Apple's problem is that no one has any reason to develop proper macOS applications these days. No one really uses macOS outside of people developing iOS apps.
So creating this unified platform is less about something that makes sense as a tool you should use, and more about Apple desperately trying to get people to release macOS apps on the macOS App Store that literally no one uses.
Not an expert on Marvel but I didn't see the link between marvel's current set of characters (batman, superman...blah blah ) and these ones so maybe with time when people noticed the lack of the link between them they slowly gave up.
As other people have pointed out, you're mixing universes. However, you're still right: each show is conceptually happening along with the Marvel Cinematic Universe, meaning that minor things like Thanatos wiping out half of all life in the universe should have happened at the same time as these shows.
Except we never get to see any of the "major" Marvel characters like Iron Man or Thor, despite the fact that conceptually - at the same time these shows are happening - the events of the movies are occurring. Instead we get vague references to things like "the Incident."
To be honest, my favorite was The punisher.
Probably because a major point of The Punisher is that he's just a guy. He has no super powers. He's just a guy in a crappy situation who decides to take matters into his own hands. It makes him far more relatable than the other characters who all have various super powers to fall back on.
I'm actually very "meh" about this. On the one hand, I enjoyed the first season of (most) of the Netflix Marvel shows (guess the exception), but on the other hand, while they kept on making it seem like something cool could be just around the corner, they never quite managed to deliver. The Iron Fist was the worst at this. Its final season ended with a setup that seemed like it could potentially be cool, but given that it was the Iron Fist, I kind of don't care that we'll never get to see if they would have managed to capitalize on it.
Beyond that, all the shows were getting kind of stale. Luke Cage's second season seemed to be a large bit of padding to set up for a third season that may have been interesting, one we didn't get to see. Jessica Jones's second season set up for maybe having an interesting new character while otherwise being pretty dull - dull enough that I managed to forget a large bit of the plot involving a fairly major character! Jessica Jones is getting a third season (the one they just finished before being canceled), so maybe the third season will manage to capitalize on the hooks the second one set up, but - well - I'm not counting on it.
Ultimately I think they all fell to something I remember reading about, how super hero origin stories are easier to write than stories where they've already been established. Origin stories are inherently the Hero's Journey, something that's very well defined and understood. The first seasons were all origin stories, and then once they were defined characters - the show writers didn't know how to continue. This meant that pretty much every "next season" of these shows ended up effectively being the origin stories of other characters beyond the "main characters." Which almost worked.
So I'm left with a mixed feeling that while the shows may have been able to move the characters in interesting directions and show us neat new things, it was probably time to cancel them. Leaving me feeling basically unable to care either way. Had they continued, that might have been interesting. Or not. So it doesn't really matter that they won't.
And, yes, I know this is a lot of text to say "I don't care" but it's this weird thing where I wish I could be invested in the characters because the shows seemed promising at first, but ultimately, I'm just... not.
This is the problem. You want to know why people turn these alerts off? Because they get woken up at 3AM and get told to look out for a gray car that's in the other side of the state. Yeah, sure, I might do that. Or I might turn the alerts off entirely and then miss one I might have been able to help on.
Part of the problem is that the alert is too short (limited to 90 characters) and can't include links to details or images of the child of vehicle they want people to look out for.
There are ways to fix the Amber alert system - let them link to details and include pictures of the child, don't sound them if the phone is silenced because that just gets people to turn them off - but adding them to Netflix and Spotify won't help. (Although it's also unclear this bill includes Amber alerts - it may just be things like hurricane or flash flood warnings. Which seems like things you'd want to deal with at the device level rather than Netflix or Spotify.)
The best part of the Twitter app on Mac was that it's so out of date, they never bothered implementing ads - I'm sorry, "promoted tweets" - on it. That would be one reason to use it: built-in ad blocking.
But other than that - yeah, I don't see a point to a Twitter app. If you want an "app-like experience" just grab a Twitter tab and throw it into its own little window. Boom. Twitter app.
To be fair, the ability to left pad a string was only added to the JavaScript standard last year. Although Array.isArray has existed for quite a while now.
As for why you need a special function to determine if something is an array, MDN links to this article.
