The Chinese, who invented pork, survived for thousands of years without eating beef.

I'd say far more people eat meat because of the seasoning. Try eating meat without the salt, onions, ketchup, barbecue sauce, etc. Raw, unadulterated meat appeals only to a very small sub-category of whole food eaters. The problem with veggiemeat isn't the taste, which can be masked by spices both ways (the reason why chicken curry doesn't taste like KFC or beef stew doesn't taste like beef barbecue), but the texture. Unfortunately for vegans, the problem can only be fixed at the cellular or maybe tissue level, not via some fancy food preparation techniques, so lab grown animal tissues is the only solution to the animal "crruelty" problem.

What is wealth but the potential to acquire the things that you want? This would be fully satisfied by universal self-production. Only the truly sociopathic would desire to have more than 10 cars when a single one would do fine. And if I'm happy having one or say at most three different cars (sports, sedan, and off-road), why should I care if the billionaire next door has 365 cars for each day of the year? I think there's a practical limit to human envy and greed. Or to put it in more practical terms, if you're the hungry homeless guy on the street you can look longingly through fast-food restaurant window at the Big Mac on the corner table feasting on two quarter pounders one after the other, but if you're a fellow diner who had just finished your own McChicken lunch (after having become mildly ecoconscious from watching some famous Hollywood actor's documentary about the relationship between cow farts and climate change), does it matter if the guy sitting next to you has a dozen quarter pounders piled on his table?

I think manufacturers should differentiate between two categories, the true smartwatch that might eventually morph into a Dick Tracy smartphone and the more focused physical activity tracker. I have the latter, which I pair with my cellphone. It has an almost Unix-like austerity to it, practically just a portable pedometer and fairly accurate heart rate monitor. I don't need all the bells and whistle of a tricorder wannabe on my wrist. Fitness trackers could very well be the dumb phones of the smartwatch market.

Compared to buying real property (property that you can hold in your hand or step on with your boots), the buying of IP is almost like somebody selling you the Brooklyn Bridge. Whether Disney manages to increase or collapse the value of the "property" depends largely on management making the right moves to promote it. With many real properties, say like gold or until recently steel mills, the buyer comes looking for you. Netflix could very well create B-movie franchises worth more than the combined paper cost of the Fox properties simply by acquiring the right source materials and adapting them well for broadcast. Who knows, maybe Netflix, Amazon, or even GooTube can create their own empires of emptiness out of fringe graphic novels, manga or user-generated short-form videos, adapted properly (read, not shamelessly prettified with Disneyesque princess endings) for the variable playing times needed for the multiple (big, medium, small) screens that everybody now seems to have. I'm thinking of movies that can be viewed both episodically on your smart phone during a long commute or in one popcorn session with your SO.

To be pedantic (i.e. meaninglessly strict in meaning), no country today is Communist. Communism is supposed to be the end state, when the state and the party wither away, leaving behind a classless society of equals. That's the theory anyway. As for the practice, we can see very fine example of how it's not done. I suspect that only Clarke's proverbial magical technology can bring about this true communist ideal, when every person can 3-D print his or hers every need, from their food to their clothes to their jet packs. At which point we'd see a convergence of the extreme forms of various non-mainstream secular ideologies, from libertarianism to anarchism to Star Trek socialism.

Whether by causation, co-evolution, or correlation, every great tech leap forward came with a corresponding food revolution.

Mastery of fire, or at least some control over it, brought cooking, giving our protohuman ancestors the meal ticket to the tougher meats and plant fibers that previously were thrown away or pooped as indigestible (a literally fiber-rich diet). Agriculture brought on the eating of grass and, coupled with the by then already ancient technology of cooking, the fine art of baking or the making of what is basically edible clay: bread, cakes and their fluffy, crumbly, crunchy and spongy allies. In the modern era, who hasn't, at some point in their lives, consumed the junk and fast food churned out by the Industrial Revolution and the subsequent development of mass production?

Following this pattern, there's no doubt that any tech Singularity will be not just a much ballyhooed AI singularity but a dinner plate singularity as well. We or our immediate descendants will become regular consumers of food that, while they may already exist in some preliminary or experimental form, haven't even gone under the noses of most humans alive today. And the surprising thing is most likely dinner would be served just like the the steak and fried chickens we already eat, but produced through the wonders of truly Frankensteinian bioengineering.

