Studies have also shown that as humans age their rate of recall also slows down, not because their brains are slower but because they have to navigate a database filled with entangled excess information. I've noticed that google searches by voice are vastly more word-accurate than siri searches by voice. But that's because google is doing something in the context of something else-- it has clues to context. Siri is trying to do free-form semantics over a much greater realm of possibilities. When you narrow Siri to a phone specific function, it does better than google. As the AI realm grows, perhaps to include sarcasm and slang, these services will require even more compute power to keep going.

However, these days, phone services are done on back end servers, so there is no great reason they should slow down in "modern" times.

I installed crouton and it totally sucks!
1) you have to run in developer mode which means one accidental miss boot or wake up and you entire hard disk is erased.
2) you get no live updates from google for the chrome portion
3) crouton linux has all sorts of network adapter problems, like seeing it at all, on my machine.
4) the archiving system for saving your current state for a reinistall after you accidentally press the space bar when it tells you to at boot (and reformats the hard drive) is byzantine and only for very serious experts who think there time has no value (e.g. want to buy a cheap computer and then waste tonnes of their time learing the tricks.
5) printing is a total disaster, and at a minumum requires a real computer or a special printer.

netflix listened to customer feedback when they tried to spin off their disc rentals to another company. so call them and give them feedback. they are easy to reach by phone. if you dont complain to them please dont whine on slashdot

SO I just post my software and these guys do a free security analysis. Cool, now I can be sloppy!

"the server sucked my job right in"

A hexagonal screen would not only solve the vertical screen problem but also the 60 degree angle screen.

These 3D whizmos, like for example LEAP motion (incredibly cool), all work great.... for about 20 minutes. Then you put them in the drawer because they require too much muscle coordination and energy to operate. in contrast when you REST your finger on a scroll wheel or REST your hand on a mouse it is not merely not moving, it is at rest in 3 dimensions. it only takes a small effort to move it, but you are not having to run a whole lot of muscles in coordination to keep the hand or finger in a constant position. it's hard to poise your hand in empty space. In the old days, good typists could do this with hands poised over the KB and fingers hovering above the keys. Most people now days use palm rests or put pressure on the keys. those old time secretarial pool typists had to sit up straight and brace their feet on the floor to pull that off. Girdles probably helped!

the first successful mouse replacement will have that feature. Perhaps something with haptic feedback to support your finger a little till you really want to move it.

personally I suspect the some sort of eye motion or maybe a joystick like thing will be the first 3D controller that people can use for long periods.

why not just reduce the window area to half it's current size. If the savings is really significant then that would be significant too. Then compensate with the video system. the remaining window would be the failsafe.

R has more single function high level commands devoted to stats, these are done right internally and are self consistent with other functions for further processing. But its not as general a programming language as python. if you want something different than the canned functions in R then you will need to write them yourself at which point you might as well be using python. however if you like SAS then chances are R will seem more like what you are hoping for.

skateboarding can be a crime

no problemo. they will just buy the self-same info from facebook or amazon and it's "affiliates" (anyone with money).

To the extent that this fig leaf is accepted in place of having real security via the simple expedient of a secondary e-mail address for password recents means this is getting baked into the system and hard to unwind later.

to see what I mean look at the silly "application specific password" kludge Google introduced to let you collect e-mail bypassing two-factor ID, and password storage vulnerabilities. nuts.

it should be baked in that all sites that use 2-factor also allow (or require) a 2nd address for all password resets.

currently the paradigm is if someone has control of your cell phone your two factor ID becomes zero factor ID. This is because nearly all cell phones can collect e-mail, allowing a password reset to be performed. Likewise cell phones display text messages with the second factor. So you are hosed. Even if you have a screen lock on your phone, have you ever lent your phone to a stranger to "make a call" or take a photo?

The workaround for this is to have a second e-mail address that you don't have associated with your phone's e-mail program. Then you can send all your finanical accounts to the e-mail address. But that's not really very convenient (e.g. amazon and google wallet would be awkward to use that way).

What needs to be done is to have financial companies send all non-critical e-mails (e.g. paypay receipts and notices) to your general e-mail, but require a second e-mail address for all critical transactions where money is movable.

or even better, they could simply require that all password resets go to a secondary e-mail address. this would be even more convenient.

until then two factor ID using cell phones is just a very vulnerable layer of the security onion.

Also if the bit coin miners get concentrated into just a few, what happens if these 3 were to get DDOSed? if the big miners are off line then would the next largest miner have a window of time where they controlled more than 50% of the mine? Would they be able to pull off some shenanigans in that time?