Custom hardware gives it the ability to communicate using body language.

Whether that's worth the extra cost, I don't know; probably not. But it does make it more interesting than "just another app".

HHGTTG was a manual.

But that was never the intent of a carbon tax, was it? It's not a reparations program.

The purpose of a carbon tax is to make carbon emitting-technologies more expensive, so that the market will be encouraged to find alternatives that emit less carbon.

Without that, it's difficult for alternative technologies to get a foothold in the market, as they are forced to compete with carbon-based technologies that are allowed to pollute "for free", thus neutralizing (from a monetary perspective) the advantage of the non-polluting technologies.

Here they are. The solar industry of the USA now employs more people than the coal industry of the USA.

Funny how you weren't aware of that fact, isn't it? It's almost as if your media sources chose not to mention it, because it doesn't fit their narrative.

Or, they succeed, but the right-wing media bubble pretends not not notice. Cherry-picking reality might help them keep their market share in the short run, but as time goes on more and more people will realize they're full of shit.

If the price of a new car was $180M, I would definitely stick with my trusty 70s car.

How did Southwest find out about this tweet?

Do they have a team of people sitting around watching a Twitter feed, so that if anyone mentions Southwest they can pounce?

If so, good job guys! You really saved the day here. SWA stock is going to go up tomorrow for sure! :^)

My intuition tells me that this would cause the codebase to become an incomprehensible mess over time, as it would not have any consistent organizing principles to speak of. Is my intuition correct, or is that not generally a problem in practice?

Too true, and I'm not sure what the compensating benefit is. There are situations where anonymity can be beneficial, but a social/gaming arena is not one of them. Why allow anonymity if it only encourages people to act like irresponsible douchebags?

A half-serious solution for a gaming platform that wants to reduce the douchebag problem: make all gamers register under their real name, and record all of their in-game communications in a searchable database that the world (including present and future employers) can Google. That ought to clean at least some of them up.

Yes. When they compared their measurements against the measurements they gathered from the people they didn't measure, they took that bias into account.

:^P

Nobody would, except perhaps for those with inadequate Internet bandwidth.

However, for a large number of movies you can't currently "access the data instantly online" (at least, not via Netflix). Netflix's primary focus should be on getting their streaming catalog to match their DVD catalog.

Have you ever tried to reason with a 3-year old? There are times when the "Argument from Because I Said So" is literally the only option left. Finer points of logic are completely lost on a person with an undeveloped frontal lobe who is in the middle of a temper tantrum.

Right, but if your company comes up with an elegant solution that gets 10x better performance out of a given piece of hardware, and your competitors cannot (or do not) do the same, then you've got a cost advantage over your competitors and can use that to get customers to choose to buy your product rather than theirs.

That will always be true, no matter how fast and cheap the hardware gets. Either your customers will be able to do 10 times more work with your product, or (if there isn't 10 times more work to actually do), they can get the job done with 10 times less hardware (and thus 10 times less expense).

There is a whole world of software out there that runs in the background and doesn't require much (if any) UX. Think of the software that generates your credit card statement every month.

That suggests a possible YouTube advertising model -- you start the video and a 30-second ad pops up, along with a "click here to pay 10 cents to make this ad go away right now" button.

I wonder how many people would click the button?

I think the government has a legitimate national security interest in developing a transportation system that does not completely grind to a halt the day someone sets off a few nukes in the major oil-producing areas of the world.

Hybrid and electric technology is what could make the difference between an event like that being a serious problem and it being a complete disaster.

There's also the small issue of global warming; I think the government also has a legitimate interest in keeping Miami above water and crops growing in California.