stdgy

It would be interesting to see this work expanded to include some of those factors; Namely indexing and archiving. Bad data models seem like a whole other beast, but indexing and archiving should be possible to generate good configuration suggestions for if you had a full history of DB usage trends along with what you were hoping to optimize for.

I agree that voice is lousy for many things, maybe even most things. And I think Apple is uniquely positioned to offer an end-to-end experience across devices (desktop, laptop, phone, watch, house/speaker) and that their design sensibilities could lead to a top notch speaker. I think the product will find buyers. But it's ultimate utility will remain in question until Siri improves.

I think part of the problem is that the things 'voice' is good for tend to have humans on the receiving end that then carry out complex, human actions. "Stu, could you schedule a dinner for me at a good local Italian place at 7:30 and invite Scott and Robin?"

Well shoot, that is a lot to unpack! It's a hell of a lot for a computer to unpack. It's a lot for anyone to unpack unless they know you and your circle of contacts. Carrying it out would require interaction with at least 3 people over a variety of mediums.

I suspect that by opening Siri up (And other digital 'assitants') it might promote the growth of infrastructure and services that would begin to make some of these more advanced queries a little more tractable.

As far as I'm concerned, Siri is on death watch until Apple figures out a strategy to open it up. Outside of setting timers, creating reminders, setting alarms, doing a little dictating or mishearing directions, the product is stagnant.

I just don't see a lot of utility going forward unless they liberalize the service and allow other people to develop new experiences for users. That should also give them new data to mine and allow good voice UI patterns to bubble up.

Not sure how they should go about designing a framework for developers to plug-in to, though. It's a tricky problem. But presumably they've learned some things after 'sharing' some of Siri with Uber and Facebook and that could help them move forward.

The opposite argument is rather popular as well: Conservatives work vigorously to make the government as expensive and inefficient as possible in order to get people to continue to vote them into office, by convincing citizens that government is the enemy and they are the solution. The worse the government, the more likely they are to be elected (Outside of an actual revolution occurring).

I suspect both arguments give each side too much credit. This issue seems deeper than the partisan divide.

Trust without proof...

I believe that's called religion.

Outside of large cities, most of America can't even afford the upkeep associated with their existing infrastructure. I'm not sure how you think they'll be able to afford large scale fiber deployments.

Or maybe you're saying that private ISPs will perform the deployment and then share their fiber? Which seems wildly unrealistic.

Rewind. Why did the government grant monopolies to these companies in the first place?

To entice them to invest in their area because nobody else would.

Infrastructure isn't software development. It requires billions of dollars of capital investment. That investment isn't going to go to many areas unless it's nearly guaranteed a return, hence the labyrinth of monopolistic guarantees bestowed upon ISPs.

It's not clear to me that consumer options would flourish if you were to roll back all ISP related regulations and void existing contracts. I suspect the current system would just become more entrenched.

How much does your 'top of the line' lane-staying sensor cost? How about your backup camera? How about automatic breaking sensors? How about all of the components required to integrate these sensors into your vehicle?

These are all things that started high and fell low. The historical prices for each of these systems reflects this fact, as does their gradual movement through the available product line-up. They all started in top of the line vehicles that cost well north of the average person's yearly salary, and are steadily creeping into the lowliest models.

I see nothing in self-driving systems that make them special in this regard. They're already largely an amalgamation of commodity components whose prices are trending downwards.

You can bet on them staying a niche product forever, if you wish. I just think it flies in the face of historical evidence.

We've already seen price drops for the most expensive self-driving components. LIDARs, GPUs and storage have already fallen in cost, and the products aren't even on the market yet. There is every reason to believe these price drops will continue as more resources are put into scaling production and more companies enter the game of component design and production.

Haha, I love it.

To anyone confused: Look today's date!

It seems like they're currently designing the APIs which, once solidified, can be used to make a user friendly service. The foundation, as described, isn't easy for customers. But it is easy for developers and engineers!

And once this framework/API work is complete, people will be able to use this to create customer-friendly solutions.

As an aside, it should be noted that all cells carry the complete blueprint for a human being. The open question for a long time was whether it would be possible to push adult cells 'back' in time to a state where they could become another type of cell. Thanks to the work of tenacious scientists, we know that the answer is yes! It can be done. Methods have been discovered to coax already differentiated cells to become pluripotent. That is, adult cells that are already of a specific 'type' have been reprogrammed to become stem cells.

I in no way intend this to be an argument against embryonic stem cells. I just find it to be extraordinarily interesting and an intriguing avenue for further development.

More info here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Induced_pluripotent_stem_cell

This is what I've run through: https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/aspnet/core/tutorials/your-...

It's nice. I went on to modify and hack with what I created to form it into a back end for a mobile app I'm playing around with. There are still some warts in the process (Namely just figuring out how everything fits together and which packages to import) but I've been pleasantly surprised.

It looks like the new Visual Studio for Mac (ie An updated Xamarin Studio) has an ASP.Net Core template. At least I thought I saw that on the live stream earlier today. Might want to check that out!

Very neat! This matches up closely with what we have evolved for my group's legacy codebase to simplify handling AJAX requests. I suspect we're not alone in arriving at this sort of declarative abstraction.

Unfortunately, our implementation is rather scatter-brained and non-uniform. That's partly due to its gradual evolution and partly due to lack of free employee time to clean up bit-rot. I'm going to investigate this a bit more and mock out some examples for our product. I definitely think it'd help us organize our unruly mass of code. Good job!

