1_2__3

Why do only the US and U.K. care?

Your anecdotal experience is not especially relevant to the conversation. It's great your friends think your phone is cool. Literally every person you ever meet in your entire life could tell you the pixel is awesome and that's still too small a sample size to be indicative of anything at all.

Yeah. It was by no means an unexpected or even unanticipated thing. It wasn't hard to see coming.

Good analogy. I was thinking of this the other day - while technically the big players are in standards committees together and do work on common standards, in practice it's a bunch of corporate maneuvering that bears no resemblance at all to things like the kind of things Sony, Toshiba, Onkyo, Panasonic and other big players do when they decide they want to accomplish something. Can you imagine Google, Apple and Microsoft regularly forming cross-team working groups to specifically develop technology and associated standards to be adopted by all?

They're too busy suspiciously eyeing each other's userbases to waste time on anything like long-term strategic thinking that benefits anyone but themselves. To be honest it feels like that kind of collaboration is long gone - it came about because it was necessary to actually serve consumers. But while someone who purchased a Compact Disc player is a Sony customer, a person who uses chat is not a Google customer - they're a SKU. The whole way the Internet tech industry is structured is exactly the opposite of what you'd want if you wanted to encourage collaboration. By making users and their data a commodity instead of customers there's no benefit at all to improving their general experience.

Honestly, what I think we're seeing is evidence of an existential crisis in some quarters in Google. There's a lot of people who still believe in "do no evil" and who furthermore believe that part and parcel of that is not building walled gardens. Then you have other people - including Larry - who think walled gardens are the only solution. The PM for RTC at Google wrote a long email about how basically interoperability is dead, XMPP is dead, federation is dead, and every attempt by Google to build open standards has been effectively exploited by competitors.

So a lot of influential management thinks going full FB is the way to go. But a lot of other people at Google think open standards are still the way of the future, or can be if a company like Google is willing to champion them.

The result of all of this is a complete and utter dumpster fire from a product perspective. It's the classic "if we're not pulling together then we're rowing against each other" problem. I think Google would be able to execute just fine if they could settle on what they want to achieve. Instead we have this.

Citation on five years being the longest drought in California since records were kept?

Couldn't you plausibly argue that you're in either case you're constrained - in one, by money, and in the other, by money? If so then doesn't it make sense to pick the approach the best benefits consumers (which this seems like it does)?

...What does Clinton have to do with any of this?

What you are calling the gig economy in this case is really a service economy, which existed long before cell phones or SF tech startup silliness. It's not some amazing new step forward for humanity.

That's the Econ 101 textbook statement, not reality.

Remember when browsers were supposed to untether you from the OS? How is operating system support at all involved for a web-based application?

No it's not.

See how easy this is?

This line of thinking is I fathomable to me. You do realize that you'd probably have better chances pulling a slot machine handle for a big payout than expecting an early-employee stock package that means anything to a non unicorn.

Long hours is not the same as owning me.

I suppose this is as good a thread as any to again make the claim that I don't think AI will be anything but a toy before AR is mainstream. For whatever reason right now the fashionable thing in tech is to pretend we don't have incredibly sophisticated and powerful meat brains in our heads and the best, most economical, and most feasible way forward is to completely eliminate it from every equation and replace it with silicon. When in truth the melding of silicon (binary) computers is easier and results in something much more powerful (and much sooner) than just silicon.

I'm fully aware computers will eventually outpace us. But the economic and human potential of human/computer augmentation is enormous and will likely last decades or even centuries in the "near" term. At some point we'll shed our obsessive fascination with denigrating humans as "old'n'busted" and remember just how incredible people can be.

> the idea of government bureaucrats dictating network engineering standards to carriers and ISPs

I have to admit I read that and I completely discount the rest of your comment. Nobody who actually believes in even the concept of sensible government regulation uses phrasing like this. I'm surprised you didn't call out "three letter agencies" too.

And besides that I believe you're just trying to fool people too stupid to know what NN is when you say net neutrality "dictates network engineering standards". I don't think your comment is intellectually honest at all.

> Not certain why people have a problem with that.

I'm even less certain you're willing to listen to anyone who tries to explain to you how faulty your logic is. Especially since you repeatedly try to distill down the complicated topics to bumperstickerisms.

> We don't even have enough money for the poor who live in this country legally.

And I'm sure you're a big proponent of changing that, huh.

You don't offer any citations or evidence or proof for any of your claims. How do you know what kind of alcohol is available in Islamic countries? How do you know the pot in the Netherlands is as strong as you say (given you say "they are supposed to..." without any evidence)?

There are enormous swaths of the US where few or none of those things are available. You are fooling yourself if you think those are guaranteed in most heavily impoverished areas and contributing to the overall problem by doing so. In fact your comment is such right-wing dog whistling (greatest country in the world no matter what lalalala".

Bear in mind that no it cannot write arbitrary files. It's a unix system, it has unix permissions, and required privilege escalation to write to locations the user is not allowed to.

Oh for fuck's sake.

Which is basically what I end up thinking after virtually every Google announcement regarding chat.

Are you not aware that literally every major sport has technical restrictions like the ones you're decrying and have for many decades?

This whole thread is full of people staggeringly ignorant of physical sport and competition.

It's weird to me that you so casually conflate technical advancement with human advancement.

You don't see it as perverting some of the basic tenets of sport and competition to encourage rampant technical meddling in them? You honestly don't see where that road leads?

Did he do it according to the rules of Senate procedure? Honest question. Please provide an article or reference.

I look forward to your evidence of sexism there then, since otherwise any inconsistency is entirely irrelevant to the "strong woman stood up to men" narrative (and please realize I say that as an enthusiastic Warren supporter).

Ah yes the ol' "blame the electorate".

Which is it? Your phrasing implies those are the same thing. They're not.

In this case the enemy of your enemy is a deranged megalomaniac. I'll take the enemy thanks.

I used to agree with you but now I resoundingly do not. The only compelling reason I have left is still quite compelling: testability. Without breaking your code I to subroutines it becomes orders of magnitude harder to test effectively or at all.

So if something isn't offered in every language, transcribed, sign language overlay, CC, and let's say color blind mode... it's half baked educational content?

I'm asking honest where you draw the line.