Stupid. Just because traffic is going down doesn't mean the technology or the company doesn't deserve some serious attention:

http://singularityhub.com/2009/07/27/wolfram-alpha-a-force-t...

"Stupid." The title wasn't "wolfram alpha deserves no attention".

A fad is defined by a traffic spike followed by a return to normal.

So a group of people checked it out and it didn't stick to them. That's ok. No need for anger.

If there's no users, why would it deserve so much attention?

It is completely irrelevant how many users use it. If it is a great tool for just a minority, then it deserves attention in that minority.

edit: Am I missing about the number of users deciding about the quality of something? Or why on earth am I getting downmodded? I don't have a problem with that, but I feel stupid and I rather not.

> If it is a great tool for just a minority, then it deserves attention in that minority.

Agreed. What I didn't agree was with the "serious attention" you mentioned earlier. btw, I didn't downvote you.

Millions of people can't be wrong!

Completely different in that it is a totally original piece. The same in the sense that they focus on the same topic, but in fact this one is a response to the other.

Ah, thanks for clarifying that.

Should I delete my question?

Robotrout,

I don't have the specific info you are looking for...but if you really want to look into this further, you could contact one of the main researchers behind the project:

http://www.agri.gov.il/en/people/875.aspx

The $.05 cost per plant does not mean that the unit cost is $.05...that is just the cost to buy proper coverage for one plant, even if that means that there is one sensor for every 100 plants.

story was updated shortly after you read it to mention that not every plant requires the chip. Like you say, there must be other stuff out there as well, so it is unclear how useful this would be versus other competing solutions

Marshall has a lot more wrong than the year. I think his ideas are pretty ludicrous. He thinks that in the next decade or so robots will replace humans as construction workers. Does he have any idea how hard of a challenge that is? More likely is that robots will complement humans in construction, just as they are in warehousing, long before they completely replace humans.

Many might mistakenly think that genomes are already being sequenced for $1,000 by companies like 23andme and decodeme, but these companies do not offer full genome sequencing. Instead they only analyze a few hundred thousand hot spots in your dna called SNP’s that can tell you lots of interesting things about your dna, but not the whole story. Fully sequencing every single one of the approximately 3 billion base pairs of your dna is a completely different scenario and the price of doing this is coming down rapidly.