In Canada, there's no law on the books governing abortions at all; it's a decision between a woman and her doctor.
That said, there are almost no third-trimester abortions. The only times where it might happen are when the fetus has already died. Women that carry the baby to the third trimester nearly universally WANTED the baby. There's no reason to outlaw the practice since it's only done for medically necessary reasons.
Contrary to the belief of anti-choice advocates, women that get abortions aren't doing them unnecessarily or capriciously. There's a litany of reasons why a woman might make that choice, but honestly, it's nobody's business but hers. A woman has bodily autonomy, and to deny that gives her less rights than a corpse. (This is literally true; you cannot use a dead person's organs without their prior consent, which is why you need to sign your organ donor card.)
Apple doesn't care, and that's why this update broke some phones. They don't have time to track down every 2-bit repair part and shop and devise some sort of code patch that'll break it. They just make updates and if it breaks your 3rd party shit, they don't care. They won't do anything to help you, and you're on your own.
Seriously, people have a really elevated sense of self importance here. Apple isn't out to get you: Apple couldn't care less who you are or what you've done.
It depends on what you mean by scientific computing. My partnerâ"a machine learning researcherâ"has to do things in C, Python and Matlab. All three are common in the community. It's surprising how many people doing machine learning research are using things like Python.
But that's because for small networks, performance isn't actually a concern. Not everything is AlphaGo.
A friend of mine went from his Masters in Biology into a CS PhD. And he's mostly done things and continues to do things in Python.
Lastly, stop splitting hairs. C is a high level language, but we all understand that how close it is to a lower level language is what makes it appealing and fast. A simple language with just enough abstraction so you're not in assembly.
I don't think it was a matter of blemish, it was a matter of making sure the battery life isn't unnecessarily shortened by keeping the mouse plugged in all the time.
THAT SAID
I'm not a big fan of wireless keyboards and mice in general except in specific circumstances. The keyboard that's at my desk day in and day out doesn't need to be wireless. I'm not lounging on the couch with it. Same with my trackball. Apple doesn't want you to use the mouse like a wired mouse, so they came up with a weirdo design to ensure that you don't, but it ends up being far more ridiculous than just shipping a wired mouse or accepting that people will leave the mouse plugged in and the battery will die prematurely. There's a dozen ways out of this conundrum, and I honestly think Apple picked the worst one. I THINK I know what they were going for, but I don't know that it was a problem worth solving at all.
Samsung makes it, it's OLED, and it IS expensive. It's the single most expensive part in the phone, and since Samsung is the only supplier of the part, they charge what they want. LG just doesn't have the chops to make the screen at the quality level that Apple wants, so that should tell you what you need to know about the complexity of making weirdly shaped, high quality phone screens.
Keep in mind that Apple would've designed the notch into the screen well in advance of the Essential Phone releasing. It's just a matter of convergent design, where two companies happened on the same idea around the same time. Apple's lead time on products is so long, there's no way they could've changed their design in time to 'copy' Essential if that's what they had wanted. (The essential was announced in early 2017, the iPhone X was announced in September, and would've already been in production much earlier in the year, with prototypes almost certainly happening in the 1 or 2 years prior.)
It's not a terrible design decision, and I can appreciate why both companies did it. Apple could've put the FaceID unit above the screen and not extended the screen up, but they decided to push the screen up and around some 'empty' space and use it as a visually distinctive feature, possibly because the home button was no longer there. As a form of visual branding, it's not a bad idea.
You don't have to love it—most people that have the phone seem indifferent, I've yet to meet someone excited by it, but why would they be?—but at least it's a choice they made on their own for their own reasons (and so did Essential). Android OEMs are free to copy it, but all it does is entrench them as a bunch of copycats, forever hanging on Apple's coattails. (The irony being that Samsung, the OG of ripping Apple off, now has its own distinct design language and can legitimately claim to be a leader in the design space.)
Why don't you think guns, governed by laws, kinda-sorta mentioned in the US Constitution—are an implicitly political topic?
