I was with you until nr. 7. Definitely not going to happen. If some genius makes it happen, expect it to be an epic failure. 8 and 10 maybe, 9 I don't know...

I would be interested in your reasoning for why it would fail. All major arms makers have a demonstration biometric activated weapon, and there is a lot of pressure in the US on private gun ownership. I see these forces coming together to force biometrics as a requirement for owning a new gun.

Not sure what triggered the filters on your response @random but I appreciate you taking the time to write it out. I can see where your scepticism comes from and agree with you that its a stretch. We'll have to see if the gun manufacturers can pull it off or not.

A couple of comments on your comment, at the 2012 SHOT Show there were people showing biometric trigger locks and gun safes, last year the iP1[1] (RFID) was there. At that time both Sig and Glock indicated they would have something similar this year. We'll know in a bit more than 20 days :-).

If I understood the essence of your argument, it was that this is a hard problem that gun manufacturers are not investing in solving, and under investing will only yield ineffective solutions.

I can see the point, I'll wait to see what people are showing next month before I cede my prediction though :-)

[1] http://fortune.com/2015/04/22/smart-guns-theyre-ready-are-we...

(My reply is specific to this happening in 2016. There will one day be Judge Dredd-like firearms. I don't see that being widespread in my lifetime, though.)

If you work in a company developing a hardware product you will learn, amongst other things, this:

1) The demonstration item is very likely hacked together at the last moment, and would 100% fail in the market if it was put into production at the time of the demo. (Even if your company does everything right, you are frequently only a part of the total product).

2) You never use the latest, shiniest, unproven technology. You use the simplest, production-friendly technology that will perform the job. Otherwise you are building a product higher than necessary failure rates.

(This is assuming that you aren't working for Google, Apple, Elon Musk or someone else who can put 100+ engineers on a sub-project and/or invent new meterials etc).

My assumptions are thus:

1) The manufacturers probably did the demonstrations to a) not be outdone by the competition and b) gauge demand.

2) No arms manufacturer has a robust, proven design that is affordable for civilian small arms. Going out on a limb I would also guess that none of them have either an experienced embedded engineering team or an intimate, effective working relationship with an external team. This is a significant expense (as opposed to a mockup for demonstration purposes), from which (3) follows:

3) The only way that a majority of customers will pay extra for this (anti-)feature is if legislation forces them to. California (and a few other states?) might try this, but given the NRA's lobbying power (and other factors) it won't be federal. If California tries it, it will be only for new firearms and perhaps even only for a certain group of sales/type of firearms, as a test. I don't see many such firearms being sold in the next 20 (at least) years.

Now, everything up to here has been some nice mental masturbation, rendered moot by the reality of a biometric-restricted firearm. These problems are non-exhaustive and can be solved, but it won't be cheap, easy or quick to market.

1) When the cheap "fingerprint" sensor with barely functioning, insecure firmware in your phone fails, no problem. If that happens on a firearm, big problem.

How can it fail? Battery runs out. Sensor gets smashed. Blood on your fingers. Finger cut/crushed AND blood on it. / Gelatine fingerprint. Real finger severed by criminals. Attacker owns a screwdriver.

2) RFID.

How can it fail? Battery runs out. Backup battery runs out. Tag gets smashed. RFID frequency gets jammed. / Tag gets recorded by someone walking past you. Tag gets recorded by someone with a directional antenna. When strong encryption is finally added, the implementation is flawed and gets cracked. One of numerous other RFID issues gets exploited (see Defcon, Chaos Communication Congress et al.). Attacker owns a screwdriver.

3) Dynamic Grip Recognition

How can it fail? Owner weakened by attack, fatigue or medical condition. Dominant hand damaged.

4) Conversion kits using any of the above

Since the aren't integral to the weapon, disabling or removing them will likely be very easy.

5) Source code of the firearm

You want to put a binary blob on my firearm? Firstly, no. Secondly I envision some interesting "unintended acceleration"-like lawsuits. (That reportedly cost Toyota about $1000 per line of source code)

Addressing all of these issues will take a long time and will be really expensive. And I'll bet the market will then end up with a DRM'd firearm that the owner won't really own. Maybe even connected to the internet, with a GPS and geographic fencing. There is a final addition which I would actually support: a screen and loudspeaker. Because then you can force the owner to view educational material on firearm safety, anger management, conflict resolution, the results of employing violence, responsible drug use and where they can find counselling w.r.t. all of the above.

Some things I would keep pushing for instead of an unreasonable electromechanical technological solution:

1) Firearm safety training in school / pre-school (ie. that it's not a toy, don't point it at people etc.). You should be training your kids regardless of your views on firearm ownership, you're not hiding the dangers of knives or cars from them, neither should you hide the dangers of firearms from them. The Brady terrorists will be against this, the practical result will be a contribution to continued accidental discharges by children.

