix-salmon/2013/11/30/waiting-for-bitcoin-to-get-boring/
Is it OK to torture or murder a robot?: We form such strong emotional bonds with machines that people can’t be cruel to them even though they know they are not alive. So should robots have rights? Kate Darling likes to ask you to do terrible things to cute robots. – Tags: BBC, Future, Technology, Artificial intelligence, Robot, Science & Environment, Psychology – http://www.bbc.com/future/story/20131127-would-you-murder-a-robot/all
The fall (and rise?) of Yahoo: How the web giant crumbled and built some great tech in the process: At one point not so long ago, Yahoo was one of the top technology companies in the world. “The only exception [was] Google,” Bassel Ojjeh, a former senior vice president of data technologies and products at Yahoo, said in a recent interview. “… That’s where big data came from. – by Derrick Harris – Tags: big data,content personalization,Hadoop,search engines,targeted-advertising,Yahoo – http://gigaom.com/2013/11/27/the-fall-and-rise-of-yahoo-tech/
Consoles will continue to dominate PC gaming for years to come: Are the Xbox One and PlayStation 4 doomed to be trounced by gaming PCs? Not long ago, our own Matt Smith put forward this contentious opinion, claiming that PC gaming is on the rise. – by Ryan Fleming – http://m.digitaltrends.com/gaming/future-gaming-still-belongs-consoles/