I have Cortana on my Android (it's on the Play Store), I can say that it is legit. I also have Alexa which is not, at least currently or as implemented, not terribly useful. I of course have Alexa on my Kindle Fire 8, it's mostly just good for handling media (actually really good) and regurgitating internet search results. So anyway, I am not going to sit here and review Cortana on Android. Take a few seconds to download it and give it a spin.
This whole idea that all electric cars are ever going to be practical or affordable is a pipe dream. I can see hydrogen powered cars being practical in a few decades though. And self-driving? Won't we have to repave all the roads with sensors and put sensors all along the shoulder? That's just dumb, that's just dumb because you can't make a car smart enough to navigate daily traffic with all onboard sensors. What's next, first stage rockets that can fall back from space and land vertically? Right... let's throw in an autonomous electric powered flying bus while we are at it.
First, enterprise and industry are wholly dependent on Open Source. This kind of snuck up over time, and with big corporation supporting the Open Source software they need. So if all the programmers go because we can't teach elementary kids to "code" because they have no "real computer" to "code" on. First off, the desktop and laptop class computers *will* still be there. Second, the kids still won't learn programming in a classroom led by a teacher with no programming experience and who is regurgitating material from a book and doesn't have the foggiest notion of how to handle something that goes wrong.
Open Source is not taught, it is encountered and embraced. Open Source programming is community. Those people who have oh so specialized cognitive abilities will naturally gravitate into the Open Source world. Not everyone belongs there and the idea of introducing this into curriculum is a waste of time when they should be learning something else. Of the Open Source programmers I know and have otherwise met, not a single one of them were taught about it in school. However, many got started in programming at a pre-teen age.
You can cite figures of slumping PC sales for sure. But what about the balancing figure that shows people aren't buying new desktops because the one they bought five-years ago is still blazing fast. Right now I am writing this on a Windows 10 tablet. It's a great device but the quad-core Cherry Trail and four gigs of ram are nothing to write home about... oh, a Bluetooth keyboard and I can code away on this tablet. Next room over I have the desktop I built when I need serious horsepower for something or need my nerd fix. It is 6-core AMD machine with 16 gigs of ram, a 120 gigabyte SSD and, integrated video. That is straight of 2011 and I call that my fast machine.
I could get back into carrying on about Open Source, but this statement:
Fewer people have the opportunity to write code and share it.
Reveals the depth to which you have no clue whatsoever what you are talking about. There are plenty of people around here who might take the time to write a small book about it for you, but I am not one of them.
I use Linux extensively and have since 1996. I started off on the "boo systemD" bandwagon myself. It was all based on hearsay and my own purity out of zealotry. Eventually, I took plunge. At a point, there was little choice. I am the type of person who pushes systems and clusters of systems to the limit. I have not experienced any of the problems you cite. Perhaps you are holding your computer wrong? And don't even get started about binary log files. You can still use all your favorite utilities: sed, grep, awk, etc... I am not buying your story. You are talking out of your ass hoping to get modded up. Meanwhile, I am calling you out expecting to get modded down.
I had an S2 smartwatch for while. I kept trying to justify it. I kept telling myself it was justified. After a couple of months I conceded that, overwhelmingly, that the most used feature I got out of it was the flashlight function. I could carry on with my critique, but what's the point. It was nothing but a status symbol, and an ugly one at that. I am currently using one of these and am very happy with it:
All the features you are listing off are in you pocket right now, it even makes phone calls. They can be secured, and they have a better interface. I will leave it to the reader to examine the "tech specs."
The most frustrating thing about T-Mobile is that you never know how they are going to redefine "unlimited" from quarter to quarter. $70 a month for SD video and... 512k of hotspot? That should not count as high speed. But regulations and lack thereof and so on. 512k is damn near useless as a hotspot. Even when super slow DSL came around in 1997 or so, you might be stuck with 512k up, but you could at least get 1 - 1.5 down. I would rather be capped at a higher speed.
So what they are really doing is selling a service that at $70 will cause you to go so absolutely bonkers with it's limitations that you will eventually have a meltdown and pay for their real unlimited high speed. Well played T-Mobile. Let's see what new high speed re-arrangement you cook up for the next financial quarter.
Or it contracts malware and Alexa's five-years hence humanoid robot, gently says, "I've got one right here." You turn around and it repeatedly stabs you in the eyes until it's batteries run out.
"Alexa, where can I find a Philips head screwdriver?" and instead of directing you to the nearest hardware store, she directs you to a drawer or cabinet containing one. People will call this super-invasion bad this and bad that, but if you didn't see this coming from a mile away, you haven't been watching.
