It’s more likely that blockchain, and even Libra, is a means to a end; Calibra is about Facebook wanting to be not only the world’s biggest social media platform but also the globe’s go-to marketplace, putting Amazon, eBay, Apple and Google in the shade.
Gestures and emoji don’t break down into smaller parts. Nor do they easily combine into larger words or sentences (unless we’re using a clunky version of the grammar of our language).
NASA’s Apollo programme was one of the most challenging technological achievements in the 20th century. Beyond the space race and exploration, it contributed to several inventions and innovations that are still having an impact on our lives. But at the same time, there are several myths regarding what technologies actually came out of it.
If you’ve ever participated in a virtual reality (VR) experience, you might have found yourself navigating the virtual world as an avatar. If you haven’t, you probably recognise the experience from its portrayal in film and on television. Popular media has brought us characters like Jake Sully in Avatar, Wade Watts in Ready Player One, and Danny and Karl in the Black Mirror episode Striking Vipers. In these examples, the character’s virtual alter-ego is physically different from who they are in the real world. The connection between the real person and their virtual avatar is called “embodiment”. If you have a strong sense…
As a cryptocurrency, there is no physical form that gives Bitcoin value, so it is impossible to perform traditional fundamental analysis of the currency. Consequently, many investors track the so-called technical trading indicators (geometric patterns constructed from historical prices and trading volumes) in order to understand and predict Bitcoin’s future movement.
This year marks the 50th anniversary of the first Apollo moon landing. This was possible thanks to an extraordinary acceleration of space technology. Within a remarkably short period of time leading up to the event, engineers had mastered rocket propulsion, on-board computing and space operations, partially thanks to an essentially unlimited budget. Since the days of these heroic endeavours, space engineering has matured into a series of interconnected technologies that deliver exciting new space science missions, a fire hose of Earth observation data and a network of global communication and navigation services. We can now land probes on comets and glimpse further back in…
The Apollo computer was state-of-the-art in its time, but what would have been different if the moon landing had the state-of-the-art computers that are available today?
I suspect that the software development time would have been a lot faster, due to the software development tools that are available today. It would have been a lot quicker to write, debug and test the complex code required to deliver a man to the moon.
Let’s go back to the basics and look at what Libra is, how it compares to other cryptocurrencies and whether you should be concerned about using it when it eventually arrives.
Facebook’s Libra cryptocurrency has taken a lot of criticism from Western government officials and media commentators – but it’s not meant for them. A major target market for the Libra is users in developing countries.
While photographic fakes have been around since the dawn of photography, the more recent use of deep learning artificial intelligence techniques (the “deep” in deepfakes) is leading to the creation of increasingly credible computer simulations.
