Not quite. It's very possible to do things that work part of the time, and allows for very nice demos. But the systems very easily blow a gasket on wrong parses, out-of-domain knowledge, etc. Roughly, there are three problems: we don't know how to operationally represent meaning, we don't know how to handle concepts that are fuzzy around the edges, which is the case of pretty much every concept out there, and we don't know how to introduce in a system all of the world knowledge a normal adult has.

Note that the advent of magnificient things like wikipedia certainly help, but as far as I know nobody is able to bootstrap a system from it yet.

If you ever work in dialogue systems, you'll find out how adaptive humans are in a communicative context. It's, in fact, relatively easy to push a human to say things a particular way your system handles better, and he won't even notice. And that's because humans do it all the time. It's not a bad thing at all, and makes building efficient dialog systems for real tasks a tad easier. But it can shift the focus of the turing test from answering like a human to fooling a human, which is not the same problem at all and, annoyingly, a way easier and less interesting one.

    OG.

Better yet you can use an app like Sygic that downloads the maps in advance. At least this way, you don't care if you are roaming or even if you have a signal at all.

have a great deal of respect for you

Sorry, I should have made it more obvious that I was writing tongue in cheek about the monarchy. Not about SpaceX though. I'm pretty impressed.

It doesn't work to do this with a democratic government. We need a monarchy :-(

It seems to me that SpaceX is on the path to a solution that might be affordable by a single administration, though.

Agreed. I have seem some devs treated badly who turned out to be pretty good developers once people stopped treating them like crap. I also had one kid fresh out of university who needed some hand-holding for his first few months while he gained some experience and gained some self esteem who turned out to be a one of the best programmers I've ever worked with.

I am thinking that has more to do with the massive advertising/FUD campaign they were running. When I was in Spain, for several months the Metro (subways for you Americans) were covered with ads for the Nokia phones and I had friends tell me that they bought the Nokias because the sales reps at the store told them that Android had a virus problem. Now the campaigns have been cut back so the sales dropped right off.

Don't I wish.

A cynic might argue that the key difference in this case was that, for a change, the ISP's, and not merely defendants, were challenging the subpoenas; but of course we all know that justice is 'blind'.

An ingrate might bemoan the Court's failure to address the key underlying fallacy in the "John Doe" cases, that because someone pays the bill for an internet account that automatically makes them a copyright infringer; but who's complaining over that slight omission?

A malcontent like myself might be a little unhappy that it took the courts ten (10) years to finally come to grips with the personal jurisdiction issue, which would have been obvious to 9 out of 10 second year law students from the get go, and I personally have been pointing it out and writing about it since 2005; but at least they finally did get there.

And a philosopher might wonder how much suffering might have been spared had the courts followed the law back in 2004 when the John Doe madness started; but of course I'm a lawyer, not a philosopher. :)

Bottom line, though: this is a good thing, a very good thing. Ten (10) years late in coming, but good nonetheless. - R.B. )

For 6 gb transfer per month? In my country, it is more expensive.

It is proprietary in that it will only talk to GM's (expensive) service rather than a more general purpose device where you could slot in your own sim card. $5 a day? That's well over double what I would pay my local cell phone provider for the same service.

Better would be to start actually selling things people want in Blu-Ray format. I refuse to buy DVDs of a series I just watched in HD and quite often series releases are still DVD only and so I buy nothing instead.

Renault isn't high end and it won't start if it doesn't detect it's card in the passenger compartment.

Mechanical locks may be mature but they are not in any way reliable.

People have known for years how to bypass an ignition switch and any decent car will have some sort of a backup anti theft system. It is also not hard to break a steering lock, in fact the police up here Canada demonstrated that some of the cheaper club clones (specifically the one that clamps to one side of the steering wheel and extends over the dashboard) actually make the car easier to steal because they can be pulled back and used as a lever to snap the steering lock before being removed.

In Europe, most cars use a key card system, if you remove the card from it's slot, the car won't drive.