Why don't you think laws that could stop people from dying aren't political? People living together under the rule of law is political. That's how all this works.
The only people that think this ISN'T political are people trying to deflect from the fact that there are political solutions to problems with guns.
(Do not start with the cockamamie BS that criminals don't follow laws—it's a stupid argument. Things can get better when there's political will to make them better. Criminals in other developed, ostensibly peaceful countries do not get the opportunity nearly as often to massacre groups of people.)
Oh fuck off. You know how I stay in contact with my swim team and cycling team? Facebook. Plenty of us that use it have lives; I can probably credit Facebook with more times it got me out of the house than it kept me in.
More likely 2 year old tech, like the 9.7â iPad from last year (which Iâ(TM)m typin this on).
But more to the point, *that's how technology works*. New stuff isnâ(TM)t cheap. 2 or 3 year old tech has economies of scale and whatnot behind it. The only way to make inexpensive good things is for them to based on old technology, not unlike the raspberry pi. Given the state of mobile processors and tablet components, I suspect you'll still see 3 to 4 years of life out of these things.
Because like most enforcement, it sends a signal to everyone else that the rules are going to be enforced. The 2 million may be a lost cause, but they want to prevent the other tens of millions from jumping to an ad free stream, which WOULD materially affect the bottom line of the advertisers and Spotify by extension.
That all pre-supposes that someone sticks around for the advertising at all. I actually put my phone or tablet down—sometimes face down—and mute it. Even with audio ads, I'd be willing to turn the volume off.
But yes, I agree with a lot of this. It still leaves a lot of people that are affected by advertising that are either unwilling or unable to pay for the product. If they had the money, they'd just buy their way out of seeing the ads at all.
I maintain that a 2 mile stretch of road with a limit of 35 (previously 45mph) thatâ(TM)s eight lanes across should have more than one crosswalk, and probably shouldnâ(TM)t exist in this form at all. I hate Uber and the empire theyâ(TM)ve built on the backs of the working poor, but city planning has to modernise with our tech. The real wonder here is that people arenâ(TM)t killed on that road CONSTANTLY.
I've never understood this strategy, exactly. I mean, I know why Google/YouTube is doing it, but what's in it for the advertisers?
Flooding the system with ads that are specifically meant to drive people to ad-free subscriptions means you're removing all the people that have the money to pay for stuff AND who can't tolerate ignoring ads. What you're left with is either people that don't have the money, or are so good at ignoring ads they don't care.
(I know that ads work on a semi-conscious level; even someone that really claims not to be affected can't help but be to some extent. Still, I don't see it as a good value for advertisers.)
It just never occurs to me to hit ctrl+enter after typing in some common site names. I fairly often type 'youtube' and wind up accidentally searching for youtube rather than just going there.
It's true. Apple's Watch has flopped so hard it outsold the entire Swiss Watch industry last year.
Or has the Swiss Watch industry flopped, too?
Stop comparing smartwatch sales to things like laptop or phone sales. They're different classes of device, and have different metrics of success. As of right now, the Apple Watch is an uncontested success. It's making money, and sales are up. Who knows how long it'll be a success, but for right now, there's no reasonable way to say that they've flopped.
I use my phone a lot during the day, every day. It sits in a dock on my desk a lot, but I've certainly had days where I'm down to 30% before noon. It's plugged in over night while I have a sleep tracker running.
I take my phone cycling with me, it's in my pocket (and sometimes in my hand) during the winter, where the temperature occasionally gets near -30C. I dunno, I think I'm a pretty average user. (My iPhone 3G actually survived my being hit by a car and being thrown from my pocket without much damage, and an intact screen. It only had a fairly light case on it.)
I'd say I'm pretty hard on my phone. I've dropped this one a few times on hard tile, and it's only 6 months old. It's surprising how far a thin plastic case'll get you.
A human, as far as I know, has no way to interface with a LIDAR unit.