Note that one context in which you will never need to use Array.isArray over instanceof Array is inside a Node.js program, as it doesn't run in a browser context.
Although even then, isArray probably doesn't work the way most people would expect: certain "array-like" things aren't arrays, such as arguments. JavaScript is fun.
This seems as good a place to leave my NPM story. Or I could just link to the bug.
The short version is if you use NPM to install dependencies, it will install your dependencies and whatever they depend on. If you run it again, it will install your dependencies and then DELETE anything they depend on.
Why would you repeat the install? Well, if your dependencies change (e.g., you update a dependency or add a new one), you would then repeat the install to get the new dependencies. Except you can't do this without blowing away the entire existing install due to this bug.
It gets somewhat worse - starting in NPM 5, they introduced a lock file. Anyone familiar with other package managers should know what a lock file is and why they're important. If the lock file exists, it will never install indirect dependencies (probably).
Basically, if anyone doubted that NPM was run by sloppy idiots, note that both bugs are still open and have been for months.
Hundreds of stories about Russia hacking the election, which never happened and has no credible sources, and now all of a sudden Slashdot requires "credible sources."
Now I remember why I had "forgotten" my login for the longest time.
I'm actually OK with the batteries not being easily replaceable. There are decent reasons why they're glued in. I'd rather have a bigger battery than a smaller battery and a door to make replacing it trivial.
However, that being said, as the batteries will need replacement, I think it's only fair that if you glue the batteries in to your phones, you should be required to replace the battery at cost of the battery, at any repair shop of the owner's choice.
None of this "mail it in" or "find the nearest Apple Store" BS. Any repair store, anywhere, should be allowed to replace a battery with Apple covering the cost of labor, as the price Apple has to pay for gluing a consumable component into the phone. It's only fair.
So... you agree with me? This is a useless feature and the only reason Apple is implementing it is because Android did it first and Apple wants to match Android bullet for bullet.
Did you watch the most recent WWDC keynote? Literally everything they covered was done elsewhere first. They introduced nothing. Even their "and one more thing" was literally a clone of a product two other companies already made!
The only reason they're adding wireless charging is because Android has it. It isn't a compelling feature, it isn't useful, but it's a bullet point.
Because Android phones have that feature and Apple has forgotten how to innovate.
And to answer your second question: no, not really. It looks cool, and... that's about it. It has some new and interesting problems, like being able to heat up accidentally dropped coins to high temperatures and sometimes not working if things aren't lined up absolutely perfectly.
If I'm reading the article correctly, the computer itself wasn't, the Slashdot headline is at best misleading. What was connected to the Internet was a backup drive containing documents that describe the password cracking computer.
It's actually somewhat unclear if they even built the thing, these are more planning documents that describe how they would. If it exists, it presumably is properly isolated from the Internet, given that it's supposed to be used only by DOD and intelligence agencies.
I like my smart lights... but not for any of the things that make them "smart." The thing I like about them is the ability to have them changes from cool light in the morning to warm light in the evening. This is something you could feasibly do without "smart" bulbs but is easier to set up with them.
But just about everything else that's supposed to be "smart" is just annoying.
Have someone over who wants to turn on the lights? Haha, they can't, not without the app! Want to turn on a light in one room? Better get out your phone and get fiddling! (They've since released physical switches you can use to control things, but I've yet to get one.)
The "smart" features that are supposed to work don't work all that well. I have them programmed to turn off automatically when I leave and turn on the light by the front door when I return. Sometimes this happens. Sometimes it'll turn on the light by the front door many minutes after I've arrived. Sometimes it'll just never turn them off, but turn on the light. Sometimes it just works.
You can use it with voice commands! These manage to be even slower than just digging out your phone and using the app.
So would I recommend "smart lights" to anyone else? No, not really. I like the ability to change the lighting color and selectively dim lights. It's nifty. It's not a killer app.
That wasn't the myth they were testing. As other people have pointed out, people can and have been sucked out of airplanes. As I recall, the episode you're talking about even mentioned that fact.
