This hits the nail right on the head. Unfortunately, it's the corporate marketers that dictate what's cool, and home-built high-performance machines with clean installs of non-proprietary operating systems and zero crapware/malware ain't it.

I wonder how much of these improvements in accuracy are due to fundamental advances, vs. the capacity of available hardware to implement larger models and (especially?) the availability of vastly larger and better training sets...

Aaaaaaaand... we've come full-circle. Look how much more productive you can be with this amazing new thing!

I didn't know that Apple made pacemakers...

My thought exactly. You're looking at the official suspect list when our digital armageddon finally comes...

There will always be plenty of this whenever an open source threat emerges to somebody's billion-dollar monopoly, and most people will buy into it without questioning where the memes are coming from.

I've also had a couple of biking accidents where my helmet didn't play a role, but if you get thrown from your bike it's not hard to see that your head is extremely vulnerable. My GF works with traumatic brain injury patients at a local hospital, and words can hardly describe how devastating these injuries can be, or how instantly your life can change forever. So other people can do what they want, but I'm not going out biking without the helmet. It takes all of 5 seconds.

This is the USA. You might surprised how many people who share you opinion end up suing just because it's the only way to pay for the medical care and rehabilitation that they need. I've also seen many cases of insurance companies screwing over TBI (traumatic brain injury) patients, just because they think they can get away with it.

Then honor the DNT flag for those that choose to use it. Unless we're using some double-speak definition of "impose" here, that is...

If you can't support your site without tracking your users across the web - an unethical practice, IMHO - then I'll hardly be mourning its destruction.

Or you can just cut them all (ads, malware, spyware) off at the ankles and install a HOSTS file like the one at http://winhelp2002.mvps.org/hosts.htm.

Whereas we would have nothing to fear from a private Internet monopoly, unrestrained by any regulation enforcing net neutrality or the constitutional limits that apply to government. The executives and shareholders of such a monopoly would realize their civic responsibility to uphold the free expression and exchange of ideas among the citizenry, and would readily uphold that responsibility even if it meant taking a hit on the bottom line.

That's the way it is in the Bizarro World, anyway. In this real world, an unregulated entrenched monopoly/oligopoly has all the power of government with none of the accountability.

And then you realize that we, those insignificant bags of protoplasm, are the means through which the universe experiences and understands itself.

With apologies to whomever I stole that from...

I use the mvps.org HOSTS file as well, and have been very happy with it. Pretty much all of the crap out there now lives at 127.0.0.1.

True, but if you're imaging the spectrum in two dimensions and summing/averaging vertically (over columns), you'll improve your Signal/Noise ratio considerably (by the square root of the number of vertical pixels, ideally). It wouldn't surprise me if the results were quite decent.