Let me quote the relevant section again: "a computer isn't better than a human until it can beat a human using equivelant [sic] sensors"
A computer is better than a human when it can perform the task better than a human. Again, it is 100% irrelevant how it does it or how we determine the equivalency of the sensors. Regardless of whether or not I've written computer vision code—and I'm aware that it's extremely difficult—it is simply the case that if a car avoids accidents and obeys rules and stays on the road better than a human, it doesn't matter how it did it, it's better than driving than a human. That's true whether it has 1 sensor or 10 or a million, and whether those sensors are organic or not. Cars don't need to be able to see the same way as humans do to make them better drivers any more than computers need to do arithmetic the same way humans do to be better at calculating sums.
I'm NOT willing to accept it being double the weight and thickness. I've never had an iPhone fail on me for reasons of durability, though. I admit that I keep a thin, $12 case on the back (just the back, nothing covering the screen) and I kept my iPhone 4 for 4 years, my iPhone 6 for 3 years (only 3 because it was stolen), and I've had my iPhone 7 for about 6 months.
The batteries in my iPhones did begin to fail around year 3, but that's chemistry.
So given all of these things, I STILL think that making 1st party parts (i.e., batteries) and technical guides should be the law of the land. I love my phones, but I don't love the waste they produce (one of the many reasons I keep them for 4 years at a time if I can) and I don't think anyone should have a problem with a shop being able to repair a device. If Apple's concern is that 3rd party parts are going to infiltrate the system, they should make sure 1st party parts are available, even if they're more expensive. I would certainly pay more for an Apple-certified battery or TouchID sensor or what have you.
There's nothing wrong with the phones Apple is making, honestly, even from a repairability standpoint. They're certainly a lot better than their laptops. Just let us have the parts and repair guide. People will STILL bring their phones into an Apple Store, just like lots of people bring their cars back to the dealer. Apple can honestly only win in this scenario, assuming they actually care about the user experience as they claim they do.
I'm 40 years old. I spent the first 6 years of my life figuring out the world around me, the years from there to about 18 learning stuff in school and figuring out how to use complicated machines and understanding the deeper rules of society and complex systems (like how the rules surrounding driving work; not just the legal rules but also the implicit social conventions), and I've spent the 22 years since then refining my understanding of the world and my place in society. I program computers (and games!) for a living and study philosophy and ecology as hobbies.
Why can I figure that game out faster than a newly hatched AI? Literally everything in my life over 40 years led up to the moment when I played that game. It's really not a fair fight.
Sorry, I don't see what that has to do with anything. If a computer gets into fewer accidents than a human, I can conclude it's a better driver. There's no ambiguity. Get me to where I'm going, don't run into anything. The ratio of accidents to successful trips is measurable, not subjective.
What? No, that's stupid. A computer is better than a human at the point where the human fails a task that the computer doesn't. I don't care by what mechanism a car decides how to stop. If it's modelling the whole universe inside a convoluted magical contained black hole and can deterministically figure out that an accident is imminent unless it slams on the brakes, fine. It's irrelevant. All we want is safer cars and safer roads. If that means a car is using infrared and sonar and lidar AND visible light cameras, I'll take it.
A lot of the stupid questions that get asked about how computer-driven cars will operate assume that we should keep city infrastructure exactly the same. Maybe that's where we start, but that's definitely not where we should end up.
When we ask questions like, "if the car is going to hit a family, and the only choices are to kill them or swerve into a concrete barrier and kill the driver," we need to wonder why the car had no line of sight to the family until the last second, and how it was able to be going at a speed that wouldn't allow it to stop in time. Why was the family crossing a major artery with blind corners? (And really, how was it possible that such an intersection ever survived the human-driving era?)
But it's not like car companies aren't sued for their failures now. If there's a widespread failure of a part, the company does a recall and replaces the part or car at their expense. If the response was inadequate or too slow, they wind up defending themselves in court. Surely driving systems will be no different. An obviously deficient (or insecure!) driving system will be replaced.
Even at their current levels of sophistication, tests on those computer-driven cars show they're much better at following the rules and being safe than humans are. The sooner we can get humans away from steering wheels the better.
Oh please. 'My argument' hardly hinged on that one statement, so it's hard to characterize it as 'extremely weak'.
