For work I use a Mac and I remote into Windows, and I have so much trouble making my brain swap the keys for copy/paste.
Ctrl-C Command-V is so painful.
That's a pretty breathless article. It specifically mentions Google but never compares it to Google Earth. Only Microsoft can do it, except it's already been done.
I am not a touch typist, far from it, but I have been typing for so long that I too couldn't tell you how much I look at the keyboard. For awhile I almost convinced myself that I had somehow stopped looking down because I never seemed to notice it. But I definitely still look at every key I type.
Management could have been aware of more personal details that coworkers should not know. I don't think it is necessarily a black mark against the company without knowing the whole story.
A good way to define metropolitan areas is by commuter patterns. If a certain percentage of residents of a county or town all commute to the same adjoining larger town, then that gets counted.
The article is credited "by Georgia Institute of Technology", so it is a press release. This is just early research, but presumably the problems of toxicity are what inspired the study in the first place. But, they can't make any claims yet, because lawyers. And cost would be a huge factor, unless regulation were involved. There is a potential public good in reducing toxins in the environment. But what about their idea of using it for framing lumber? Nobody uses pressure treated for framing today, do they? It would help insulate, they say, but there's no way that would make any sense unless the cost were much lower than today's treated lumber, which... well it's just an early research project.
The traditional TLDs, especially .com, are immediately recognizable as www addresses. If you write some_name.com somewhere, just about anyone would know that they could type that into a browser. But some_name.club would not have that effect.
In modern standards a straight wall is much easier to build because you can just measure once for each row and stretch a string to match the bricks against. A curved wall requires a level placed against every brick to make sure you are still going straight up. I expect older walls actually trusted the mason's skill without going through all that. The Wiki photo certainly looks true.
Ironically, in the old days everyone used to complain that they couldn't pay for just the cable channels they watch, you had to accept the whole bundle. Now you pay for the channels separately. Yay?
So the trees had evolved, but the bacteria had not caught on yet. "It’s a curious mismatch. Food to eat but no eaters to eat it." In a few million years, they might be saying the same thing about plastic.
The hegemony of car culture is so ingrained that people are not even aware of how much it personally costs them. These companies are taking advantage of this loophole. People notice gas prices go up and down with great interest, but that is just a small part of the total cost. Since you pretty much have to have a car to just exist in society, people don't count the capital expenses.
Here in Asheville, NC we had a fellow who built and attempted to ride a 44 ft. (13.4m) tall bike at a festival. He did not ride far enough to make it in the record books. But it was exciting.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-WgBeW4LXcU
Regular people can afford a detached house in America, for some definitions of regular. I used to be part of the working poor, and having a car did not make me feel free, it was a constant stress. I went through a series of old clunkers, and the threat of it dying was a real threat to my continued livelihood. Millions of Americans live that way today. Car culture is self-propagating; it excludes other options via the built environment. The more convenient we make it for rich people to drive faster, the more deadly we make it for those who cannot reach that bottom rung.
I think you are conflating New York with livable places. Which is understandable; New York is virtually the only walkable place in the US. But the same design principles work on any scale. Tiny villages of 20 people can be made walkable.
I am certainly not suggesting that you be forced to live close to other people. But I would like to have the option. The other half of that is that since we all live a half-mile from all our neighbors, we don't know how to behave with consideration for each other. Without a culture of reciprocal consideration, there are bound to be conflicts. It is not obvious how we get from here to there.
The US is huge, and we could build anything we want. The problem is that we don't see what we have given up by not living closer together. The dream of car culture is that we as individuals can live in a huge area, with vast potential for interaction. But the truth of what we have built is that we are cut off from one another. The "square" that I pass through every morning is a massive intersection of two suburban highways. Behind our tinted windows, we wait in long lines for out turn signal. We drive to the gym and fight for that close up parking space so we won't have to walk. Why? Because the exterior environment we have built is horrific. This is not the life I want to live.
I reject the idea that we can't live in nicer places. Americans learn the wrong lesson from visiting Europe. They think that a place has to be hundreds of years old to be livable. But we can build anything we want. Politics need to get out in front and not drag us back. Moneyed interests need to take a chance. Because when given a choice, people will choose a walkable, livable world.
"While Google and Amazon have been creating voice assistants that people seem to actually use and wax lyrical about, Apple … hasn’t. There’s no easy solution there."
Until the Apple-Google merger. I for one welcome...
The article mentions that the robocar can theoretically see other drivers intent:
<i>It’s worth noting that sometimes humans solve this problem by making eye contact, to know if the other car has seen you. Turns out that robots can do that as well, because the human eye flashes brightly in the red and infrared when looking directly at you — the “red eye” effect of small flash cameras.</i>
But what about the other way? Perhaps the bus driver couldn't see Goog's flashing eyes, and assumed therefore it wouldn't attempt to merge back in.
Surely you can see that they think the exact opposite. In order to do something like that, they have to convince themselves that they the good guys, and it has to be done to "purify the evil in the world" or something. The truth is that people are not inherently bad. Evil feeds on itself; if you insist on calling them bad, then you are falling into the same trap that they did. Hopefully you wouldn't act in such a heinous manner, but Western societies kill thousands of innocents all the time, and it is masked with the same rationalizations; if a drone strike kills someone, we define them as a bad guy.