I sat in stunned disbelief for a second after finishing the book before turning back to page 1 and starting in on it again. I only read the first few chapters/vignettes again, but I could see the allure in continuing. I didn't have the structure of the characters, the institutions and their relationships cemented in my mind until the book was nearly over. And after I started in on those first few chapters, I ran across a line from Hal which was to the effect of '... and I dug up the stuff in the garden with Gately...'

And I imagine these kinds of references continue throughout the book. References whose significance I wouldn't have picked up on without having first read the book. But more generally, I don't think I've encountered a work before on which I've vacillated so much between considering it brilliant or insufferable. Maybe that's part of what I find intriguing about it.

Earliest I can find is a NYTimes reference: http://www.nytimes.com/2005/09/25/magazine/the-east-in-the-w...

Search for streetcar.

x86 was already on lock down. They could have ridden into the ARM ecosystem, guns blazing, and wouldn't have lost a penny from their existing x86 platform. ARM doesn't compete against x86 in mobile. That's obvious now, but it (apparently) wasn't obvious at the time.

Intel turned down a boat load of free money.

I believe aresant is questioning the motivation behind the investment.

That is:

- Is Apple investing in Didi in order to see a straightforward return on investment?

Or

- Is Apple investing in Didi in order to counter Uber's global expansion, so that they can begin to control the ride-share market themselves?

Their motivation for the investment would say a lot about their intent regarding their automotive plans (Project Titan). If they are doing this simply because they have a mountain of spare change sitting around and would like to put it somewhere to see larger gains while rubbing elbows with China's establishment, it might not signal much about their automotive intent. But if they are making the investment to staunch Uber's expansion into Asia (And maybe India, given Didi's investors' related holdings) in order to secure a spot for themselves at the global table to cash in on autonomous auto service, that's a whole different ballgame.

Edit: Formatting

Not to mention supplying these hypothetical moon lasers with enough power to blast these mini-probes into another star system.

BD = Boston Dynamics

I don't think they would. The issue isn't that traffic is being intercepted inside the enterprise. It's that the proxy performing the interception is issuing a certificate that uses SHA-1 in it's digital signing algorithm.

Yes. You can extract your favorites as a CSV with this extension: https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/rdio-enhancer/hmaa...

Now I'm looking around to see if it would be possible to import the contents of that CSV into another service. It looks like Spotify has an API to add a track to a user: https://developer.spotify.com/web-api/save-tracks-user/

And there's a third-party API some folks cooked up for Google's service: http://unofficial-google-music-api.readthedocs.org/en/latest...

Might have to play with them this weekend.

They're certainly not institutions I would normally consider 'collegiate'. And god knows they're not Universities. They're trade schools.

But, barring the fact that they're an Apples-to-Oranges comparison to typical liberal arts colleges and should be segmented as such in the data, I nonetheless think it's interesting information. Trade school expansion is often touted as a reasonable alternative to pushing more people into the higher education pipeline. To that end, we should seek to highlight and study which trades are actually worth pursuing from an economic perspective.

This title is horrendous. It's missing the most important piece of information, which is '...Production in 2 Years...'.

In general, I like to think of it as:

Facebook knows the facade that you want to present to the world. Google knows what you want (or what you want to know).

Now, each of these is actually only addressing the front-facing portion of the business. Each company obviously has much more information when you begin to consider their link tracking, advertising network tie-ins, communication mining and external domain 'likes'.

But it's good to remember that Google's advertising is so damned valuable because you're already looking for stuff when you go there.

The brain continues to fascinate. I wonder how the brain acts while under anesthesia or induced to sleep through sleep aids? Is it different than naturally falling asleep?

More particularly, it sounds like brain cells (At least in mice) shrink during sleep and then enlarge during wakeful consciousness. That shrinking mechanism may play a role in the cerebrospinal fluid recycling/cleaning process, which itself may play a role in ridding the brain of harmful plaques. Does an Alzheimer's patient not show the same level of growth and shrinkage? Could forced sleep improve their outcomes? (IE: Could forced sleep lead to a more normal growth/shrink cycle?)

I am, unfortunately, ignorant on most of the medical science at play here. Any biologists, doctors or hobbyists have any thoughts?

Is there significant evidence that people who engage in affairs are more likely to be unhappy than happy after having engaged in them?

I don't doubt the claim, but evidence would be appreciated.

That's a good point. Though, if the enterprise I work in is representative (notwithstanding a singular anecdote not being data), the proportion of people that haven't heard of them is higher than those that have.

The most interesting thing about this doesn't seem to be their cloud support. It's the inclusion of Xamarin in Oracle sales pitches delivered by their well connected sales force to corporate clients. Seems like a smart way to ease yourself into the corporate world.

But the market's largest participants already know what's going into the negotiations. They're privy to the draft texts of the deal and are the executive's primary 'consultants'. They know as much as, if not more than, our actual elected Representatives.

So I'm not sure what you mean by 'imagine the effect on the markets' or 'the effect of the markets on negotiations'. The market's most powerful players are already guiding the legislation. The only people that seemingly aren't allowed to directly guide the agreement are a country's citizens and its smaller market players, neither of whom are allowed a seat at the table.

The pessimist/realist in me suspects the final text will directly reflect this lopsided representation, such that the most powerful will become even more powerful and the least powerful will continue their decline.