I'll concede that 'stomach fullness' apparently isn't an issue, but, from the paper:
"Microplastics have previously been shown to adversely impact invertebrate species such as lugworms, causing weight loss, reduced feeding activity and inflammation (Besseling et al., 2013; Wright et al., 2013), and detrimental effects on the intestinal functioning of seabass (Dicentrarchus labrax) have also been noticed (Pedà et al., 2016)."
And
"The ingestion of microplastics by mesopelagic fish may also have secondary implications for other species as well as the entire ecosystem. Mesopelagic fish are now known to make up a substantial biomass in the pelagic realm (Kaartvedt et al., 2012) and provide an important food source for many large predators such as dolphins, seals, and tuna as well as sea birds (Cherel et al., 2008; Danielsen et al., 2010; Spitz et al., 2010; Varela et al., 2013). These taxa consume large amounts of mesopelagic fish and consequently ingest the microplastics within them. More importantly, due to trophic transfer, predators of mesopelagic fish may also bioaccumulate chemical pollutants absorbed from ingested microplastics."
So, if we go back to the original question being asked—"do these microplastics affect the fishes' health"—the answer is almost certainly yes.
Here's the thing with Animoji: they're a minimum viable product. They're a fun sort of tech demo that Apple did to show what you can do with good facial mapping. It's clear that even they were taken by surprise that animojis were so popular; after all, they weren't the ones that invented animoji karaoke, but they sure were quick to pick it up once other people started doing it and roll it into their advertising.
Samsung, as with many things they copy, has mistaken them as an end in themselves. I don't think animoji are really selling many phones, even among the younger users that would enjoy them, but Samsung NEEDS to copy this thing, because they can't stand not adding features to their phones. (This is not purely a criticism—they very often hit on something that sticks. But they are aggressive about it.)
I'm sure people will use them, but the more important thing is whether or not we see the face mapping tech being used for anything beyond just talking poop cartoons.
Slashdot Mirror
In Canada, there's no law on the books governing abortions at all; it's a decision between a woman and her doctor.
That said, there are almost no third-trimester abortions. The only times where it might happen are when the fetus has already died. Women that carry the baby to the third trimester nearly universally WANTED the baby. There's no reason to outlaw the practice since it's only done for medically necessary reasons.
Contrary to the belief of anti-choice advocates, women that get abortions aren't doing them unnecessarily or capriciously. There's a litany of reasons why a woman might make that choice, but honestly, it's nobody's business but hers. A woman has bodily autonomy, and to deny that gives her less rights than a corpse. (This is literally true; you cannot use a dead person's organs without their prior consent, which is why you need to sign your organ donor card.)
Apple doesn't care, and that's why this update broke some phones. They don't have time to track down every 2-bit repair part and shop and devise some sort of code patch that'll break it. They just make updates and if it breaks your 3rd party shit, they don't care. They won't do anything to help you, and you're on your own.
Seriously, people have a really elevated sense of self importance here. Apple isn't out to get you: Apple couldn't care less who you are or what you've done.
It depends on what you mean by scientific computing. My partnerâ"a machine learning researcherâ"has to do things in C, Python and Matlab. All three are common in the community. It's surprising how many people doing machine learning research are using things like Python.
But that's because for small networks, performance isn't actually a concern. Not everything is AlphaGo.
A friend of mine went from his Masters in Biology into a CS PhD. And he's mostly done things and continues to do things in Python.
Lastly, stop splitting hairs. C is a high level language, but we all understand that how close it is to a lower level language is what makes it appealing and fast. A simple language with just enough abstraction so you're not in assembly.
I don't think it was a matter of blemish, it was a matter of making sure the battery life isn't unnecessarily shortened by keeping the mouse plugged in all the time.
