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Tuesday, 26 July 2011 18:00

Clive Thompson on The Breakthrough Myth

Illustration: Dev Gupta

Tech people love stories about breakthrough innovations—gadgets or technologies that emerge suddenly and take over, like the iPhone or Twitter. Indeed, there’s a whole industry of pundits, investors, and websites trying feverishly to predict the Next New Big Thing. The assumption is that breakthroughs are inherently surprising, so it takes special genius to spot one coming.

But that’s not how innovation really works, if you ask Bill Buxton. A pioneer in computer graphics who is now a principal researcher at Microsoft, he thinks paradigm-busting inventions are easy to see ...

  • 12:00 pm  | 
  • Wired August 2011

Joan of Arc...

Savor that wild, unmetered American Internet while it lasts. With the two largest ISPs in the US, AT&T and Comcast, already imposing bandwidth caps on their subscribers, and companies like Time Warner toying with the idea of metering, the days of all-you-can-eat Internet could be coming to an end. For now, the ceilings remain relatively high, typically between 100 and 250 GB a month. But there’s no guarantee that those numbers won’t shrink or—more likely—fail to scale as our bandwidth hunger grows. Just ask our friends up north: After a ruling by Canada’s regulatory agency last year...

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