There are currently 315 million people in the United States, but NPD estimates that there are 425 million devices operating in U.S. households. And with cheaper tablets and other devices hitting the market at a rapid clip, that number is sure to continue to grow.

The way I see it, we either start reproducing or learn to speak binary code -- fast.

h/t BetaBeat

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So they did.

According to Studio Roosegaarde the highways of the future are safer, cleaner and more environmentally sound. The lab has developed solar powered glow-in-the-dark roads that charge during the day to illuminate your evening drive, dynamic asphalt paint that transforms in response to road conditions like ice and sleet, and car lanes that double as electric car chargers by using magnetic fields under the asphalt.

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After climbing in the first three quarters of this year, the Dow dropped in the fourth quarter for the firt time since 2008. Despite ongoing concerns over the fiscal cliff, the Dow climbed 166 points today, its best ever showing on New Years Eve. The broader S&P 500 index had its best New Year's Eve since 1974.

WSJ:

The S&P 500 and [technology heavy] Nasdaq both rose for the eighth year in the past 10, after slipping last year. The S&P stands 111% above its 2009 low, and the Nasdaq is 138% above its.

These astounding gains show that the great recession was a once in a lifetime buying opportunity for those who still had faith in the markets (or money to invest).

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The social gaming company skyrocketed into the collective brainspace with addictive fare like the simulation "FarmVille" and "Words with Friends." But the public markets haven't been kind to the company. Its ongoing restructuring effort involves cutting more than 100 jobs, closing offices and eliminating more than a dozen of its titles.

TechCrunch wrote that, "Investors feared it had become bloated, free virality on Facebook had been curtailed, competitors were proliferating, and the shift of Facebook users to mobile from Zynga’s stronghold on the desktop canvas would break the company."Zynga went public in December 2011 at $10 per share. On Monday morning it was trading at $2.37. It has not traded above $4 since July.

Games shut down this month include "PetVille," "Mafia Wars 2," "FishVille," "Vampire Wars," and "Treasure Isle."

TechCrunch:

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A simple story, maybe, but in that personal shift you can hear the echo of 2012's biggest technological transformation. Call it the year of the great untethering: In 2012 "mobile" triumphed. We've seen this paradigm shift rolling down the pike for a long time. Now it's here. The decline of the PC is no longer subject to debate.

And that's a big deal. The changing sales figures for desktops and laptops versus tablets and smartphones signify more than just an interesting tech business trend. This is a story about the reconfiguration of society around the small screen, a development that has implications for the media, entertainment, and advertising industries; for our privacy and our economy; for business and politics. If you're not figuring out how to play in what the tech industry likes to call the "smart connected device space" then you have already lost. And if you are not paying attention to what these devices will do to us as well as for us, then you are criminally negligent. Society is changing fast as we get more mobile. Can we keep up?

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The Daily Dot speculates, probably correctly, that the top two answers, "Facebook" and "Wiki" owe their popularity more to clumsy computer users than genuine curiosity. The rest of the list, though, can be read as a guide to the things people want to know about that they don't want others to know they want to know about. Except maybe Google.

1) Facebook

2) Wiki

3) Deaths in 2012

4) "One Direction"

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As Apple stock continues it’s a long steep slide, investors and market watchers are speculating about whether the Cupertino, Calif.-based company can regain the mojo that made it a market favorite. But a report in today’s Financial Times (subscription required) suggests that the Android platform, now installed on three out of four smartphones sold worldwide, is exercising a gravitational pull on app developers.

Google’s Android has long lagged behind Apple in the number of available apps and the number of apps sold, but the balance appears to be shifting. “Android is the platform of growth,” Misha Lyalin, CEO of Zeptolab, which puts out the popular game “Cut the Rope” told the paper.

The article quotes one techie who personifies the platform rift:

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"Some of the shrinkage in sales can be attributed to more fuel-efficient cars," Short writes. "But that presumably would be minor over shorter time frames and would be offset to some extent by population growth." He also notes that this list of top 10 best-selling vehicles has its share of gas guzzling pickups and SUVs.

And the sales drop has taken place at a time when the population has grown. Short finds that per-capita gas sales have declined almost 20 percent since March 1989.

What's going on here? Short sees several factors at work: 1) Urban populations have climbed, 2) Fewer people in the aging population have to get to work and 3) More young people are able to work from home or, due to social media, are less interested in leaving the house. We've become a nation less demographically inclined to drive.

h't Quartz

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So why is the once-unstoppable favorite suddenly in such a fix?

Yes, Apple is up some 25 percent for the year. But it was only four months ago when the price per share sat at $700.

In the New York Times, economist Edward Zabitsky suggested that "as Samsung has surpassed Apple as the leading handset maker, apps have become more important than the devices that carry them, and handsets are increasingly being evaluated on their ability to access the cloud and interact with other devices." Zabitsky, long bearish on Apple, suggested those trends are bad news for Apple's long-term competitive situation.

In Business Insider, Henry Blodget posited several theories, many of them also suggesting concern that Apple's long dominance may be waning as the smart phone market evolves and lower-priced -- and lower-profit margin -- phones take a larger piece of the annual sales.

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As targeted advertising has fueled the growth of internet giants like Google and Facebook, the $70 billion TV commercial market has remained in the dark. Sure there are beer ads during the Super Bowl, but to a far greater degree than on the internet, advertisers just pay for their spots and hope to find a receptive audience. That could change next year with the debut of a new technology from Gracenote, a division of Sony.

