Oh good; had no idea Indiegogo added that feature.

It just occurred to me, a lot of people might put some money towards it just for a laugh, expecting they'll get their money back at the end of the failed campaign like Kickstarter does. On Indiegogo, the campaign keeps the money whether it's successful or not.

These guys just got £66,055 (Minus 5%) from a joke... They claim they'll refund it at the end of the campaign, but there's no system in place to guarantee that; they could just take the money and run.

If it raised hundreds of thousands, millions even, could you repress the urge to just take the money?

From what I've seen Twitter is great for powerful, dynamic people to read in tiny bursts and write in tiny bursts, then get on with what they were doing; the character limit makes Twitter the success it is.

It also makes it fail at being a meaningful communication platform, given that concepts must be expressed in a finite, tiny space. Much Twitter anger seems to stem from a fundamental failure of one party to fully explain thier position within the character limit.

But given celebrities' small attention spans and/or demands on thier time, I don't see them moving to another social network unless it makes the experience faster and easier to consume still. This makes Twitter-in my mind-less of a place for normal people to socialise, and more of a stream-of-consciousness of celebrities - a one-way social network, and occasional personal messaging client.

While I agree with the sentiment of ol' 927, for a standard to be adopted it must first exist. 927 didn't stop the Hamburger (One of the weirder statements I've made)

That's a fine point, I hadn't considered the effects on consumers brand associations; Glass would really benefit from a distancing of Googles' perceived invasions of privacy in particular. It's interesting how we associate traits and values to a name so integrally, that just changing the parent companies name changes how we can perceive the products function. I know I'd instinctively feel more comfortable using the Kinect were it made by Acme Inc. instead of Microsoft.

Regarding Google's "Don't Be Evil" slogan, I do wonder how much of Google's fundamental philosophies and business structure will be ported between subsidiaries. It would be amusing and disconcerting to have, say, a military contractor providing cryptographic devices to the NSA as a sister company to Google.

That's a really fine argument; that people gloss over the 'Buger when sniffing for navigation cues was particularly compelling. Up until now I accepted the Hamburger Menu as a necessary design compromise to make a mobile experience work well, and thought people would just get use to it with sufficient adoption like people got used to the Start Menu. But it is an ugly, unintuitive abstraction, and one of the worst compromises to solve the mobile UI navigation problem; designers can and should do better.

It makes me wonder whether we should be looking at the more novel ways in which mobile users can interface–like gestures, or movement input–that can be a pretty intuitive and totally invisible solution, if only some well designed, codified and broadly adopted design language was used.

This is a really interesting move. It provides some protection against anti-monopoly actions, as r6y9yd8lar5u1mugbz said, and the fascinating prospect of opening up additional funding avenues and risk-protection as kleinbl00 said. Another interesting dimension is PR – other Alphabet subsidiaries won't benefit from the inherent value attached to the Google brand nearly as much as if they were directly Google products, "Glass, from the company owned by the company who owns Google" just doesn't have the same ring to it. On the other hand if a risky Alphabet subsidiary fails as dramatically as Google+ did, that failure won't reflect on Google and damage its brand nearly as badly.

This seems like a win from so many perspectives: Ease of administration, risk avoidance, monopoly defence, additional funding, tax mitigation, brand management. I'm kind of surprised they didn't do this sooner, on reflection.

They should have waited til April 1st, and upheld the Google tradition.

Nothing new then, this was the conclusion several months ago; but it's good to see it accessibly written out on a popular news site.

It is almost certainly a methodological error in the experiment; but that fact that so many groups are experiencing the same error (Even NASA's JPL, of all groups) implies that there's some thing unknown to science causing the error, even if it's a failure in the testing apparatus. Some of the best minds in their fields can't yet work out what's causing the effect, and that means we may well learn something new – all be it something that agrees with our current understanding of momentum conservation and thermodynamics.

When I'm having a good conversation, especially with a beautiful woman. I suffered from social anxiety disorder for most of my life, only coming to terms with it in my mid-twenties. I can't even begin to count the number of bumbling, frightening, simply awful conversations I agonized over for days, weeks sometimes.

Now that I can deal with my anxiety, and I've learned to be somewhat charismatic in the face of it, bringing charm to a conversation feels like punching my demons square in their faces. A good conversation with a beautiful woman makes me feel ascended to that charming, easily pleasing archetype of a fellow I always envied in my teens; makes me feel invincible.

Those proposing he's unelectable generally believe that a leftist government is a thing of the past in Britain – the last leftist government ended in 1979 following the Winter of Discontent, a series of widespread strikes in many industries reacting to poor economic governance. Margaret Thatchers' Conservative government was elected directly as a response to the poor performance of the previous Labour government.

Labour remained in opposition for 18 years, until Tony Blair won the 1997 election with his New Labour campaign – a restructuring of the Labour party to appeal to the centrists, inspired by the Clinton campaign in the US.

Many in the UK–including Tony Blair and many of the elected Labour ministers–argue a Labour that doesn't appeal to the centre can't win. I would argue that since Labour lost its large Scottish base to the Scottish National Party (SNP) in the 2015 election, a centrist Labour government can't win.

A shift to the left will give the much ignored left-learning portions of the electorate something to vote for again, hopefully increasing youth turnout and winning back some of the Scottish voters who went with the more left-learning SNP; and may well allow Labour to ally with the SNP to form a coalition government.

Either way, I don't see Labour winning again in its current incarnation; unless the SNP royally screws up and fails to keep its current voters. Something has to change in Labour.

Given the changes to their privacy policies, making Cortana a flagship feature, and giving 10 away for free to most of their potential audience, it seems like Microsoft is moving towards the Google style of a data driven business for this OS instead of a product sales driven business.

It'll be interesting to see how (And if) they can make that strategy work, given that the 10%~ ad-network market share doesn't give them an awful lot of scope to capitalise on targeted ads like Google does.

Assuming this is the case, it seems like a backwards way of going at the problem – get the advertisers on board, and surely the users will flock to view those ads.

She might, but clearly she's weighed that decision (Pun intended) and–as a rational human being with agency–decided the value of losing 100lbs is not worth it.

That fine. We're all adults, we can make those choices; and it's wrong to shame somebody into making a different choice — the choice you might feel is right for her.

Reframing the argument: Clearly a multilingual speaking person is better than a monolingual speaker; they can participate better in the global economy & contribute to a broader society. But learning other languages takes effort, time, and work.

I might say that if you don't learn other languages, you are a bad, lazy, incompetent person; a lesser person than I. Clearly you should be shamed into making the right choice about languages, my choice about languages.

Surely you can see that in a free society this is unethical. You've weighed the choice of learning other languages, and decided against it. It's not my place to tell you my choice is right and yours is wrong; that's what you're there for — to make your own choices.