The big win of Graffiti was that the Graffiti recognizer was simple - perhaps an order of magnitude simpler than Newton's, maybe more like two. If you invested the small amount of mental effort to learn Graffiti, which was not at all out of proportion to the cost or utility of the Palm, you had a predictable and reliable control mapping with a low error rate, because your brain's internal model of Graffiti was reasonably close to the actual algorithm. Moreover, the process of learning it was actually kind of fun.

Applying this realization to put a good UI on Wolfram Alpha would not be difficult at all. It would not even require removing the giant electronic brain, which could remain as a toy or exploratory feature. Again, it is a perfectly decent toy, and it may even be a reasonable way to explore the space of visualization tools and datasets that WA provides.

http://unqualified-reservations.blogspot.com/2009/07/wolfram-alpha-and-hubristic-user.html

Wonga

What’s awesome about the Internet is how it breaks up monopolistic markets where middlemen unfairly gobble up outsized fees, leaving us little choice but to keep paying them.

- Techcrunch about Wonga credit service

Thats my vision too. Digital real estate agents anyone? One click Tax-advisor? WWW plumber?

A new debate

WSJ is jerking around with the Internet.

The way to start a passionate debate today is make a statement no longer than three words, i.e.:
The Future is Free
The Internet is Dead

Great comment Mr. Ben Atlas

People always knew it, Google is a browser

Seriously

60m east-europeans less

Europe’s 2008 population of 736 million is projected

to decline to 685 million by 2050 because

of its low country-level TFRs and in spite of

continuing net immigration. The decline, however,

is expected to take place primarily in eastern

and southern Europe. Eastern Europe’s 2008

population of 295 million is projected to decrease

to 231 million by mid-century, while southern

Europe is projected to decrease from 155 million

to 150 million.

http://www.prb.org/pdf08/63.3highlights.pdf

Some thoughts on that:

Austrian economy, that highly gained from the new EU member states, will suffer this demographic shift.

Western and Northern Europe are stable, but require higher automatisation of semis-skilled labor.

More semi-skilled immigration from the south - racist parties gain but society is to old for Nazi-cruelties.

US still dominates the century, due its founding myth its open to skilled labor immigration and is highly competitive.

India, Brazil are the new force, if China doesn't make it to become a mature service economy before it grows too old. Russia will decline.