Yes, I understand this. I understand that they can look for most common answers among correct control responses, and crowd source the OCR of difficult street view images. My point is that is not what the experiment is doing. The point of the experiment is to determine if these images are as effective as the current images used in the tests. For the purposes of that experiment, it would be much easier (and probably more scientifically accurate) to use images where the correct answer is already known. As Google already has a large number of those images where it has extracted street names and numbers, they would have a large sample size to use for this experiment. They do not need, at this point, to use the unknown images.

If the experiment shows the street view images are equally effective, people can debate whether it's ok to have random web users do your OCR for you. Until then I'm not going to panic.

I have read the quote from Google about what they are doing several times, and I don't see what everyone else sees. It appears to me that they are using the already known street names and numbers as possible ReCAPTCHA images. What they are NOT doing is using the results given by people to define what the image says. The point of the experiment is to determine whether these images are sufficient to separate people from web-bots. I imagine that they will look at the number of 'wrong' answers from both sides of the test, and see if bots are able to parse the street view images significantly more often than the standard test images.

So... can anyone point to something in the Google quote to show me where I went wrong? From TFA, here is the quote:

We’re currently running an experiment in which characters from Street View images are appearing in CAPTCHAs. We often extract data such as street names and traffic signs from Street View imagery to improve Google Maps with useful information like business addresses and locations. Based on the data and results of these reCaptcha tests, we’ll determine if using imagery might also be an effective way to further refine our tools for fighting machine and bot-related abuse online.

At end of product life cycle (when a new, shinier iPad comes out, for example), old stock could be offloaded through places like Amazon, which already provides for selling of used electronics. This business plan is very similar to what car rental agencies have used for quite a while.

I have seen quotes similar to this by several CEOs, including from Microsoft. I really think this more than anything shows a lack of vision. We currently have laptops with docking stations that people can set up to use both a "desktop computer" they carry easily from work and home. While these are ok, they are typically limited to a specific make (and often model) of laptop. A shift to a more generic docking station is hopefully not too far off. As the processor market continues to evolve, I think we will start to see something similar for tablets. While on the go, you can maybe do simple things, like browse the web, etc. When you get home or to work, it plugs in and becomes your computer. Longer term, the same may be true even for phones, although that may be a decade or more from now.

I can imagine buying a "monitor" with a sort of universal phone jack on the back of it. You get one for home, work provides one at the office. Coffee shops install a few of them for pretentious writer types. You carry your computer with you as you do a phone now, and wherever you go you plug it into a monitor that has a keyboard & mouse. Imagine if every computer you logged into (by connecting your phone) had the same OS, desktop, all of you files, applications, contacts, internet connection (from the phone), etc.

Dismissing the tablet (and phone) as never replacing the computer is probably short sighted. Will there still be high end systems? Of course. Some consumers will always either have or want more processing power, be it for regression modelling, compiling, ego boosting, or whatever else. For the majority of people.. if you can buy a phone that has the processing power to do everything you need, buying a full power PC becomes a lot less interesting.

While this is true, it misses the larger issue. There are a number of factors that change driving performance. Eating while driving has a similar effect to talking on a cell phone, much like applying makeup, shaving, etc. In contrast, having a second person (or more) seems to improve driving performance. A young child who is sleeping in the back seat can greatly improve performance, while a small child who is screaming and crying has a negative effect.

If we want to use the logic "it hurts performance", we should ban all electronic devices, and have the radios in cars have 1 big button that can turn on or off road information messages. We should ban all eating while driving. We should require any children that are in cars to be drugged and remain unconscious, and it should be illegal to drive without a second person in the car. That would, statistically, increase driving performance across the board.

Banning cell phones simply because they can be shown to have a negative performance is singling out a single cause because we don't like it. Instead, as usual, the problem is larger and more problematic to fix. Personally, it comes down to how much risk we, as a society, are willing to accept. The current rates of traffic accidents and fatalities are lower than they have been in previous years[*]. Personally, I am comfortable with the current level of risk when I step into a vehicle, either to drive or to ride as a passenger. If society, in general, would like to make changes to improve those numbers, we should have a realistic discussion about what would changes would help, how much each change would help, and what cost would be associated with each change. Simply pointing out one cause, and removing it, without addressing any other issues, is simply punishing a behavior based on personal bias.

Over analyzing the reason for mass appeal, as well as statistical distributions showing cross cultural appeal of various game genres is just how these people have fun, you insensitive clod.

I could be wrong, but I believe the logic goes that if the entire area was land, the cities in the area were allied with each other and this allowed for the sharing of technology between them. When the sea rushed in, it destroyed all but the few cities left at the edge of the new sea, leaving us with the "mystery" of how these few cities connected by only the sea could all have independently developed this tech, when no one else did.