TechCrunch reports, “Gracenote‘s new ad replacement system combines viewing habits with personal info to show you more relevant commercials.” While some consumers will undoubtedly appreciate a technology that delivers ads for things they're more likely to buy—reporter Josh Constine writes “I literally left my meeting with company giddy with the possibilities” – some blowback about personal data collection is probably inevitable, like the last gasps of a defeated army.

Constine describes the technology as follows:

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This week brings two radically different perspectives on how robots are changing the world. Marketplace quotes Jaan Tallinn, an Estonian programmer who helped develop Skype, on the dangers of self-replicating technology: "Once we have something that is no longer under control" says Tallinn, "once technological development is yanked out of our hands, it doesn't have to continue to be beneficial to humans."

Machines which we can't control, which sounds a lot like the grey goo problem, is just one of the topics that will be studied at Cambridge University’s Centre for the Study of Existential Risk, an organization co-founded by Tallinn to examine threats to the continuing existence of humanity.

Tallinn explains:

Humanity is seriously under-invested in them. For example, we're spending more money in lipstick research than we are in making sure that we survive this century as a species. Worrying about long-term issues is definitely something that very few people are doing. Therefore my time and my money can actually make a big difference in that area.

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Nestled within the "Rights" sections of Instagram's updated terms, Instagram and Facebook can share or sell photos (to ad agencies, for example) without notifying users or compensating them for it:

"To help us deliver interesting paid or sponsored content or promotions, you agree that a business or other entity may pay us to display your username, likeness, photos (along with any associated metadata), and/or actions you take, in connection with paid or sponsored content or promotions, without any compensation to you."

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There are currently nine symbols representing different degrees of compliance with privacy standards. If a website sells your data to outside parties, it gets a dollar sign inside an orange circle with an upward pointed arrow. If it doesn't, it gets a plain old green circle around a dollar sign. Confused? You're not alone. The new set of icons is complicated, and that's pretty much by design. As Casey Oppenheim of Disconnect explains, Internet privacy is a hard concept to boil down to a visual language. "How do you convey data, intent, all these different things?"

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A lawsuit that might have clarified this increasingly important question, PhoneDog LLC vs. Kravitz, has settled out of court, Fortune reports:

The mobile device and app review site sued former employee Noah Kravitz in federal court, claiming that, when Kravitz quit and took 17,000 Twitter followers with him, he was in effect stealing a client list. According to PhoneDog's calculations, each follower was worth $2.50 per month over the 18 months Kravitz tweeted on the company's behalf. So, the lawsuit said, Kravitz owed his erstwhile employer $340,000.

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In the second most embarrassing tech flub of the year, (Facebook's IPO) Apple's iPhone 5 included a new but comically flawed maps program. The release resulted in the firing of an executive and a rare public setback for the company. In cartography, it turns out, experience matters and now Google has released a new maps app for sometimes rival Apple's flagship phone. In a near worshipful review, New York Times gadget fiend David Pogue finds that Google's maps app is accurate:

Hundreds of Google employees have spent years hand-editing the maps, fixing the thousands of errors that people report every day. (In the new app, you report a mistake just by shaking the phone.) And since 2006, Google’s Street View vehicles have trawled 3,000 cities, photographing and confirming the cartographical accuracy of five million miles of roads.

Now iPhone users won't be bumping into each other because they're lost, they'll be bumping into each other because they're staring at the maps app on their iPhones.

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Here are the "Modern Seinfeld" episodes we're yearning for the most:

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While cyberspace is often idealized as a transnational and anarchic mode of communication, increasingly, different nations want a role in governing and policing it. This contest for control of the Internet is a topic of discussion at the U.N.’s International Telecommunications Union conference in Dubai this week. The ITU is a century and a half old -- the “T” once stood for “telegraph" --  and its members are countries. Just as countries have different ideas about governing their people, they don’t all agree about how to regulate a technology that transcends national borders. This has created an opening for a group of autocracies who want more control of the Internet.

Like many transnational issues -- climate change comes to mind -- the devil is in the less-than-stimulating details. Who has time to worry that all of the world’s IP addresses – those unique location indicators that allow a computer network to function -- keep running?  As long as we can share family vacation photos on Facebook and watch the silly YouTube of the day, all is right in our digital universe. But as Internet usage continues to grow this issue is anything but settled.

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Why? Odds are that your imagination will be adding things to the present world. I am sorry, but this approach is exactly backward: the way to do it rigorously is to take away from the future, reduce from it, simply, things that do not belong to the coming times.

I am not saying that new technologies will not emerge — something new will rule its day, for a while. What is currently fragile will be replaced by something else, of course. But this “something else” is unpredictable. In all likelihood, the technologies you have in your mind are not the ones that will make it, no matter your perception of their fitness and applicability — with all due respect to your imagination.

*   *   *

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Now they are known across the world as the co-founders of Reddit, the "front page of the internet." In a recent interview, they discussed their journey and gave a fascinating glimpse into how the site came to be and what it takes to launch a start-up:

h/t TechCrunch

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Police only need an administrative subpoena, issued without a judge's approval, to read emails that have been opened or that are more than 180 days old. Police simply swear an email is relevant to an investigation, and then obtain a subpoena to force an Internet company to turn it over.

By this standard, emailed bank statements, health records and other supposedly confidential information is much more vulnerable than the same information sent through the postal service.

The amended law, written by Senate Judiciary Committee Chairman Patrick Leahy, D.-Vt., requires a search warrant based on probable cause to access a citizen's private email. Leahy, an early adopter of a sort, also wrote the original 1986 act, which dates to almost a decade before the World Wide Web.

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