Corporations dealing in the kind of tech regularly dismiss or accommodate law enforcement requests for any recorded\generated data. Rather than fearing the man, we need to work towards legislation that define these early AIs in such a way as to protect us legally from having them invaded. What definitions? What legislation? I will leave that to the rest of the comments.
Todays evil is tomorrow's potential (or vice versa). And so we will have a new black market in iris altering contacts that can fool machines. Someday we here will be having a conversation about other applications for said possibly but maybe not beneficial technology. These days you cannot expect a technology to merely go in one direction. I know other nations are already doing similar, and just because other people are already doing this does not negate the ambiguous nature of my post.
Oh sorry, I forgot. Your our 51st state. I request that you please take that inbred royal family of yours and shove them up your ass. We really don't need that in our country.
I absolutely agree about "Battlefield Earth". A lot of people are turned off by the L. Ron Hubbard aspect. Most of the rest are turned off by the page count. I would really like to see another movie attempt. "One" of the places they went wrong with the first try was attempting to cram it into a single film. It at the very least needs to be a trilogy.
I forget to mention your next year query. I will be rereading the entire Known Space series and related. It should let the pressure out of my brain. I shall start with Ringworld and Luis Wu with his motley crew.
Broadband? Your country is the size of the US state of Alabama. The logistics are quite different, especially when you consider how much of that is rural or damn near. I'm talking about 46 million people, representing ~15 percent of our population and somewhere around 70% of our entire land mass. This makes rolling out and maintaining broadband for all of that area and all of those people incredibly, super-substantially expensive. It negates anything about that being remotely lucrative or business smart and the rest of us get to pay the price in oh so many ways.
Great, now my alien religion friends will say. "The white supremacy aliens that are here to help us transition into a higher dimension are initiating the process!" If you're not familiar, the idea of an impending magnetic flip is central to that belief system. That is if the lizard people don't interfere. I am done arguing this, it is tiring
Not intended to be funny, but I count on any comments being.
It will one day be said, "It started with McDonald's." The question is, will we be there to hear it, or will it be a robot's contemplation of their evolutionary predecessor.
Slashdot Mirror
I have Cortana on my Android (it's on the Play Store), I can say that it is legit. I also have Alexa which is not, at least currently or as implemented, not terribly useful. I of course have Alexa on my Kindle Fire 8, it's mostly just good for handling media (actually really good) and regurgitating internet search results. So anyway, I am not going to sit here and review Cortana on Android. Take a few seconds to download it and give it a spin.
Or maybe it is the flashing musical baby toys that wires brains this way in the first place.
Lets go back a few short years...
This whole idea that all electric cars are ever going to be practical or affordable is a pipe dream. I can see hydrogen powered cars being practical in a few decades though. And self-driving? Won't we have to repave all the roads with sensors and put sensors all along the shoulder? That's just dumb, that's just dumb because you can't make a car smart enough to navigate daily traffic with all onboard sensors. What's next, first stage rockets that can fall back from space and land vertically? Right... let's throw in an autonomous electric powered flying bus while we are at it.
I was speaking of the common person, the family type, the average consumer and average user, not people going all SJW on blueray disks.
Open Source is not taught, it is encountered and embraced. Open Source programming is community. Those people who have oh so specialized cognitive abilities will naturally gravitate into the Open Source world. Not everyone belongs there and the idea of introducing this into curriculum is a waste of time when they should be learning something else. Of the Open Source programmers I know and have otherwise met, not a single one of them were taught about it in school. However, many got started in programming at a pre-teen age.
You can cite figures of slumping PC sales for sure. But what about the balancing figure that shows people aren't buying new desktops because the one they bought five-years ago is still blazing fast. Right now I am writing this on a Windows 10 tablet. It's a great device but the quad-core Cherry Trail and four gigs of ram are nothing to write home about... oh, a Bluetooth keyboard and I can code away on this tablet. Next room over I have the desktop I built when I need serious horsepower for something or need my nerd fix. It is 6-core AMD machine with 16 gigs of ram, a 120 gigabyte SSD and, integrated video. That is straight of 2011 and I call that my fast machine.
I could get back into carrying on about Open Source, but this statement:
Reveals the depth to which you have no clue whatsoever what you are talking about. There are plenty of people around here who might take the time to write a small book about it for you, but I am not one of them.
