I wonder what's going to happen to the other features, though. Part of the great thing about Google Voice (formerly Grand Central) was that you could route and filter the calls. You could say, "If my girlfriend calls this number, put her directly through to my cell phone. If my boss calls during working hours, ring both my cell and my desk phone. If my boss calls after hours, ring my cell phone twice and then send him to voicemail with my professional voicemail greeting. If my mom calls, ring my home phone. If someone calls and the number isn't in my address book, send it directly to voicemail with an anonymous greeting."

I don't remember what all the options or limitations were, but it had some flexibility. Google Voice still does some of this stuff, but I haven't seen any of it in Hangouts.

About a year ago...2 years ago?... all the major carriers switched their plans over to include unlimited voice and SMS, while charging for data usage. Why do you think they did that?

Well Hangouts has its own app on mobile devices. It's accessible from gmail. You can get a chrome extension that makes it act more like its own stand-alone app.

By having a magnetic connector that secures the watch in place, you're probably getting the maximum efficiency possible from the inductive charger by securing the watch in place. By having an inductive charger, it (a) doesn't require a plug, saving space in the device and making it easier to charge; and (b) doesn't leave metal connectors that would be exposed to sweat and weather.

Maybe there's a better solution, but it doesn't seem like a dumb way to go about things.

As far as I've seen reported, it's still not confirmed that the leaks were due to any fault on Apple's part. As far as I have been able to piece together, a lot of people jumped to the conclusion that there must have been a single major hack of iCloud because many of the photos were taken with iPhones, and they were leaked shortly after a potential method for exploiting iCloud was discovered.

However, a lot of what has come out since then has indicated that the photos were gathered from a variety of sources over a long period of time, and compiled into a collection of sorts by an underground ring of collectors who traded nude celebrity photos. If that's the case, then we don't actually know how the trading ring got their hands on any given photo. The story probably shouldn't be "Hackers got their hands on nude photos by hacking iCloud," but instead, "Hackers spent years collecting nude photos that came from a variety of sources.

That said, I'm forced to trust banks with my banking. I trust no one with nude photos.

I kind of agree with you, but I'm not sure what difference it makes whether you call it "broadband" or something else. Is the issue that there are laws requiring them to provide "broadband" to cover certain areas?

I don't really care what you call it, but 4mbps by1 mbps is not "enough". At this point, Americans should be able to anticipate a 10mbps symmetrical "dumb pipe" connection to be available for their home or business, and at a reasonable price. Of course, someone always objects, "So you think AT&T should be forced by the government to run a 10mbps connection to the top of a mountain, just because some idiot chooses to live in a shack on top of a mountain?!" No, of course not. There are places without running water, without electricity, and I expect that there will be places without Internet.

I just think it's shameful that nearing the end of 2014, we have major metropolitan areas where neither individuals nor businesses are able to get upload speeds faster than 2mbps or 5mbps without spending thousands of dollars per month. It's a sad state of affairs, and it's a drag on the economy. It just shouldn't be considered "acceptable", and clearly companies like TWC, AT&T, and Verizon have dropped the ball.

Exactly why science can't be said to "prove" things, because you'll never compile a list of "every possible cause, including those that I can't think of."

The rest of your post is just discussing how people compile the list of "every possible cause I can reasonably think of" and how people discount possible causes as "unreasonable". You haven't really provided any argument against what I said. In fact, you're reinforcing it by agreeing that scientific "proof" never rises to the level of mathematical proof, and that scientists can never hope to falsify every possible cause of a phenomenon.

That could always come later. It wouldn't be unusual for something like that to start with someone saying, "Look, we may be interested in some kind of partnership, but first take the whole thing down until we can work out licensing."

It's also argued that science doesn't actually "prove" anything, but only refutes. That is, science doesn't tell you what the cause it, but it can tell you what the cause *isn't*. What scientists do then, according to this argument, is systematically list every possible cause that you can reasonably think of, and then set out to disprove each of those possible causes. If one of those causes survives every attempt at refutation, then that's the closest you'll ever get to a scientific proof.

It's absolutely true that science is not about consensus. Science is not a body of knowledge, but a process of (roughly speaking) formulating an explanation of phenomena, devising a means to test the explanation, and then using that test to determine whether the explanation adheres to the "real world". One of the criteria of a good test is that it must be reproducible, but nothing in the process of science actually requires "consensus".

However, you have a bunch of different scientists with different specialties studying different phenomena, so much so that no single person can actually be aware of it all. Certainly no single person can actually reproduce all of the tests and experiments. In the face of such complexity, we've developed another system which, speaking strictly, is not "science". It's more of a social/political system whereby the various experiments are reviewed by other scientists who attempt to determine whether the tests were good, and whether the tests actually tested the explanation/phenomena they were supposed to. In a formal setting, this process is called "peer review", but it also happens informally (i.e. scientists read each others' work, challenge it, devise other tests).

The upshot of this social system is that, if you aren't enough of a climate scientist to review the existing knowledge of global warming and evaluate its validity, then you should probably just trust the consensus. You trust that there are a lot of smart people working on the problem, and if 95% of the climate scientists agree, then the safe guess is that they're probably at least on the right track. It doesn't mean that they're absolutely correct-- no scientific or social process can guarantee absolute correctness-- but you're going to find more success going with the overwhelming consensus than going against it.

Of course, every once in a while, there is some genius who figures out that the overwhelming consensus is wrong. Most of the time, the scientific community catches on pretty quickly and the consensus changes.

Out of curiosity, can you explain what's so bad about it?

Honestly, I thought it was awkward and confusing until I got used to it, and then it seemed... not so bad. Is it really bash itself that's so good, or is it tools like awk, grep, and sed?

Because Powershell has some nice little things built-in like parameter validation for function parameters, and extremely simple XML parsing, without even using other tools. I'm not much of a programmer, but for my purposes, I can sometimes write simpler and more readable code in Powershell than I know how to do in Bash-- I usually often write my scripts in Ruby because I feel like my complex Bash scripts become unreadable to me. I'm curious what, from a real programmer's point of view, is so bad about Powershell?

I don't have kids, but when I was a kid, they did things like having a science fair every year. It wasn't actually helpful for fostering creativity, though, as far as I can remember. It was bizarre in that they were both very restrictive-- in that they'd shoot down any idea that they didn't think would work out well-- but they also wouldn't provide guidance. They'd just say, "Make a science fair project." I don't know how the other kids came up with their projects, but I vaguely remember that I just ping-pong-ed between my parents and my science teacher. My parents would suggest something, and I'd go suggest that project to my science teacher. The science teacher would reject it, and I'd go relay the rejection to my parents.

I could see it being helpful if someone actually helped the kids find things that they were interested in, and let them pursue that interesting thought even if it wouldn't work. As it was, though, for me it was just another shitty experience of school being completely inane and discouraging.

What I'm getting at here is, it's not just a matter of doing these things and making these programs, but of executing these programs in a way that they're accessible and rewarding for students. Your child's school may do this, but I would guess that most don't, even if they have these kinds of programs at all.

You know, I kind of hated Powershell until I was forced to use it.

I still hate it. But then I have to write a bash script, and I run across some specific problem while writing a bash script, and find myself thinking, "This would be easier in Powershell." So that's something.

It's really not like Batch files, though. It really isn't that bad of a scripting language.