What they were testing was that a bullet hole in a plane could lead to "explosive decompression" and cause a large hole to suck people out. Specifically the myth that a terrorist with a gun shoots a hole in a window and that causes a large hole that people get sucked out of. And they determined that such a scenario just wouldn't work: airplane glass won't fracture like that, and the hole the bullet creates wouldn't be large enough to cause enough suction to suck people out.
But they never tested anything like an exploding iPad or laptop. They were specifically testing shooting holes in a plane with a gun.
Every other month it seems, we get an urgent notice from IT reminding us to either uninstall or update Flash.
Unfortunately, I have to have Flash installed on my work computers because the corporate-required "training" courses that they keep on making us take require Flash - such as the one on "information security" about how important it is to keep our software up to date.
So, basically, I have to have Flash installed so I can tick off a little checkbox that says I know not to install software like Flash.
I had one where we asked for a street address that was a mile away. It came up with the same street address... in South Africa, and then told us it couldn't get directions there. No shit, it's not even the right hemisphere!
"Hey Siri, get directions to the nearest Starbucks." Siri: "I found one that's two miles from here. Would you like to call, or get directions?" "WHAT THE FUCK DID I JUST ASK YOU SIRI?!" Siri: "I'm sorry, I didn't get that." "AAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAH!!!"
I don't think I've ever seen Siri actually be useful for anything. In fact, this story is the first story I've ever read about someone using Siri for something useful. Most of the time she just misunderstands or does something stupid.
And as you've noticed, all that stuff Steve Jobs talked about how you can carry on a conversation is bullshit. Modern Siri is basically a command prompt, each line is a brand new command with absolutely no relation to any previous context, except for very specific commands. Things like asking her the weather in one place and then about that weather report - which Steve Jobs demoed, if you recall - do not and have never in fact worked.
I doubt it. Ever try to caption a video? It's a slow, annoying process. The automated stuff generally doesn't work that well so you have to carefully go through and fix errors and it's a giant pain in the ass. You then have to watch the entire thing to make sure that the caption timing is correct and that you've made it clear who is speaking when. For extra credit, try and make sure captions don't cover important parts of the video.
The problem with crowd sourcing is that you'd have to give a reason for people to bother doing it. The people who even can do it by definition don't need it. It's slow, it's boring, and it's annoying.
There's a reason it's so expensive to do, and that the government is forcing people to do it. Without government coercion, no one would bother.
I basically agree - VR as it currently stands is not going to take off. The current experience is nifty but it quickly becomes annoying. The cables get in the way. The controllers work but you're still holding on to little plastic bits.
The next gen is going to be higher resolution and wireless, and Microsoft is going to have standard APIs for them. I expect that's when they'll go mainstream.
Here's where I'm not sure I agree - I think what's going to go mainstream first is smartphone VR, for one simple reason: just about everyone owns a smartphone. It's inherently wireless. Assuming you stick to Android devices (as Apple isn't doing anything with VR and seems to be actively hostile to the concept), you've got a standard API.
Smartphone powered VR has the chance to be something that's basically a cheap add-on for a device you already own.
There are issues with this: smartphones aren't really powerful enough to create a great VR experience and the smartphone controllers are - well, also not great. There's still work to be done to make smartphone VR really "go mainstream."
But I think $100 "addon" VR headsets for a $1000 smartphone people are already buying to use elsewhere is much more likely to happen than a $400 VR headset that's only a VR headset.
Of course it did - his model assumes a correlation with various states, and that a polling error in one state will likely apply to another state. As the overall polling error became clear as states were called and the actual-versus-polls became known, the model adjusted for that. You're also seeing the effect of swing states being called - as states are called, they stop being "70%/30%" chances are start becoming "100%/0%" chances, and that flat-out eliminates certain possibilities.
Yes, it rapidly swung from 70% Clinton to 70% Trump - when the east coast votes were tallied and it was clear that Clinton was losing swing states. But only when actual, real data was coming it.
The actual difference between the final polls and the actual results was something like 2%, which is well within the margin of error. It turns out that the polls this year were actually more accurate than they were during the 2012 election.
His model was fairly accurate throughout the year - it showed a highly volatile and uncertain race that was slightly in Hillary's favor. It's starting to sound like the failing in the polls has more to do with the assumptions of who was going to vote - turnout this year was far lower than in 2016, probably because a lot of voters couldn't stand either choice.