I use Linux extensively and have since 1996. I started off on the "boo systemD" bandwagon myself. It was all based on hearsay and my own purity out of zealotry. Eventually, I took plunge. At a point, there was little choice. I am the type of person who pushes systems and clusters of systems to the limit. I have not experienced any of the problems you cite. Perhaps you are holding your computer wrong? And don't even get started about binary log files. You can still use all your favorite utilities: sed, grep, awk, etc... I am not buying your story. You are talking out of your ass hoping to get modded up. Meanwhile, I am calling you out expecting to get modded down.
I had an S2 smartwatch for while. I kept trying to justify it. I kept telling myself it was justified. After a couple of months I conceded that, overwhelmingly, that the most used feature I got out of it was the flashlight function. I could carry on with my critique, but what's the point. It was nothing but a status symbol, and an ugly one at that. I am currently using one of these and am very happy with it:
https://smile.amazon.com/gp/product/B01MEF5ZNM/ref=oh_aui_detailpage_o03_s00?ie=UTF8&psc=1
All the features you are listing off are in you pocket right now, it even makes phone calls. They can be secured, and they have a better interface. I will leave it to the reader to examine the "tech specs."
The most frustrating thing about T-Mobile is that you never know how they are going to redefine "unlimited" from quarter to quarter. $70 a month for SD video and... 512k of hotspot? That should not count as high speed. But regulations and lack thereof and so on. 512k is damn near useless as a hotspot. Even when super slow DSL came around in 1997 or so, you might be stuck with 512k up, but you could at least get 1 - 1.5 down. I would rather be capped at a higher speed.
So what they are really doing is selling a service that at $70 will cause you to go so absolutely bonkers with it's limitations that you will eventually have a meltdown and pay for their real unlimited high speed. Well played T-Mobile. Let's see what new high speed re-arrangement you cook up for the next financial quarter.
Virgin mobile is CDMA reseller of Sprint alone. Or so says the SIM card in the Virgin Mobile phone next to me, and their website. T-Mobile is GSM.
Or it contracts malware and Alexa's five-years hence humanoid robot, gently says, "I've got one right here." You turn around and it repeatedly stabs you in the eyes until it's batteries run out.
"Alexa, where can I find a Philips head screwdriver?" and instead of directing you to the nearest hardware store, she directs you to a drawer or cabinet containing one. People will call this super-invasion bad this and bad that, but if you didn't see this coming from a mile away, you haven't been watching.
Corporations dealing in the kind of tech regularly dismiss or accommodate law enforcement requests for any recorded\generated data. Rather than fearing the man, we need to work towards legislation that define these early AIs in such a way as to protect us legally from having them invaded. What definitions? What legislation? I will leave that to the rest of the comments.
Or you could use a jet pack. But that would be crazy. Is the Canadian border armed? Off to my workshop!
Todays evil is tomorrow's potential (or vice versa). And so we will have a new black market in iris altering contacts that can fool machines. Someday we here will be having a conversation about other applications for said possibly but maybe not beneficial technology. These days you cannot expect a technology to merely go in one direction. I know other nations are already doing similar, and just because other people are already doing this does not negate the ambiguous nature of my post.
It was only matter of time before they hired Russia.
I had to look it up for myself, but no shit your right.
Oh sorry, I forgot. Your our 51st state. I request that you please take that inbred royal family of yours and shove them up your ass. We really don't need that in our country.
Oh yeah. Go eat a spotted dick.
I absolutely agree about "Battlefield Earth". A lot of people are turned off by the L. Ron Hubbard aspect. Most of the rest are turned off by the page count. I would really like to see another movie attempt. "One" of the places they went wrong with the first try was attempting to cram it into a single film. It at the very least needs to be a trilogy.
If you did not read it, how would you know?
I forget to mention your next year query. I will be rereading the entire Known Space series and related. It should let the pressure out of my brain. I shall start with Ringworld and Luis Wu with his motley crew.
1984
Broadband? Your country is the size of the US state of Alabama. The logistics are quite different, especially when you consider how much of that is rural or damn near. I'm talking about 46 million people, representing ~15 percent of our population and somewhere around 70% of our entire land mass. This makes rolling out and maintaining broadband for all of that area and all of those people incredibly, super-substantially expensive. It negates anything about that being remotely lucrative or business smart and the rest of us get to pay the price in oh so many ways.
I am surprised you have managed to hit a score 5.
Great, now my alien religion friends will say. "The white supremacy aliens that are here to help us transition into a higher dimension are initiating the process!" If you're not familiar, the idea of an impending magnetic flip is central to that belief system. That is if the lizard people don't interfere. I am done arguing this, it is tiring
Not intended to be funny, but I count on any comments being.
Would you like to play a game?
It will one day be said, "It started with McDonald's." The question is, will we be there to hear it, or will it be a robot's contemplation of their evolutionary predecessor.