I wonder if part of this is that Alexa is suffering from a problem that, for example, autistic people sometimes suffer. For people without such issues it seems so obviously easy that we do it without thinking, but consider the question: "how do you know when someone is talking to you?" Can you name a fixed set of criteria that are always reliable and don't return false positives? It's harder than you think, and I suspect one of the problems Alexa and her ilk are having is that they don't actually know what the cues are that they could give Alexa to make sure she knows that people are actually talking to her, so they rely on keywords that, as in this case, have a statistically small but nonzero probability of coming up in actual conversation.

Just as an example, from the US: there are presently 9 million people employed in "transportation" in the US; that includes bus drivers, truck drivers, train, taxi, limo, etc. drivers. What happens in, say, 10-15 years, when self-driving vehicles make all of those jobs obsolete? Nine million people is a bit under 5% of the working-age population; where are you going to transition all those drivers to? They can't transition to some other sector, because all the sectors that involve driving have been eliminated. There's not going to be anywhere to go.

This sort of thing is the fallacy that tech bros and Silicon-Valley VC libertarians conveniently ignore: the rise of automation and more capable AI is going to move all the means of production -- that is, all the production of wealth -- into capital. When that happens, either we find a way to enact a general tax on capital and use it to pay everybody else (that is, the 90%+ of the population that doesn't derive its income from capital), or the tiny sliver that effectively owns everything will watch everybody else starve.

People forget: socialism didn't first arrive out of altruism; it was originally to placate the masses so that the rich wouldn't find themselves in front of a firing squad when the revolution came.

Longer Answer: what is going to dominate internationally is something a lot of my German colleagues refer to as "international English." This, I'm given to conclude, really means "American English as spoken in Hollywood mass media, learned as a second language by watching television/movies, and presumed in Dunning-Kruger style to be correct despite having a 5th-grade level of skill/vocabulary and looking like something spit out by Google Translate."

And aside from that, to which American English are you referring? There's easily a dozen different dialects in the US, some mutually incomprehensible (or nearly so; have a look at the language of the Gullah-geechee on the Carolina shore, or the High Tiders in Eastern Virginia), and I'd suggest that none of them have any wide circulation internationally. What I think the author is imagining as "American" English is not really any dialect as spoken by even moderately competent native speakers, but rather some mass-market doggerel.

Signed, a snoot.

Wait, why didn't they do any genetic testing of the zygote *before* implanting? In vitro means the egg was fertilized outside of the womb. They didn't doe the due diligence to check that they'd gotten it right?

This is, of course, a completely different question than the ethics of suing the clinic for the child having the "wrong genes," which sounds like some bullshit.

Fortunately, we have the case of a previous wistleblower -- then-Pfc (?) Bradley Manning, now Chelsea -- who exposed much worse crimes than Snowden did, who was tried and convicted, and is presently being abused vigorously in US custody. If President Obama is citing a lack of going to trial as his reason for not issuing a pardon, then we have a much more egregious miscarriage of justice much more deserving of such a pardon, for which that reason is not an issue.

The fact that Chelsea Manning has not been pardoned, and is in fact being openly and publicly subjected to abusive treatment to make an example of her, says all you need to know about this administration's stance on pardoning wistleblowers who do their country a great service.

If the Tories want to keep their jobs and not get swept out by UKIP, they're still going to have to pass Brexit. I very much suspect Theresa May would be sacked if she doesn't invoke Article 50 when she says she will: UKIP and its neo-fascist voters seem willing to insist on showing how much they disdain immigrants above all other considerations, the dire warnings of nearly every reputable economist notwithstanding.

The funny part is where the Brits seem to think they have a choice on whether they get a "hard" or "soft" Brexit: As Al Jazeera's commentator argues, the EU is going into negotiations with such a hilariously imbalanced advantage -- the negotiations are likely going to be conducted in French -- that the UK really should consider itself lucky if they can manage to walk away with any agreement at all (instead of the entirely possible scenario of them being booted from the EU and concomitantly the WTO and having to renegotiate all their agreements with everybody).

