Glayden

Precisely. Can we even see a complete simulation of E. Coli?

It's disheartening how much of science news and research today is all about hype, smoke, and mirrors. It's becoming more about catching fleeting fame and money grabbing than actually producing interesting advances and results.

Exactly how would they scale this when you have something like a hundred trillion synapses between the neurons in a brain? Mind you this is falsely assuming that there is nothing of worth to simulate within individual neurons/synapses. Our current technological infrastructure isn't even in the ballpark of being good enough to deal with actually LARGE graph data structures, and people are getting excited about this nonsense. They talk up these simulations, but we don't even know the basic details about these things yet.

Let's see a complete simulation of a spider's brain from the bottom up before talking about simulating the human brain. Let's figure out precisely what is going on in the brain of a spider. I will be surprised if we accomplish that in the next 50 years.

Kudos to Newegg, but this system is sooo very broken and badly in need of reform.

Large established and heavily profitable organizations like Newegg might be able to pull this off, but what about all the small startups that are forced into bankruptcy by settling when the trolls come knocking? They don't have the resources to put up a fight. If larger companies tend to fight the tedious and expensive legal battles or avoid getting harassed by other companies by building up their own stash of patents that they can use to retaliate, in the long term what it really does is incentivize companies to go after larger numbers of smaller fish that can't put up a fight.

I think we would do better to follow Bhutan's lead and start using some metrics along the lines of Gross National Happiness in our analysis of how our country (and world) is doing. Ultimately metrics like GDP are only meaningful to our interests to the extent that they indicate the quality of life and sustainability of improved quality of life for people. We lose sight of where the real underlying value lies far too often.