But we can draw pictures. Guess you missed that option.

Why do we still use words to communicate? For the same reason we program in a text-based language. We demand as much nuance in everyday communication as we do in software development.

I specialize in algorithms and have worked as a principal in VC-backed companies for over 15 years.

They won't care about fine details but they have to understand enough to know:

1) How easy is it to replicate your algorithm?
2) What enhancements/future features do you have in mind to stay ahead of the fast followers?
3) Why are you and your team uniquely able to pull this off?

Give enough details -- in fact, I'd suggest slides directly addressing these questions -- so you can back up the answers.

VCs never sign NDAs.

I don't think they paid for this particular prediction, since he's given it away for free. I doubt they are paying him for any decade-long forecasting. So saying he's supported by large corporations is not germane to the argument.

Just because there is a spike in traffic from Iran doesn't mean they haven't got Stuxnet under control at their nuclear facilities, does it? Maybe the worm is just still in the wild on other machines and the country is infected?

There is no way it is a hash of a fingerprint. What it is is a list of features (minutiae in some systems) of the fingerprint. These features cannot be used to reconstruct the fingerprint. They are, however, usable in other fingerprint systems, and also useful to replay into the same fingerprint system, so they should be treated as confidential/private.

I'm as big a privacy advocate as you'll find. But my main concern has always been that I want my private life
to remain private to other humans, so that they could not exploit it for personal gain. Nowadays, there is so
much information on so many people that I don't expect to get singled out in this regard. If the details of
my private life are only available to and processed by machines, then it's not nearly as big a deal.

Problems occur when that information is available to humans. that is where I draw the line.

I read probably 5-10 articles per day on the NYT website. While there are alternatives for free online news, none match the quality. I don't know if that makes me a power reader or not. I do know it would be a little painful to not have access to at least 2-3 articles per day.

For the 5-10 articles I'd be willing to pay something, but probably $10 per year, not per month. If they are intent on getting it "really, really right" then they need to start with the price. $49.95 / month, as the failed TimesSelect charged, is a non-starter.

I find this to be a narrow-minded view, despite the points well-taken about research getting harder and harder in general.

Case in point: mobile-phone technology. How many patents have been generated from that? How many new jobs around the world? You'd have thought the "hard-part" of basic radio research was over long ago.

Sure, the low-hanging fruit has been plucked. However, we have so much more knowledge to build on and such better tools these days with which to do the research that, even though the overall job is harder, it can be done quicker and more efficiently than ever before.

Curves/trends are useful for predictions, until something comes along that no longer fits. And it's impossible to predict when that something will arrive. But if we don't fund basic research adequately, it'll likely take that much longer.