You mean in the most technical of senses? You're correct. The election won't be officially decided until the Electoral College votes on December 19th. At that point, the result of that vote will determine who becomes the President.
Can they decide that they want to vote for someone other than whoever their state votes on? It depends. Most states have laws against it... BUT the penalties for them range from being unenforceable to a minor fine. If for some reason Hillary Clinton wins the Electoral College vote in December 19th, then yes, she would be the President Elect.
Is that going to happen? Not a chance. Some electors have refused to vote for the candidate their state voted for... but they're refusing to vote for Hillary Clinton. So that could happen, and Hillary's final vote tally could officially be less than the states she won.
But if it somehow did, then yes, it is conceptually possible for the Electoral College to elect someone who didn't win.
Nate Silver's model explicitly gave Hillary a 10.5% chance to win the popular vote while losing the Electoral College - exactly what happened. 10.5% might not sound like a lot, but it's better odds than rolling a 10 on a 10-sided die. (Barely, but... better.)
If you read the final post before the elections, Nate Silver explicitly pointed to a scenario where the polls were biased a few points in favor of Hillary and pointed out that would lead to the scenario that happened. His model "got it right" with the data it had and correctly laid out chances based on that.
People are bad at understanding chances. The polls legitimately gave Hillary Clinton a 72%-ish chance of winning. But that leaves Trump with a 28% chance - and if you've ever flipped a coin and had it come up heads twice in a row - congrats, you hit a 25% chance. Which was less probable than the polls gave for Trump to win.
I've pointed out multiple times this election that the DNC was way too self-assured for their own good, and I was proven right. That's not a problem with the polls (though they proved to be systematically biased against Trump), that's a problem with the DNC. But fuck the DNC. They earned a Trump Presidency and they can enjoy all eight glorious years of it.
The country needs to be able to dump low-skilled people directly out of high school into a job that will pay enough to sustain them and their families over a lifetime. Don't concentrate so hard on educating everyone -- some people can't handle it and don't want to be...look at how many students are just barely graduating college and not actually absorbing anything.
While you're absolutely right that there needs to be low-skill jobs that pay a good wage - manufacturing just isn't going to be it. We already have robots to make a lot of things. As long as the cost of building things with robots is less than the cost of building them with manual labor - and thanks to the relatively high labor costs in the US, they will be - those jobs are never coming back.
Ever watch the show "How It's Made?" The answer is (almost) always robots. I remember one where they showed how modern swords are made. The first step involved a CNC machine to cut out the shape of the sword from a steel blank. The human involvement was basically limited to wrapping the handle with leather and dumping the product in a box. And that's prop swords, the definition of a niche market.
Manufacturing might come back to the US, but thanks to improvements in productivity (due to automation) the raw number of jobs is simply never going to be the same. Ever.
We need to come up with some new solutions, but I'll be honest: I have no clue what they'd be.
Actually what Comey said - and he was very careful about the words he used - was that they didn't have a strong enough case to bring to trial.
If you read between the lines, it's fairly clear that their real reasoning is that no one wants to test the current law on this case. They're afraid that if they did opt to prosecute Hillary, she would create case law that weakens the laws protecting classified information. Any trial on this would almost certainly go to appeals and take years, and who knows what the final outcome would be.
He very specifically said "extremely careless" and not "grossly negligent" to avoid the exact wording of the statues that were broken and specifically said "no reasonable prosecutor" would try the case, not that there was no case.
I suspect that the higher-ups simply don't think that the risk of Hillary winning the case and weakening their ability to safe-guard American secrets is worth bringing down Hillary. I suspect Comey figured that there's no way the DNC would be stupid enough to nominate her with the announcement he made, and that if they were, there's no way the nation would be stupid enough to elect her. Joke was on him for the first one, it remains to be seen what will happen on the second one.
Slashdot Mirror
Apple's problem is that no one has any reason to develop proper macOS applications these days. No one really uses macOS outside of people developing iOS apps.
So creating this unified platform is less about something that makes sense as a tool you should use, and more about Apple desperately trying to get people to release macOS apps on the macOS App Store that literally no one uses.
