It seems like Amazon could be in a unique position to generate training data for this sort of effort, given they own Audible and Kindle. That's a large set of text mapped directly to high quality speech.

I've had a model 3 for about 10 months now. Your comments about the wiper controls and one-pedal driving are wrong. The button on the left stick behind the wheel activates wipers manually. If you are talking about picking specific intervals for them, then yes there is no turn-knob that does this. With regenerative breaking turned up high you can easily drive with one pedal for the most part. I wasn't aware that this was a commonly desired feature though. The lack of buttons is something you get used to really quickly. If you are in a situation where you need to have eyes glued to the road you probably shouldn't be messing with buttons or screens, and the car has voice control for those situations. The coolest thing that most often goes unmentioned is that your car will keep getting better AFTER you drive it off the lot! Increased power and range, new features, etc. It's a game changer in my opinion.

You should do some reading into the PageRank algorithm. Yes, search engines existed before Google, but they were implemented poorly and did not scale well. There is a reason 'googling' something became synonymous with 'searching', because it worked really well. Would you call Tesla a "me too" company just because other people have been making cars for decades? I'm not trying to argue that they Google isn't a "me too" now, just that I don't think it's accurate to say they started out that way.

I think they are only making the argument that you can't charge someone with felony hacking because they are accessing the information you make publicly available in a way you don't like.

How many decades has it been since you were in Reno? That's not a thing here, but it is in Vegas.

I live in Reno, and I think the RGJ is pretty widely regarded as just a really crappy newspaper.

I would look into this guy a little more before you get too excited. Even broken clocks... yada yada

The irony is that companies, like the one I am employed by, will spend millions to renovate an existing cube farm to the open equivalent. This completely throws the idea of cost reduction out the window. All because the hair-brained CEO saw that layout at another company and liked the idea of it. And in spite of the fact that an initial trial group of employees all indicated that distractions out weighted any benefits.

Every day I have to go back there is the worst day of my life...

I think it must come from some sort of CEO Bullshit Handbook they all get when they start the job. The CEO at my company has been saying this exact same phrase for about 5 years as she continually does rounds of layoffs, while increasing stock buyback and dividends.

I wouldn't know because I've been fortunate to live in a country that doesn't suffer from fundamentalist, totalitarian rule. Maybe there are some christians in North Korea that would want to buy a bible?

You're obviously struggling to disconnect the tech from what it could be used for though. You're question was why this tech should exist. I gave you a very benign purpose that one could use it for as an example, thinking you could extrapolate on what other uses you might take for granted that not every person in the world is allowed. The medication example I used was meant to be the more compelling argument.

Having watched Dallas Buyer's Club a few weeks back, it comes to mind that one could want to purchase medications that are arbitrarily banned by the FDA because corporate interests have a large lobbying arm.

I agree with your point that the majority of U.S. users will not be engaging in "legitimate" business dealings, but I doubt there has been a government that has never banned a substance/item/idea because of pressure from special interest groups. A system like this could be used by people in [OppressiveCountryName] for something as honest as buying a book that has been banned.

The question is specific to mobile apps.

Exactly. I work at a large tech company and our engineering staff is probably close to 40% non-white. He needs to go the schools and communities to encourage education if he wants to see the numbers of his minority rise, not corporate boardrooms.

Sounds to me like they just need to build a really big wall. Problem solved!

I've found Udacity to have some pretty good online CS classes. They have been expanding into other areas as well lately, but their focus has mainly been CS. I thought the Web Applications class was really well done. Python is even my new favorite scripting language because of it.