No, I'm not talking about converting plant fibers into meat as the summary and the vegan pornoganda appear to imply, but the growing of the meat without the chemical and thermal energy hogs that come along with it. That is, animal tissues grown in an oversized Petri dish stuffed with all the necessary ingredients for them to grow to a form and size big enough and ready to be cut, if not butchered, seasoned, then roasted or fried and served on a dinner plate as nature identical steak. Or maybe nearly identical, with much of the bad cholesterol engineered out or replaced with the supposedly good cholesterol of aqua based animals.

If you have stocks in a cattle or chicken raising company, sell out now, while you still have a healthy profit margin. Natural meats are going to be replaced faster than e-cigarettes will displace tobacco.

Now if you're heavily invested in the food industry, your options boil down to a choice between the increasingly vegan whole foods companies being gobbled up by the likes of Amazon, or the traditional meat processing companies, which can easily shift from producing ham and hamburgers with inputs sourced from creatures that eat hormones and GMOs to meat derived from headless and gutless animal zombies fed a steady cocktail of who knows yet what set of micronutrients.

Yes, in the future non-paleo meat lovers will have to content themselves with eating lab grown meat. That or they will have to suffer the indignity of meat made out of plant cells. But there's no way traditional animal agriculture can flourish in the new anti-greenhouse gases regime. Now that there's an active movement trying to link meat production to climate change in particular and unsustainable development in general. Cattle farming will become the new coal industry, set to soon collapse both from pressure from the ecozealots and from competition by the Frankenfood industry. Let's just hope somebody opensources or leaks the essential gentech needed to grow headless pork bellies and chicken wings.

Well that's enough of my Slashrant for the hour. Be back after my Big Meal of the Day.

Petty? This isn't petty until Google files a trademark notice for, say, a large body of water. How about Niagara or the Nile? Or if size is all that matters, how about surfing the Pacific? On the other hand, I suspect Google, being the word company that it is, would simply try to one-up Amazon Alphabetically, simply by trademarking a word that occurs earlier in the dictionary like Access (for a cloud service), Able (a sort of catch-all service that en-Ables users to do anything), Acquire (for an online store) or even just Amaze (for a sci-fi/fantasy studio).

Yes, and its best selling product, besides its moonshots and occasional forays into hardware and social work, is its users. Just like that other big ad company that we use to find those Face-less other things on the Net.

? So what's the most popular site ATM to get your video game walkthrus/demos?

I agree. Developing a technology in-house might protect a company from the greater uncertainty that comes from an outsourced design. They can more rapidly build around the technology's strengths or shortcomings. Autonomous navigation has become one of Tesla's major selling points, besides the battery-powered engines, so designing a custom chip (aka ASIC) for its Autopilot system actually makes sense, even if they decide to sell it independently of the vehicle, since the design & engineering are already a sunk cost. Now if Tesla were to build an electric plane, that might qualify as corporate ADHD (but not for Elon's other company, SpaceX)

The way I see it. There won't be an AI revolution. Slowly the pieces of the weak-to-strong AI puzzle will fall into place, and only someone who's been comatose all the time will see the arrival of strong AI as a revolution. Examples of the pieces, weak AI that can do crude image recognition, synthesized voices like SIRI that actually sound better than a lot of non-native speakers of a given language (English in particular), weak AI that can defeat the best human minds in games like chess and go, self driving vehicles that can already drive better than a student driver.

LOL. Mozilla isn't a business, at least not in the sense in which MS, Apple, Google or even Elon's companies are. Mozilla looks like it's designed to lose Money. So another shirt-losing investment won't hurt.

Do I need to duck? I really can't understand why there would be a big uproar or even a little growl about video game cheats. Cheating in elections or cheating your spouse, now those to me are SERIOUS matters. Video game cheats? Meh. Note: I don't like athletes who cheat using performance-enhancing drugs not because they cheat but because they promote the pop-inject idea that there's a chemical compound that can fix any of life's problems. I don't mind an athlete who can cheat without drugs, since I considering cheating to be an art form.