Not an expert on Marvel but I didn't see the link between marvel's current set of characters (batman, superman...blah blah ) and these ones so maybe with time when people noticed the lack of the link between them they slowly gave up.
As other people have pointed out, you're mixing universes. However, you're still right: each show is conceptually happening along with the Marvel Cinematic Universe, meaning that minor things like Thanatos wiping out half of all life in the universe should have happened at the same time as these shows.
Except we never get to see any of the "major" Marvel characters like Iron Man or Thor, despite the fact that conceptually - at the same time these shows are happening - the events of the movies are occurring. Instead we get vague references to things like "the Incident."
To be honest, my favorite was The punisher.
Probably because a major point of The Punisher is that he's just a guy. He has no super powers. He's just a guy in a crappy situation who decides to take matters into his own hands. It makes him far more relatable than the other characters who all have various super powers to fall back on.
I'm actually very "meh" about this. On the one hand, I enjoyed the first season of (most) of the Netflix Marvel shows (guess the exception), but on the other hand, while they kept on making it seem like something cool could be just around the corner, they never quite managed to deliver. The Iron Fist was the worst at this. Its final season ended with a setup that seemed like it could potentially be cool, but given that it was the Iron Fist, I kind of don't care that we'll never get to see if they would have managed to capitalize on it.
Beyond that, all the shows were getting kind of stale. Luke Cage's second season seemed to be a large bit of padding to set up for a third season that may have been interesting, one we didn't get to see. Jessica Jones's second season set up for maybe having an interesting new character while otherwise being pretty dull - dull enough that I managed to forget a large bit of the plot involving a fairly major character! Jessica Jones is getting a third season (the one they just finished before being canceled), so maybe the third season will manage to capitalize on the hooks the second one set up, but - well - I'm not counting on it.
Ultimately I think they all fell to something I remember reading about, how super hero origin stories are easier to write than stories where they've already been established. Origin stories are inherently the Hero's Journey, something that's very well defined and understood. The first seasons were all origin stories, and then once they were defined characters - the show writers didn't know how to continue. This meant that pretty much every "next season" of these shows ended up effectively being the origin stories of other characters beyond the "main characters." Which almost worked.
So I'm left with a mixed feeling that while the shows may have been able to move the characters in interesting directions and show us neat new things, it was probably time to cancel them. Leaving me feeling basically unable to care either way. Had they continued, that might have been interesting. Or not. So it doesn't really matter that they won't.
And, yes, I know this is a lot of text to say "I don't care" but it's this weird thing where I wish I could be invested in the characters because the shows seemed promising at first, but ultimately, I'm just ... not.
This is the problem. You want to know why people turn these alerts off? Because they get woken up at 3AM and get told to look out for a gray car that's in the other side of the state. Yeah, sure, I might do that. Or I might turn the alerts off entirely and then miss one I might have been able to help on.
Beyond that, the effectiveness of Amber alerts is highly debatable. According to Engaget, less than 5% of mobile Amber alerts led to a rescued child. Even then, it's unclear that any Amber alert has ever actually saved a child. The majority of Amber alerts are issued in family custody cases, where the child's life was never in any real danger. Vocativ has a good (but broken) set of infographics about how effective they are.
Part of the problem is that the alert is too short (limited to 90 characters) and can't include links to details or images of the child of vehicle they want people to look out for.
There are ways to fix the Amber alert system - let them link to details and include pictures of the child, don't sound them if the phone is silenced because that just gets people to turn them off - but adding them to Netflix and Spotify won't help. (Although it's also unclear this bill includes Amber alerts - it may just be things like hurricane or flash flood warnings. Which seems like things you'd want to deal with at the device level rather than Netflix or Spotify.)
The best part of the Twitter app on Mac was that it's so out of date, they never bothered implementing ads - I'm sorry, "promoted tweets" - on it. That would be one reason to use it: built-in ad blocking.
But other than that - yeah, I don't see a point to a Twitter app. If you want an "app-like experience" just grab a Twitter tab and throw it into its own little window. Boom. Twitter app.
To be fair, the ability to left pad a string was only added to the JavaScript standard last year. Although Array.isArray has existed for quite a while now.
