As for users, the latest official number we can find clocks in at 845 million active monthly users, which comes directly from Facebook’s IPO filing. Interestingly, 850 million users has also been widely reported.
To stay conservative, we’ll go with $102.8 billion / 845 million users. This means each user is worth… approximately $121.
Though this is all for fun and games, it’s perhaps telling as well. Every Facebook user adds up to the gigantic social platform we see today, and while the sum is likely greater than the parts, there’s no reason to discount the value of a user.
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In the video game Re-Mission, players are tasked with piloting the microscopic robot Roxxi to blast away cancer cells as she navigates the bodies of fictional cancer patients.
A new study that took real-time functional MRI scans of 57 people randomly assigned to either play the game or watch it being played has found that those who played exhibited increased activity in the brain’s positive motivation circuits, while those who merely observed exhibited no increase in activity.
“Identifying a direct connection between the stimulation of neural circuits and game play is a key step in unlocking the potential for game-based tools to inspire positive behavior and improve health,” Brian Knutson, associate professor of psychology and neuroscience at Stanford University and co-author of an article on the new data, said in a news release yesterday.
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However, in an NPR report about just how unhappy the FBI is about all of this, it notes that the FBI actually scrambled to file for warrants on most of those 3,000 devices, such that only 250 were permanently shut off. And yet it’s still complaining about this whole “getting a warrant” thing. As Tim Lee notes, FBI director Robert Mueller is basically complaining to Congress that it’s just so hard:
In Congressional testimony last month, FBI Director Robert Meuller said the ruling “will inhibit our ability” to do GPS tracking “in a number of surveillances where it has been tremendously beneficial.” Mueller said that in cases where they didn’t have probable cause, the FBI is forced to deploy teams of six to eight people to track suspects the old-fashioned way.
“If you require probable cause for every technique, then you are making it very, very hard for law enforcement,” an FBI lawyer told NPR.
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