THAT SAID
I'm not a big fan of wireless keyboards and mice in general except in specific circumstances. The keyboard that's at my desk day in and day out doesn't need to be wireless. I'm not lounging on the couch with it. Same with my trackball. Apple doesn't want you to use the mouse like a wired mouse, so they came up with a weirdo design to ensure that you don't, but it ends up being far more ridiculous than just shipping a wired mouse or accepting that people will leave the mouse plugged in and the battery will die prematurely. There's a dozen ways out of this conundrum, and I honestly think Apple picked the worst one. I THINK I know what they were going for, but I don't know that it was a problem worth solving at all.
Samsung makes it, it's OLED, and it IS expensive. It's the single most expensive part in the phone, and since Samsung is the only supplier of the part, they charge what they want. LG just doesn't have the chops to make the screen at the quality level that Apple wants, so that should tell you what you need to know about the complexity of making weirdly shaped, high quality phone screens.
Keep in mind that Apple would've designed the notch into the screen well in advance of the Essential Phone releasing. It's just a matter of convergent design, where two companies happened on the same idea around the same time. Apple's lead time on products is so long, there's no way they could've changed their design in time to 'copy' Essential if that's what they had wanted. (The essential was announced in early 2017, the iPhone X was announced in September, and would've already been in production much earlier in the year, with prototypes almost certainly happening in the 1 or 2 years prior.)
It's not a terrible design decision, and I can appreciate why both companies did it. Apple could've put the FaceID unit above the screen and not extended the screen up, but they decided to push the screen up and around some 'empty' space and use it as a visually distinctive feature, possibly because the home button was no longer there. As a form of visual branding, it's not a bad idea.
You don't have to love it—most people that have the phone seem indifferent, I've yet to meet someone excited by it, but why would they be?—but at least it's a choice they made on their own for their own reasons (and so did Essential). Android OEMs are free to copy it, but all it does is entrench them as a bunch of copycats, forever hanging on Apple's coattails. (The irony being that Samsung, the OG of ripping Apple off, now has its own distinct design language and can legitimately claim to be a leader in the design space.)
Why don't you think guns, governed by laws, kinda-sorta mentioned in the US Constitution—are an implicitly political topic?
Why don't you think laws that could stop people from dying aren't political? People living together under the rule of law is political. That's how all this works.
The only people that think this ISN'T political are people trying to deflect from the fact that there are political solutions to problems with guns.
(Do not start with the cockamamie BS that criminals don't follow laws—it's a stupid argument. Things can get better when there's political will to make them better. Criminals in other developed, ostensibly peaceful countries do not get the opportunity nearly as often to massacre groups of people.)
"I find that argument, that if you're not paying that somehow we can't care about you, to be extremely glib"
It's not that you can't, Zuck, it's that you DON'T.
Oh fuck off. You know how I stay in contact with my swim team and cycling team? Facebook. Plenty of us that use it have lives; I can probably credit Facebook with more times it got me out of the house than it kept me in.
More likely 2 year old tech, like the 9.7â iPad from last year (which Iâ(TM)m typin this on).
But more to the point, *that's how technology works*. New stuff isnâ(TM)t cheap. 2 or 3 year old tech has economies of scale and whatnot behind it. The only way to make inexpensive good things is for them to based on old technology, not unlike the raspberry pi. Given the state of mobile processors and tablet components, I suspect you'll still see 3 to 4 years of life out of these things.
Because like most enforcement, it sends a signal to everyone else that the rules are going to be enforced. The 2 million may be a lost cause, but they want to prevent the other tens of millions from jumping to an ad free stream, which WOULD materially affect the bottom line of the advertisers and Spotify by extension.
That all pre-supposes that someone sticks around for the advertising at all. I actually put my phone or tablet down—sometimes face down—and mute it. Even with audio ads, I'd be willing to turn the volume off.
But yes, I agree with a lot of this. It still leaves a lot of people that are affected by advertising that are either unwilling or unable to pay for the product. If they had the money, they'd just buy their way out of seeing the ads at all.
I maintain that a 2 mile stretch of road with a limit of 35 (previously 45mph) thatâ(TM)s eight lanes across should have more than one crosswalk, and probably shouldnâ(TM)t exist in this form at all. I hate Uber and the empire theyâ(TM)ve built on the backs of the working poor, but city planning has to modernise with our tech. The real wonder here is that people arenâ(TM)t killed on that road CONSTANTLY.