As for why you need a special function to determine if something is an array, MDN links to this article.
Note that one context in which you will never need to use Array.isArray over instanceof Array is inside a Node.js program, as it doesn't run in a browser context.
Although even then, isArray probably doesn't work the way most people would expect: certain "array-like" things aren't arrays, such as arguments. JavaScript is fun.
This seems as good a place to leave my NPM story. Or I could just link to the bug.
The short version is if you use NPM to install dependencies, it will install your dependencies and whatever they depend on. If you run it again, it will install your dependencies and then DELETE anything they depend on.
Why would you repeat the install? Well, if your dependencies change (e.g., you update a dependency or add a new one), you would then repeat the install to get the new dependencies. Except you can't do this without blowing away the entire existing install due to this bug.
It gets somewhat worse - starting in NPM 5, they introduced a lock file. Anyone familiar with other package managers should know what a lock file is and why they're important. If the lock file exists, it will never install indirect dependencies (probably).
Basically, if anyone doubted that NPM was run by sloppy idiots, note that both bugs are still open and have been for months.
Hundreds of stories about Russia hacking the election, which never happened and has no credible sources, and now all of a sudden Slashdot requires "credible sources."
Now I remember why I had "forgotten" my login for the longest time.
I'm actually OK with the batteries not being easily replaceable. There are decent reasons why they're glued in. I'd rather have a bigger battery than a smaller battery and a door to make replacing it trivial.
However, that being said, as the batteries will need replacement, I think it's only fair that if you glue the batteries in to your phones, you should be required to replace the battery at cost of the battery, at any repair shop of the owner's choice.
None of this "mail it in" or "find the nearest Apple Store" BS. Any repair store, anywhere, should be allowed to replace a battery with Apple covering the cost of labor, as the price Apple has to pay for gluing a consumable component into the phone. It's only fair.
So... you agree with me? This is a useless feature and the only reason Apple is implementing it is because Android did it first and Apple wants to match Android bullet for bullet.
Did you watch the most recent WWDC keynote? Literally everything they covered was done elsewhere first. They introduced nothing. Even their "and one more thing" was literally a clone of a product two other companies already made!
The only reason they're adding wireless charging is because Android has it. It isn't a compelling feature, it isn't useful, but it's a bullet point.
Because Android phones have that feature and Apple has forgotten how to innovate.
And to answer your second question: no, not really. It looks cool, and ... that's about it. It has some new and interesting problems, like being able to heat up accidentally dropped coins to high temperatures and sometimes not working if things aren't lined up absolutely perfectly.
If I'm reading the article correctly, the computer itself wasn't, the Slashdot headline is at best misleading. What was connected to the Internet was a backup drive containing documents that describe the password cracking computer.
It's actually somewhat unclear if they even built the thing, these are more planning documents that describe how they would. If it exists, it presumably is properly isolated from the Internet, given that it's supposed to be used only by DOD and intelligence agencies.
I like my smart lights ... but not for any of the things that make them "smart." The thing I like about them is the ability to have them changes from cool light in the morning to warm light in the evening. This is something you could feasibly do without "smart" bulbs but is easier to set up with them.
But just about everything else that's supposed to be "smart" is just annoying.
Have someone over who wants to turn on the lights? Haha, they can't, not without the app! Want to turn on a light in one room? Better get out your phone and get fiddling! (They've since released physical switches you can use to control things, but I've yet to get one.)
The "smart" features that are supposed to work don't work all that well. I have them programmed to turn off automatically when I leave and turn on the light by the front door when I return. Sometimes this happens. Sometimes it'll turn on the light by the front door many minutes after I've arrived. Sometimes it'll just never turn them off, but turn on the light. Sometimes it just works.
You can use it with voice commands! These manage to be even slower than just digging out your phone and using the app.
So would I recommend "smart lights" to anyone else? No, not really. I like the ability to change the lighting color and selectively dim lights. It's nifty. It's not a killer app.
That wasn't the myth they were testing. As other people have pointed out, people can and have been sucked out of airplanes. As I recall, the episode you're talking about even mentioned that fact.