2) Require all firearms, in all states, to be stored in a safe (which can't be opened (without a key!) by a three year old) when not in use. The NRA extremists need to stop politicking when it comes to requiring training and safe storage. Once again, a contribution to continued accidental discharges by children.

3) Instead of the planned invasion of Syria, put money into education in an intelligent way. Not into arguing about the math curriculum, but into social programs etc. to make finishing school and contributing to society more profitable (both in tangible and non-tangible ways) than doing drive-by shootings.

4) Decriminalize all drugs and let gangsters register their illegal firearms and join newly set-up shooting clubs with competitions and other places they can find stimulating jobs.

There, I've solved the USA. What's next?

PS. Something I think will (are?) sell(ling) are biometric trigger locks. People won't care that they don't work, since current trigger locks don't work either.

"10) Nintendo ships a fun to use game console."

I'd rather they didn't even try. Their iOS foray felt like a step in the right direction to me.

I was wondering why 8 isn't more wide-spread. We tend to see all these fun applications in tech news but the unfortunately obvious route for UAVs is for war/terror purposes (beyond the predator drones). On a smaller scale, these will be used as a replacement for suicide bombers and even targeted kills.

2016 Anti-drone defenses will boom.

I am surprised too that NATO troops don't use smaller drones to check for snipers and ambushes.

I see tiny surveillance drones on every helmet, with HUD controls. Look into every room before entering; see what's coming up around every bend. And land back on the helmet to recharge! Like the SAW, need one on every team.

They're visible and loud. And unless you're using something with decent radio/battery range, you're still in the visual / shooting range.

Because it still isn't cost effective. A drone that can be guided, either autonomously or by a human, will cost at least, what, $80 wholesale? That will almost equal the price of the ordinance. Causing a lot of casualties at a low cost is one of the major appeals of field artillery and explosives.

Now, maybe it would make more sense for the assassination of carefully guarded targets. But it will probably be a few more years before that technology is more reliable than strapping a vest containing c4 on someone.

We we have seen the army deploying their "smart munitions" gun this year (http://arstechnica.co.uk/information-technology/2015/10/army...) the purpose of which is to defeat enemies behind cover.

That works when you are in 'gun range' of their cover and can shoot at them. But if you're pinned down? What about the enemies rear area where they are staging? How quickly can you set up and tear down a mortar emplacement?

Giving the soldier on the ground the ability to send a round exactly where they want to, behind cover, even inside a building. And I think you've created a very strong force multiplier. Given the the current state of the art in having locally operated visual recognition on the drone itself (http://www.csail.mit.edu/drone_flies_through_forest_at_30_mp...) to either avoid obstacles or target specific objects makes the weapon even more effective.

In my opinion when these things make their debut they will be as disruptive as the machine gun.

I hate to write this, but it must be more expensive than $80 to raise, brain-wash and train a human to become a suicide bomber..?

What makes you think that Google will have a layoff?

Softening of the search advertising margins without a new business picking up the revenue slack will put pressure on growth.

Why do you think search advertising margins are going down?

Margins went up YoY in Q3 2015: https://investor.google.com/earnings/2015/Q3_google_earnings...

From that press release ...

   Aggregate cost-per-click 	   (11)% 	 (1)%
   Cost-per-click on Google
   websites 	                   (16)% 	 (2)%
   Cost-per-click on 
   Google Network Members' websites   (4)% 	 1%

That is the search advertising margin eroding. Google has been compensating for that in a number of ways, from putting more ads on their sites (more "inventory") to re-writing rules ("no mobile for third parties") to changing splits with non-Google sites. The underlying cancer though is that Advertisers are more and more likely to see Microsoft Bing, Facebook, and Yahoo! ads as "equivalent" to Google's ads. And they split their spend, and they have been less and less impressed with the "results" of their advertising, so they pay less. All symptoms of a maturing market and one that has been going on for years. And as it continues it puts more and more pressure on Google to make up its margins in other ways. My guess is that 2016 is the first year they are going to have to cut staff across the board to keep their margins up.

So you're confounding average CPC with search advertising margin. Great. And then making a bunch of statements about the cause for a decrease in CPC with no factual basis. Here's another plausible narrative:

Mix of traffic is shifting as traffic builds in new platforms (e.g. mobile, emerging markets, YouTube), knocking down average CPC. Then we're getting a Simpson's paradox (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Simpson%27s_paradox) effect causing average CPC to decrease.

Actually not so much, there is a fun class they used to give new employees at Google (called Nooglers) called "life of a dollar" (well that was what it was called when I joined) which talked about how Google made money with search advertising. And one of the key things about that class was how the cost per click, or the amount of money Google got when someone clicked a link, was fundamentally tied to how all of the other processes made (or didn't make) money. After I left Google four years later, I actually joined another search startup called Blekko where not only did I get to see the "high level" view of where Google made its money (and how much it would share with us if we used their ads) I also got to see the contracts involved and the clauses where Google wanted to protect its margins. We also partnered with one of Google's largest advertising redistributors, Infospace.

