cc licensed ( BY NC ND ) flickr photo shared by ViaMoi

I've spent some time on Quora, Yahoo Answers, and similar sites, but the one thing that continues to frustrate me while I use them is that there are so many similar questions with similar answers, and there are so many answers delivered as attempts at humor or cleverness which do not really address the intent of the person asking the question, and therefore are clutter on the page.

These sites, however, seem sold on the idea of retaining everything within a question in some form. If you are trying to provide a service where people can get great answers to good questions, you need to be able to remove material that is not providing that value. I'm not talking about deleting controversial answers; those should remain available. But let the material of no substance go away. If you just gray it out and tell me it was downvoted, I don't know whether it was controversial or just junk, so I still have to invest in clicking it and reading it. This is undesirable.

Secondly, and most importantly, there must be a way for two similar questions asked to be merged. Consider the following questions:

1. How do I learn to play the guitar?
2. What specific things should beginners focus on when learning guitar?
3. What's the first thing you should master when learning to play the guitar?

These are three actual individual questions on Quora right now. Quora and other QA sites become more difficult to navigate if these similar questions are not merged into one question. There is also the value added of increasing the likelihood of finding the one really great answer if you merge the questions.

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cc licensed ( BY ) flickr photo shared by Patrick Hoesly

Your smartphone gets a bit smarter.

When you receive a text message, your phone comprehends it—and here's where it gets interesting—attempts to generate a reply for you. In the beginning, it is only able to recognize simple YES or NO questions and give you the option of replying either way, with some styling based on how you replied to other YES or NO questions, e.g., "Sure!" or "Nope."

After a while, however, the phone will be able to construct simple replies based on how you've responded to similar texts in the past, taking into account the time of day, who you are responding to, and various other factors.

Of course, it always gives you the option to click a button, bypass the generated response, and compose one of your own. Sometimes, it might give you up to three options to choose from.

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PS: I realize the title of this post suggests another idea, viz, actually making a choose your own adventure that can be played via short text messages and simple alphanumerical replies. You could do that, but you would probably be better off making that an app.

cc licensed ( BY ) flickr photo shared by Yutaka Tsutano

Starting a company and bring it to a $1 million valuation using only the iPhone or iPad.

Haven't decided on which business idea will make for the best candidate, but the rules are simple: anything related to the idea must be done on the iPhone or iPad. This includes all creative development and all communications. The challenge is to go from nothing to a $1 million valuation with only the device. Meetings via mail and FaceTime; development via apps available through iTunes. While this may be easier with the iPad, I think it will be even more impressive with the iPhone.

Perhaps Apple will express an interest in participating.

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cc licensed ( BY NC ) flickr photo shared by GrungeTextures

Before it can ever become a pothole, the road heals itself.

This is a work in progress even as an idea and has been sitting in queue on this website for months, but I'm fairly certain it is at least possible. A material is made that that, when subjected to an electric current, changes from a strong solid into something between a solid and liquid, something with the consistency of putty. At that point, much like the putty that comes in a jar, gravity slowly smooths the surface of the material. If the material can be made rugged enough, we will be able to use it on the surfaces of roads much like asphalt.

A few challenges inhere. Firstly, we have the issue of inclines. If gravity is responsible for the settling of the material in its altered state, any significant incline creates an unacceptable result.

Perhaps we construct the road in two layers where the lower layer is a mesh of wire for the delivery of the current, and the upper layer is the special material for the road itself. In this way, the entire thing is made electromagnetic so as the road is repairing itself, the material, sufficiently magnetic, is drawn toward the lower layer when it is in its putty phase. This seems to work for small inclines, but not necessarily for larger ones.

Secondly, we have the material conduct electricity only at a certain level of current or voltage, and much like water when struck by lightning, the material isn't too high of a conductor, so there is a radius to the edge of the shift in material state, allowing us to heal a small portion without affecting the other parts of the surface.

Recent developments show that plastics can be engineered to heal themselves. If we can apply this property to recycled plastics used in combination with other road materials, we may have a functional self-healing road.

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cc licensed flickr photo shared by Andrew Morrell Photography

Whenever I'm watching a sporting event, there are usually several shots from the air—for example, the baseball field from above or the domed arena where the football game is being held, or the massive parking lot around a stadium.

From the air, people and cars create a certain mosaic effect that creates a sort of living canvas for branding advertisements. Imagine, just before breaking away from the game or coming back to it, the crowd in the stands morphs into a translucent Coca-Cola banner, or superimposed on the roof of the domed arena is Pepsi's logo, or the parking lot around the arena becomes a bunch of Dr. Pepper cans rolling around. Soda theme.

You can combine the popular look of projecting things on buildings and surfaces without the projectors because it's all added digitally; people at the event wouldn't be aware of it. The borders of things would be digitally marked and those vectors tracked as the camera moves so that the areas remain defined.

Aerial photography at sporting events seems like a good entry point, as people in crowds or cars in parking lots are not individually recognizable anyway, so you aren't removing interesting imagery. Other applications readily come to mind.

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The state of intellectual property currently is unstable and unsustainable. (See the infographic below.) Copyrights and patents aside, there is a third form of intellectual property that is rarely talked about—the trade secret. Trade secrets are not published like patents and copyrighted works, and often only exist in the brains of a few individuals.

Shifting gears a bit, there have been some recent scientific breakthroughs in neuroscience—specifically, the ability to erase bad memories chemically and identify specific thoughts through fMRI imaging.

The idea here, and it would be a terrifying idea, would be to combine the two.

Imagine a company suing a former employee over their possession of a trade secret. Imagine that company demanding that the guilty party have that trade secret, the thought, identified and erased from that person's brain.

Preposterous! Indeed. Right now, it would be preposterous to think that such a thing would ever be allowed, but new laws are always coming into being. After all, the giants of the corporate world—some of whom are currently involved in patent wars—have a tremendous amount of political influence as well (e.g., SOPA, PIPA, ACTA), so much so that people have started to label this country as a de facto corporatocracy.

To think that a company would be so ridiculous as to demand such a thing, consider that Apple recently sued Samsung to prevent it from making a "rectangular product shape with all four corners uniformly rounded."

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Source: http://frugaldad.com

cc licensed ( BY SD ) flickr photo shared by sludgegulper

Why isn't it possible for me to select a folder of emails in my webmail client (or a group of emails sharing a tag) and export them to a .zip archive?

I think this would be especially useful for those who have temporary clients or projects. After the project is finished, the correspondence could be easily archived with other files on the person's local drive (or uploaded to a cloud drive), and then removed from the webmail client. This would keep the webmail client uncluttered and easier to search and navigate, while providing the user with the information they might need to reference at some later point.

I realize you could just keep them in a webmail folder, but it gets cumbersome to manage a couple dozen folders or tags---especially for files that might only need to be kept for a significant amount of time but only referenced every once in a very long while.

Of course, the .zip archive would contain the individual emails or conversation threads in a common format, e.g., .eml or .txt or .pdf. I think the webmail clients suffer from the belief that more information kept is always better and might hesitate to build this feature in, but a browser extension or add-on should work.

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