What they were testing was that a bullet hole in a plane could lead to "explosive decompression" and cause a large hole to suck people out. Specifically the myth that a terrorist with a gun shoots a hole in a window and that causes a large hole that people get sucked out of. And they determined that such a scenario just wouldn't work: airplane glass won't fracture like that, and the hole the bullet creates wouldn't be large enough to cause enough suction to suck people out.
But they never tested anything like an exploding iPad or laptop. They were specifically testing shooting holes in a plane with a gun.
Every other month it seems, we get an urgent notice from IT reminding us to either uninstall or update Flash.
Unfortunately, I have to have Flash installed on my work computers because the corporate-required "training" courses that they keep on making us take require Flash - such as the one on "information security" about how important it is to keep our software up to date.
So, basically, I have to have Flash installed so I can tick off a little checkbox that says I know not to install software like Flash.
I had one where we asked for a street address that was a mile away. It came up with the same street address... in South Africa, and then told us it couldn't get directions there. No shit, it's not even the right hemisphere!
It'll also does that if you ask for directions:
"Hey Siri, get directions to the nearest Starbucks."
Siri: "I found one that's two miles from here. Would you like to call, or get directions?"
"WHAT THE FUCK DID I JUST ASK YOU SIRI?!"
Siri: "I'm sorry, I didn't get that."
"AAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAH!!!"
I don't think I've ever seen Siri actually be useful for anything. In fact, this story is the first story I've ever read about someone using Siri for something useful. Most of the time she just misunderstands or does something stupid.
And as you've noticed, all that stuff Steve Jobs talked about how you can carry on a conversation is bullshit. Modern Siri is basically a command prompt, each line is a brand new command with absolutely no relation to any previous context, except for very specific commands. Things like asking her the weather in one place and then about that weather report - which Steve Jobs demoed, if you recall - do not and have never in fact worked.
I doubt it. Ever try to caption a video? It's a slow, annoying process. The automated stuff generally doesn't work that well so you have to carefully go through and fix errors and it's a giant pain in the ass. You then have to watch the entire thing to make sure that the caption timing is correct and that you've made it clear who is speaking when. For extra credit, try and make sure captions don't cover important parts of the video.
The problem with crowd sourcing is that you'd have to give a reason for people to bother doing it. The people who even can do it by definition don't need it. It's slow, it's boring, and it's annoying.
There's a reason it's so expensive to do, and that the government is forcing people to do it. Without government coercion, no one would bother.
I basically agree - VR as it currently stands is not going to take off. The current experience is nifty but it quickly becomes annoying. The cables get in the way. The controllers work but you're still holding on to little plastic bits.
The next gen is going to be higher resolution and wireless, and Microsoft is going to have standard APIs for them. I expect that's when they'll go mainstream.
Here's where I'm not sure I agree - I think what's going to go mainstream first is smartphone VR, for one simple reason: just about everyone owns a smartphone. It's inherently wireless. Assuming you stick to Android devices (as Apple isn't doing anything with VR and seems to be actively hostile to the concept), you've got a standard API.
Smartphone powered VR has the chance to be something that's basically a cheap add-on for a device you already own.
There are issues with this: smartphones aren't really powerful enough to create a great VR experience and the smartphone controllers are - well, also not great. There's still work to be done to make smartphone VR really "go mainstream."
But I think $100 "addon" VR headsets for a $1000 smartphone people are already buying to use elsewhere is much more likely to happen than a $400 VR headset that's only a VR headset.
Of course it did - his model assumes a correlation with various states, and that a polling error in one state will likely apply to another state. As the overall polling error became clear as states were called and the actual-versus-polls became known, the model adjusted for that. You're also seeing the effect of swing states being called - as states are called, they stop being "70%/30%" chances are start becoming "100%/0%" chances, and that flat-out eliminates certain possibilities.
Yes, it rapidly swung from 70% Clinton to 70% Trump - when the east coast votes were tallied and it was clear that Clinton was losing swing states. But only when actual, real data was coming it.
The actual difference between the final polls and the actual results was something like 2%, which is well within the margin of error. It turns out that the polls this year were actually more accurate than they were during the 2012 election.