I've never understood this strategy, exactly. I mean, I know why Google/YouTube is doing it, but what's in it for the advertisers?
Flooding the system with ads that are specifically meant to drive people to ad-free subscriptions means you're removing all the people that have the money to pay for stuff AND who can't tolerate ignoring ads. What you're left with is either people that don't have the money, or are so good at ignoring ads they don't care.
(I know that ads work on a semi-conscious level; even someone that really claims not to be affected can't help but be to some extent. Still, I don't see it as a good value for advertisers.)
It just never occurs to me to hit ctrl+enter after typing in some common site names. I fairly often type 'youtube' and wind up accidentally searching for youtube rather than just going there.
It's true. Apple's Watch has flopped so hard it outsold the entire Swiss Watch industry last year.
Or has the Swiss Watch industry flopped, too?
Stop comparing smartwatch sales to things like laptop or phone sales. They're different classes of device, and have different metrics of success. As of right now, the Apple Watch is an uncontested success. It's making money, and sales are up. Who knows how long it'll be a success, but for right now, there's no reasonable way to say that they've flopped.
I use my phone a lot during the day, every day. It sits in a dock on my desk a lot, but I've certainly had days where I'm down to 30% before noon. It's plugged in over night while I have a sleep tracker running.
I take my phone cycling with me, it's in my pocket (and sometimes in my hand) during the winter, where the temperature occasionally gets near -30C. I dunno, I think I'm a pretty average user. (My iPhone 3G actually survived my being hit by a car and being thrown from my pocket without much damage, and an intact screen. It only had a fairly light case on it.)
I'd say I'm pretty hard on my phone. I've dropped this one a few times on hard tile, and it's only 6 months old. It's surprising how far a thin plastic case'll get you.
A human, as far as I know, has no way to interface with a LIDAR unit.
Let me quote the relevant section again: "a computer isn't better than a human until it can beat a human using equivelant [sic] sensors"
A computer is better than a human when it can perform the task better than a human. Again, it is 100% irrelevant how it does it or how we determine the equivalency of the sensors. Regardless of whether or not I've written computer vision code—and I'm aware that it's extremely difficult—it is simply the case that if a car avoids accidents and obeys rules and stays on the road better than a human, it doesn't matter how it did it, it's better than driving than a human. That's true whether it has 1 sensor or 10 or a million, and whether those sensors are organic or not. Cars don't need to be able to see the same way as humans do to make them better drivers any more than computers need to do arithmetic the same way humans do to be better at calculating sums.
I'm NOT willing to accept it being double the weight and thickness. I've never had an iPhone fail on me for reasons of durability, though. I admit that I keep a thin, $12 case on the back (just the back, nothing covering the screen) and I kept my iPhone 4 for 4 years, my iPhone 6 for 3 years (only 3 because it was stolen), and I've had my iPhone 7 for about 6 months.
The batteries in my iPhones did begin to fail around year 3, but that's chemistry.
So given all of these things, I STILL think that making 1st party parts (i.e., batteries) and technical guides should be the law of the land. I love my phones, but I don't love the waste they produce (one of the many reasons I keep them for 4 years at a time if I can) and I don't think anyone should have a problem with a shop being able to repair a device. If Apple's concern is that 3rd party parts are going to infiltrate the system, they should make sure 1st party parts are available, even if they're more expensive. I would certainly pay more for an Apple-certified battery or TouchID sensor or what have you.
There's nothing wrong with the phones Apple is making, honestly, even from a repairability standpoint. They're certainly a lot better than their laptops. Just let us have the parts and repair guide. People will STILL bring their phones into an Apple Store, just like lots of people bring their cars back to the dealer. Apple can honestly only win in this scenario, assuming they actually care about the user experience as they claim they do.
