timbre

It's really the wrong approach. Supervised learning is the way to go. For example a paper by Kumar et al.[1] shows how to build an "attractive woman" classifier that is 83% accurate.

[1] http://homes.cs.washington.edu/~neeraj/publications/base/pap...

I don't see why you read this as belligerent, unless you think altering and changing designs is inferior to coding and original design. There were a lot of articles after Tim Cook took over that described Jobs' genius as that of a design editor, knowing what to cut and what to keep. Wozniak's comment here seems consistent with that.

Jormundir didn't say Amazon "ought to" do anything, but his comment seemed to generally support pasbesoin's comment, which was not (only) a fist-shakin' comment, but a rule-changin' one:

> If you don't like it, vote with your dollars (or whatever currency).

But, do you really believe that successful corporations "are motivated first, foremost, and entirely by the almighty dollar?" I know only a handful of people running successful corporations (much smaller than Amazon!), but I believe this to be true of none of them.

It is frustrating that quotation marks have come to have two, almost perfectly opposite meanings (the traditional "words someone actually said" and the new "words no one actually said"). I guess the battle against the new usage is lost though.

Stitch a few of those into a panorama.

That surprises me, since it says "AAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAA" would take about 10^28 years.

The Geforce 600-level cards are all terrible for scientific computing, which surprised no one as Nvidia has been slowly removing CUDA features from the Geforce cards since the 200s, trying to get everyone to upgrade to Teslas.

> Their code of conduct also states that you may not take pictures of people without their express consent.

Where is that? The only code of conduct I have found is here:

https://us.pycon.org/2013/about/code-of-conduct/

The only mention I see of photography is in this sentence.

> Harassment includes offensive verbal comments related to gender, sexual orientation, disability, physical appearance, body size, race, religion, sexual images in public spaces, deliberate intimidation, stalking, following, harassing photography or recording, sustained disruption of talks or other events, inappropriate physical contact, and unwelcome sexual attention.

I think you could make a reasonable that this is "harrassing photography." (I disagree, but I think it's a matter of opinion.) I don't see anything about photography requiring consent, although the code of conduct is shorter than I expected (the "Longer Version" on that page is not much longer than the "Short Version"). Is this just a summary of a longer document somewhere?

There's not much augmented reality in glass; only the turn-by-turn directions sort of qualify. I think the key thing about glass is that it's hands-free. As handy as smartphones are, it's remarkable how much of a difference not having to take the thing out of your pocket and push a button makes.

(The reason there's not much AR is that AR is very power hungry (you have to leave the camera on).)

That's pretty much what "OEM license" means. The whole point of the retail license was that it wasn't tied to hardware; what's news is that this is no longer offered.

For a professional reporter writing in the New York Times, I think it's right to lump "semi-true" with "flat-out lied."

An unintended consequence of the "https everywhere" practice.

Has Microsoft ever produced a good version 1? Maybe XBox? I don't know much about games. But for the most part I think what MS is good at is slowly improving a turd until it's really quite nice. DOS, Windows, IE, Office, and Visual Studio were all much worse than their competition initially, but successful by their fourth versions or so.

But I don't know if MS has the heart anymore to go through a few rounds of failure to reach success.

At least one court, in US vs Lori Drew (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_v._Lori_Drew) has determined that violation of terms of use does not qualify as "unauthorized access" under the CFAA.

The author makes the point more effectively when he writes "It's blown everything else away to the point it's moved the bar and redefined what we think of as a low level language."

Youtube is respecting the claims of copyright holders a lot more than it has to by law.

1. The entire pre-DMCA-takedown process (the first round of complaint and appeal) is not required by law. I think it's a good idea in general (it's nice to have a low-stakes option before you launch into the DMCA process) but the immediate presumption that the complainant is in the right is offensive. Something like "we will start displaying ads if you do not dispute within 24 hours" would sit a lot better.

2. Once the DMCA process has started, the poster was required to go through Youtube's "copyright school", and was limited to posting only short videos. I wish they would wait until one or the other party lost the dispute before doling out punishment and education.

Youtube is within its rights to behave this way, but it's Youtube's choice, not something required by law.

"Girlfriend" in particular is ambiguous for women.

I think it's you who's assuming too much. I don't see why you think the author assumes the pest control guy is "disturbed by the open admission of sexuality." What the author says is that the pest control guy was "trying to process this and maintain his composure," which could easily describe the process you describe in your last paragraph.

Certainly many of the licenses must have been sold to businesses. I wouldn't expect most businesses to buy software through the app store.

For that matter I wouldn't expect individuals to use the app store much either. I use both Windows 8 and Mac OS, but have never bought anything on the Windows app store, and have only "bought" (for $0) XCode from the Mac app store. The low app-to-OS-license ratio may indicate that the App store isn't doing well, not that the license numbers are inflated.

From Memoto's FAQ (http://memoto.com/pages/faq):

> Will it be possible to use the camera without ever uploading any photos to Memotos cloud storage?

> Yes. You can use the camera with local storage only if you want. You will however not be able to use the data from the GPS and you will have to manage and organize all the photos yourself. The data from the GPS is not converted into a useful position in latitude and longitude until it has been processed in our cloud service.

No more a fool than an artist who took out a loan to make an album. Business often involves accepting a risk that you won't be able to meet your obligations.

What's the dilemma? Isn't a math class very clearly not the professional world, but a place to develop in your brain the mental models to do math?

Or hang a sheet across the living room and rent out the new extra "room."

Few people complain about Sony laptops because few people buy them.

This may just be a difference in attitude. For myself, I would count having multiple iPhones and MacBook Pros replaced or repaired as a terrible experience. Good service is better than bad service, and occasional defects are unavoidable, but the iPhone is only 5 years old; multiple replacements within that span would give me doubts about a company (unless you're buying lots of them, e.g. if your at a company that supplies employees with phones).

It's hard for me to believe that they don't know the test is insufficient when the protocol involves waiting 1 minute for the problem to go away.

That's the point. The Bayesian incorporates this information into the prior. ;)

Do you keep logs? The idea that you've got a record of every time I've entered or left my house creeps me out enough that I wouldn't use this as a customer. On the other hand, if I were building this, I'd be pretty interested in what I might be able to do with this data.

Do Google and Amazon count as web 2.0? Maybe they're 1.0. Anyway, what I think of as the three biggest "internet companies", Google, Facebook, and Amazon, have all decided it's worth their while to get into this kind of systems work. E.g. HipHop (Facebook), Cassandra (Facebook), BigTable (Google), Android (Google), Go (Google), AWS in all its myriad manifestations (Amazon). Maybe when you do anything on a large enough scale, this stuff becomes important.

A lottery doesn't seem to me to do anything but mitigate the benefit of fancy redialers or other automated ways of getting your ticket order in first. With or without a lottery, allowing resale for profit gives people willing to pay more a better shot at seeing the performance. Preventing it means everyone who's willing to pay the set price has an equal shot. I've always assumed that's the goal of anti-scalping schemes.