His model was fairly accurate throughout the year - it showed a highly volatile and uncertain race that was slightly in Hillary's favor. It's starting to sound like the failing in the polls has more to do with the assumptions of who was going to vote - turnout this year was far lower than in 2016, probably because a lot of voters couldn't stand either choice.
You mean in the most technical of senses? You're correct. The election won't be officially decided until the Electoral College votes on December 19th. At that point, the result of that vote will determine who becomes the President.
Can they decide that they want to vote for someone other than whoever their state votes on? It depends. Most states have laws against it... BUT the penalties for them range from being unenforceable to a minor fine. If for some reason Hillary Clinton wins the Electoral College vote in December 19th, then yes, she would be the President Elect.
Is that going to happen? Not a chance. Some electors have refused to vote for the candidate their state voted for ... but they're refusing to vote for Hillary Clinton. So that could happen, and Hillary's final vote tally could officially be less than the states she won.
But if it somehow did, then yes, it is conceptually possible for the Electoral College to elect someone who didn't win.
Nate Silver's model explicitly gave Hillary a 10.5% chance to win the popular vote while losing the Electoral College - exactly what happened. 10.5% might not sound like a lot, but it's better odds than rolling a 10 on a 10-sided die. (Barely, but ... better.)
If you read the final post before the elections, Nate Silver explicitly pointed to a scenario where the polls were biased a few points in favor of Hillary and pointed out that would lead to the scenario that happened. His model "got it right" with the data it had and correctly laid out chances based on that.
People are bad at understanding chances. The polls legitimately gave Hillary Clinton a 72%-ish chance of winning. But that leaves Trump with a 28% chance - and if you've ever flipped a coin and had it come up heads twice in a row - congrats, you hit a 25% chance. Which was less probable than the polls gave for Trump to win.
I've pointed out multiple times this election that the DNC was way too self-assured for their own good, and I was proven right. That's not a problem with the polls (though they proved to be systematically biased against Trump), that's a problem with the DNC. But fuck the DNC. They earned a Trump Presidency and they can enjoy all eight glorious years of it.
The country needs to be able to dump low-skilled people directly out of high school into a job that will pay enough to sustain them and their families over a lifetime. Don't concentrate so hard on educating everyone -- some people can't handle it and don't want to be...look at how many students are just barely graduating college and not actually absorbing anything.
While you're absolutely right that there needs to be low-skill jobs that pay a good wage - manufacturing just isn't going to be it. We already have robots to make a lot of things. As long as the cost of building things with robots is less than the cost of building them with manual labor - and thanks to the relatively high labor costs in the US, they will be - those jobs are never coming back.
Ever watch the show "How It's Made?" The answer is (almost) always robots. I remember one where they showed how modern swords are made. The first step involved a CNC machine to cut out the shape of the sword from a steel blank. The human involvement was basically limited to wrapping the handle with leather and dumping the product in a box. And that's prop swords, the definition of a niche market.
Manufacturing might come back to the US, but thanks to improvements in productivity (due to automation) the raw number of jobs is simply never going to be the same. Ever.
We need to come up with some new solutions, but I'll be honest: I have no clue what they'd be.
Minus, of course, the tons of examples in this very thread where they were.
Not that it matters, the crook is going to jail and we're going to make America great again. Finally!
Actually what Comey said - and he was very careful about the words he used - was that they didn't have a strong enough case to bring to trial.
If you read between the lines, it's fairly clear that their real reasoning is that no one wants to test the current law on this case. They're afraid that if they did opt to prosecute Hillary, she would create case law that weakens the laws protecting classified information. Any trial on this would almost certainly go to appeals and take years, and who knows what the final outcome would be.
He very specifically said "extremely careless" and not "grossly negligent" to avoid the exact wording of the statues that were broken and specifically said "no reasonable prosecutor" would try the case, not that there was no case.
I suspect that the higher-ups simply don't think that the risk of Hillary winning the case and weakening their ability to safe-guard American secrets is worth bringing down Hillary. I suspect Comey figured that there's no way the DNC would be stupid enough to nominate her with the announcement he made, and that if they were, there's no way the nation would be stupid enough to elect her. Joke was on him for the first one, it remains to be seen what will happen on the second one.