I'm 40 years old. I spent the first 6 years of my life figuring out the world around me, the years from there to about 18 learning stuff in school and figuring out how to use complicated machines and understanding the deeper rules of society and complex systems (like how the rules surrounding driving work; not just the legal rules but also the implicit social conventions), and I've spent the 22 years since then refining my understanding of the world and my place in society. I program computers (and games!) for a living and study philosophy and ecology as hobbies.
Why can I figure that game out faster than a newly hatched AI? Literally everything in my life over 40 years led up to the moment when I played that game. It's really not a fair fight.
Sorry, I don't see what that has to do with anything. If a computer gets into fewer accidents than a human, I can conclude it's a better driver. There's no ambiguity. Get me to where I'm going, don't run into anything. The ratio of accidents to successful trips is measurable, not subjective.
What? No, that's stupid. A computer is better than a human at the point where the human fails a task that the computer doesn't. I don't care by what mechanism a car decides how to stop. If it's modelling the whole universe inside a convoluted magical contained black hole and can deterministically figure out that an accident is imminent unless it slams on the brakes, fine. It's irrelevant. All we want is safer cars and safer roads. If that means a car is using infrared and sonar and lidar AND visible light cameras, I'll take it.
A lot of the stupid questions that get asked about how computer-driven cars will operate assume that we should keep city infrastructure exactly the same. Maybe that's where we start, but that's definitely not where we should end up.
When we ask questions like, "if the car is going to hit a family, and the only choices are to kill them or swerve into a concrete barrier and kill the driver," we need to wonder why the car had no line of sight to the family until the last second, and how it was able to be going at a speed that wouldn't allow it to stop in time. Why was the family crossing a major artery with blind corners? (And really, how was it possible that such an intersection ever survived the human-driving era?)
But it's not like car companies aren't sued for their failures now. If there's a widespread failure of a part, the company does a recall and replaces the part or car at their expense. If the response was inadequate or too slow, they wind up defending themselves in court. Surely driving systems will be no different. An obviously deficient (or insecure!) driving system will be replaced.
Even at their current levels of sophistication, tests on those computer-driven cars show they're much better at following the rules and being safe than humans are. The sooner we can get humans away from steering wheels the better.
Oh please. 'My argument' hardly hinged on that one statement, so it's hard to characterize it as 'extremely weak'.
I'll concede that 'stomach fullness' apparently isn't an issue, but, from the paper:
"Microplastics have previously been shown to adversely impact invertebrate species such as lugworms, causing weight loss, reduced feeding activity and inflammation (Besseling et al., 2013; Wright et al., 2013), and detrimental effects on the intestinal functioning of seabass (Dicentrarchus labrax) have also been noticed (Pedà et al., 2016)."
And
"The ingestion of microplastics by mesopelagic fish may also have secondary implications for other species as well as the entire ecosystem. Mesopelagic fish are now known to make up a substantial biomass in the pelagic realm (Kaartvedt et al., 2012) and provide an important food source for many large predators such as dolphins, seals, and tuna as well as sea birds (Cherel et al., 2008; Danielsen et al., 2010; Spitz et al., 2010; Varela et al., 2013). These taxa consume large amounts of mesopelagic fish and consequently ingest the microplastics within them. More importantly, due to trophic transfer, predators of mesopelagic fish may also bioaccumulate chemical pollutants absorbed from ingested microplastics."
So, if we go back to the original question being asked—"do these microplastics affect the fishes' health"—the answer is almost certainly yes.
Here's the thing with Animoji: they're a minimum viable product. They're a fun sort of tech demo that Apple did to show what you can do with good facial mapping. It's clear that even they were taken by surprise that animojis were so popular; after all, they weren't the ones that invented animoji karaoke, but they sure were quick to pick it up once other people started doing it and roll it into their advertising.
Samsung, as with many things they copy, has mistaken them as an end in themselves. I don't think animoji are really selling many phones, even among the younger users that would enjoy them, but Samsung NEEDS to copy this thing, because they can't stand not adding features to their phones. (This is not purely a criticism—they very often hit on something that sticks. But they are aggressive about it.)
I'm sure people will use them, but the more important thing is whether or not we see the face mapping tech being used for anything beyond just talking poop cartoons.