So long, Brits! You decided to enact the geopolitical equivalent of cutting off your nose to spite your face in the most ridiculously exaggerated way possible, all to prove how much you despise foreigners, and now it's going to bite you in the ass! Enjoy sleeping in the bed you shit your very own self, because we sure will.

Rolling Stone, of all places, had an excellent analysis of the rather simple and brutal math behind such a transition. Simply put, there are about thirty trillion (ie, 10^12) US Dollars worth of hydrocarbons in the ground. Those hydrocarbons count as assets on the balance sheets of the richest companies on earth. Avoiding a 2-degree C global average temperature increase requires leaving about $20T of those reserves in the ground, forever. That is, you would have to get the richest companies in the world, all together, to write off a loss five times the size of the one that triggered the subprime mortgage implosion in 2008.

The scary thing is, in the long run, that's the cheaper alternative.

Let's not forget, either, that Apple's most visible growth period -- after Jobs' return, the introduction of the iMac, later the iPhone -- was also a period in which Apple was saving production costs by using suppliers that employed child labor. That article is from 2013; there are still investigations -- and potential charges -- going on now.

Just keep that in mind when you fawn over Stev Jobs as some rogue market-disrupting genius: he made his billions with the help of child labor, indentured labor, conflict minerals, and relentless wage pressure on the workers who made his products. And we, upstanding people that we are, we ratified all of it, and celebrated him for doing it, by buying all his shit and then singing his praises in glossy magazine profiles.

Huh. How weird! Every time there's an article about, say, global warming, or efforts to correct imbalances in gender or ethnic representation in the sciences, or health care, there's always a sizable crowd of self-identified libertarians who show up and extol the virtues of unregulated markets and the need to rein in government spending. And now here we are, extending libertarian principles to their natural consequence (ie, taxpayers shouldn't be the ones to fund the sciences, but rather the market), and I see ... a puzzling lack of support for the idea.

It's almost as if taxpayer funding is only wasteful and frivolous if it benefits other people, and "libertarianism" is just a thin rhetorical cover for preserving privilege.

Shit, somebody beat me to this movie reference, and then I went and posted it further downthread like an idiot.

Welp, it was nice knowing you guys, I guess :(

Wasn't this the plot of Sneakers?

I cannot believe nobody here has brought up WeChat. The app is free, is super easy to use, can send both short audio and video messages, as well as text chat, and make audio or video calls. It's far superior to Whatsapp; once you use it, Skype and Whatsapp look like button-mashing clickbait for imbeciles in comparison.

Seriously, people, get your shit sorted out. WeChat fills all his listed requirements. Everyone should be using it for Internet comms.

Glad this got mod points, because most of these programs function mainly as an excuse for the sorry state of public education in the US. Did you know? Private and parochial schools saw huge gains in white enrollment right after desegregation, particularly in the states of the former Confederacy and Jim Crow south. And guess what? "School choice" programs favoring charter schools has had the same effect.

Structural racism is insidious and pernicious, and requires a lot of effort to eradicate. Here's something to consider for all the other people in this thread defending neo-segregation: There are two explanations for the unequal racial representation in our society (say, in the prison population, or corporate CEOs, or application of the death penalty, or encounters with police, or income distribution, etc etc): either we live in a society that distributes its awards and punishments unequally according to the racial background of the recipient, or you believe that there is something intrinsic to different racial backgrounds that account for it. Either we live in a racist society which it is our duty as decent human beings to combat, or you are a racist yourself.

So which is it?

Cripes, I wish I had mod points this week. It's so nice to read someone who can reasonably articulate what's actually going on here. Cheers.

EDIT: no hope of a breathable atmosphere. Figure out how to sequester all the CO2 on Venus, you could even one day get down to the surface. We will never be able to have open-sky colonies on Mars, but doing so on Venus only requires solving a problem that we're going to have to solve on Earth soon enough anyway. For all the extra solar energy, well, that's not really even a problem from the right point of view.