When I left in 2010 I started also following Google's financial reports. Year after year, following that indicator you could see pressure on Google's search ad business, and you could watch Microsoft's Bing ads get to be more and more profitable. Did you know that if in 2010 Microsoft could get the same CPC as Google did for their ads on Bing that Bing would have out performed all other parts of Microsoft in terms of revenue and profit? As a search vendor in the middle I could see what Microsoft shared with us and what Google shared with us, and we could back compute the actual CPC, and the ratio of the CPC. Whats more we could watch Microsoft's going up while Google's was (and is) continuing to go down.

I was also there as their CPC plummeted and they told Infospace (and through them us) that we could no longer show Google ads on Mobile search. No only Google could from now on. And that wasn't just us, that was everyone. And we've watched as more and more of their search page became "sponsored" in one form or another, and how people with Google ads on their web sites were getting less and less money, even though their traffic was the same or better.

I've been watching the Google money machine slowly deflate for the last 5 years (coming up on 6) and called almost every move they've made prior to them making it. All based on understanding that rounded to the nearest billion dollars, nothing in Google makes any money except search advertising. Even Youtube can barely break even these days and we've seen how the 99% of Youtube "stars" actually have real day jobs rather than be able to produce content for that service. We've seen Google working hard to "yank back" the whole Android is open source thing, in the name of "user experience" to be sure, but attacking Cyanogen? Threatening Samsung? Forcing HTC to throw itself under the Microsoft bus? And paying for more and more traffic, $4 billion a year? how much further can they push that life vest?

The good news here is that predictions are like freebies, you win some you lose some. No alien contact this year, sorry Inquirer! But I've been more right than wrong about predicting Google's road and I'm confident in this one too. Google is stuck between a need to please the street and the cost of engineers that produce no revenue. They have way more of the latter than they need, and from what I can tell they have pretty much been aggressive as they can at getting rid of people "gradually" who were in the bottom 10%. And their CPCs continue to fall double digit percentages year over year, and they don't have any business that is growing at that rate. Throw in an EU anti-monopoly monkey wrench, or a Facebook throwing their search over to Bing, or the EU getting their tax policy together and eliminating the double irish? Suddenly the need to shed costs fast will overwhelm their ability to do so quietly.

I kind of thought they would end up doing that this year but they dodged a bit by turning into Alphabet which gave them some new accounting tricks.

I'm sticking by my prediction they are going to have a layoff next year of between 8 and 12% of the company. They could surprise me by putting a bunch of people into an Alphabet subsidiary and then "divesting" themselves of that subsidiary. It would have to take 8 - 12% of the company though to make it worth while.

I understand your angst. Nobody likes to think about the company where they work having layoffs (hey I'm working at IBM which Cringely is constantly predicting will explode at any moment!) But the truth is that its really all sort of mechanical. Goods and services go out and money comes in. The costs of delivering those goods and services has a variety of components, the largest of which is often personnel.

And if you look around and realize the company could be making all the money it is currently making with or without you, and without you it would be banking the cost of your salary and benefits. Well then you need to be especially mindful of the indicators for the current business, and the growth rate of the revenue your project is contributing too the business versus the cost of keeping you around. It won't be personal, it will just be the way it is.

Let me see if I've got this right.

TL;DR: you worked at Google where they said average CPC was important and you worked on a search related startup that sold relabeled Google ads (presumably through the AdSense for Search program?) where Google paid some contractually fixed fraction of revenue on searches (revenue on these searches is not necessarily correlated with revenue on main Google search, correct?). At this startup, they wouldn't let you resell these ads for mobile searches because it would hurt margins (seems like shaky reasoning to me, who doesn't like more money / more profit?).

Then a smattering of recent news stories with tangential relationships to your main thesis about margins (YouTube (when have the margins been broken out on this?), Android (not sure how this fits into your narrative about the decline of Google's growth)) mixed in with some real medium term competitive threats (EU, Facebook/Bing (didn't FB used to redirect their search traffic to Bing? not sure that made much of a difference)).

Here's some alternative narratives:

a) There's far more to profitability on online advertising than average CPC, like query mix as I mentioned before. Additionally, advertising on Google owned & operated properties have been continually far more profitable and growing at a much faster pace than relabeled search advertising or AdSense on third party websites. Google has refocused their engineering / sales efforts on advertising products on their owned & operated properties and de-emphasized properties like Blekko.

b) Google's PE ratio has gone from <20x in 2010 to >30x today. The market believes Google's growth prospects are brighter than ever.

To summarize, I also keep a careful eye on Google / other tech company's financials and how they relate to both my personal work and larger trends in the industry as a whole. I simply disagree with your theses that a) search engine margins are decreasing and b) that the search engine business needs to grow at a faster rate for Google to continue to grow sustainably due to a) the continued power of direct response search advertising and b) other growth areas like video, brand, mobile, and new markets.