This is (largely) true; but the question is why?. It is expected that cheap phones will suffer from somewhat inferior hardware; but it is less clear why they should suffer from inferior software, doubly so if the very same vendor or the AOSP has software without whatever flavor of broken is causing the issue. It's also particularly weird with something like autocorrect making dumb mistakes: that's far too high level to be a 'well, we went with the cheapest SoC vendor, and you wouldn't believe what total shit their BSP is...' problem, it's not something that the guy buying the expensive phone is going to be spared because he has a faster CPU and more RAM, and it's not something where there's any good reason for the vendor to be trying to roll their own.

I suspect that the thesis about 'hard to quantify' stuff getting squeezed first is true, and one would be foolish to expect market mechanisms to work in the absence of good information, which 'hard to quantify' largely assures; but it still surprises me that cheap hardware (and even some expensive hardware) is routinely shipped with software that actually cost somebody money to make worse than 'stock'. Carrier shitware on cheap phones, I understand, because carriers exert most of the control over what phones will be made available 'free' with contract, and so OEMs will suck it up and preinstall whatever they demand; but any other area where the experience is worse than stock android of the equivalent version just seems weird.

If you don't mind looking ridiculous, the helicopter market has had this for ages (since there's nothing quite like sitting under a propeller going fast enough to keep you in the air when it comes to noise...) Nice, sturdy, over-the-ear headphones with substantial protection from outside noise, along with a mic which gets piped to everyone else's headphones so they can hear you as though you were speaking in a more normal environment(the ability to mute individual users would, of course, be vital in broad application).

This is an airport we are talking about: the kiosk AIs have more rights than the passengers interacting with them. Rates of assault will likely be low.

The trouble with progress as a cure for stress is twofold:

One, expectations tend to grow as fast, sometimes faster, than capabilities. Unless you are traveling without any connecting flights and on a very leisurely schedule, everyone's assumptions about where you'll be and when will be calibrated to 'your flight; but on time', so delays that would have faded into the noise historically will now throw you off.

Perhaps more fundamentally it appears to be the powerlessness rather than the absolute time that stresses people out, and being at the mercy of complex systems run by other people is beautifully designed to rub your face in powerlessness. Technology has, of course, increased our absolute level of power by chiseling away at the domain of 'nope, go try placating the spirits or something'; but all those places where it used to be that nobody had any control, now somebody; but not you, has control and you can't quite shake the impression that they are jerking you around.

Aside from all that, it isn't clear why adding a shallow emulation of a talking human head is even going to improve the terminal experience:

If you are dealing with a routine matter, you aren't really trying to convey that much data (and none of the data you are trying to convey are subtly emotionally nuanced or anything, it's basically an "I want to be on this flight, ideally in this seat, here's the billing info" operation, not a sonnet) and existing text and graphic based interfaces, while often questionably thought out, are at least as competent as a natural-language dialog for anyone who isn't illiterate or otherwise handicapped.

If something or someone is fucked up and/or deeply confused, the computer won't be able to help you because it will just format and present the garbage you are trying to sort out. You need someone who can understand an edge case or error and has the power to give a good hard shove to whatever fields aren't cooperating.

I'd bet nontrivial money that the effect of this 'advance' will be to make the experience worse: The licensing fees will be calibrated to be lower than human salaries; but the underlying system will still be far dumber and less flexible than the humans who it will replace (because why do we need so many desk staff now that our kiosks are so user friendly!?); so users whose problems were already solved will have, at best, a slightly more pleasant interaction, and the users with real problems will have to wait in a longer line for a more harried human to fix it.

We all know how totally peachy-keen 'interactive voice recognition' systems have made interacting with call centers, and this is basically the same old shit with an animated face.

The high-heritability hack only works on sexual reproduction; but horizontal gene transfer mechanisms do not.

The heritability hack wouldn't directly cause more horizontal transfers than usual; but it would ensure that the introduced gene spreads quickly through the target population(increasing the odds that a gene transfer event from that population will include the gene in question) and if it is successfully transferred, it will be more likely than usual (if the transfer target reproduces sexually) to spread into the new host species rather than dying with the individual who received the transfer, increasing the odds that a single gene transfer event would end in a population-level change, rather than just one genome that will be taking a dirt nap soon enough.

I am not impressed with the state of coal fired emissions regulation (sulfur compounds are down; but fly ash certainly isn't something that cures what ails you, and the general 'Eh, old stuff just gets grandfathered because we can't fight the incumbents' model of regulation is broken); but your snarking about the poor reactors being treated as unnatural is rather flawed.

The further your coal gets from being pure carbon, the more dire some of the potential aerosolized-and-spread-hither-and-yon materials are; but the process is just conventional chemistry, you aren't going to emit anything you didn't dig up(except the added oxygen). A nuclear reactor; shockingly enough, is not subject to this limitation, and fairly aggressively shoves assorted fissionables down the decay chain.

Aside from the one (known) incident at Oklo, the crust isn't seeing much in the way of activity above background decay rates, and it follows that anything with a short half life is going to be extremely scarce. Something that's been dug up, concentrated, and carefully stewed in its own neutrons, by contrast, will have a very different collection of isotopes, some remarkably scarce anywhere else.

This doesn't mean that coal power is good for you, or restricted in what it contributes to our air supply; because that is very unlikely; but it's just silly to pretend that reactor products are isotopically similar to what you'll find in the ground; the 'power' in 'nuclear power' is only there because they aren't.

How can you say that "Too nasty for the Supreme Court"(coming soon to pay-per-view) isn't a respectable standard for judging 'obscenity'?

(Let's not even mention that the first amendment doesn't actually read "Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech(except obscene stuff, obviously), or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the Government for a redress of grievances.")

Pink contract, anyone?

Hey, as long as 'responsible disclosure' requires that anyone developing novel pathogens or lethal recessive genes contact the vendor and give them time to implement a fix, only customers who fail to contract patches promptly will be vulnerable! What are you complaining about?

Gene flow can, and does, occur between species. Most common in bacteria, which appear bent on making up for not having developed sex through sheer promiscuity; but it has been known to happen even in much larger eukaryotic organisms(and viruses, of course, more or less are nothing but horizontal gene transfer wrapped in an elegant delivery system). When dealing with a hypothetical gene engineered to be extraordinarily heritable the odds probably don't improve of not spilling it somewhere unhelpful.

If memory serves, Pandora's box was pretty similar to most software development: Release #1 unleashed hitherto unknown evils upon the world. Release #2 implemented hope. No additional releases have been forthcoming. We would not have needed release #2 had it not been opened the first time.

Well, um, how are things looking for this quarter's earnings call?

The trouble is that it's very, very difficult to encapsulate the fact that you can construct statements that are strictly true but which convey a false impression in any sort of legal standard that wouldn't be dangerously vague and subjective. And, while sometimes inescapable, 'vague and subjective' are not virtues in legal standards. Any such move would markedly expand the zone of dangerous uncertainty about what you might be dragged into court and ruined for saying, since you would have no way to reliably predict what might strike a given judge or jury as 'strictly true; but excessively insinuates'. In practice, given the cost of losing, the uncertainty zone tends to become an exclusion zone.

It seems a waste to imprison or impale them when they are likely still full of usable organs that could be reassigned to somebody who isn't an abhuman sleazeweasel...