And if a retailer isn't located in a state, they're not under that state's jurisdiction.

I'm guessing that you only play a lawyer when you're on the internet? It has long been the case that a corporation not located in a state can be subjected to that state's jurisdiction based on a minimum contacts test.

It happened to gain popularity because cell phone providers made it easier than email

You really think so? When SMS became popular, many folk still weren't regularly using email and most of those who did have addresses wouldn't have push email access on their phone.

What made SMS popular was that it's nearly instantaneous and, particularly at a time when people paid for phone calls or had a limited bundle of minutes, it was generally low-cost.

They are bringing in $400 per trip. It will only take 2.5 million trips to break even. (Not counting running costs. electricity, taxes, employees, etc).

Or, looking at it another way, if the system can handle 2,000 passengers in each direction, we have 4,000 passengers each paying $25 or $100,000 of income per hour at capacity. So, 10,000 capacity hours would pay for the system (excluding maintenance and wear and tear). Assuming six capacity hours per day it would take 4.5 years to get the initial $1 billion in revenue, with the other 18 hours per day providing income for operating, maintenance and ROI.

I'd think that, if it's doable at even twice the cost, it could work. But whether it can be done for even a couple of billion is anyone's guess.

Amazing new study shows people will lie for $600

Are you suggesting they borrowed clean blood samples from a co-worker to get $600?

Also, if they self report, lies/truth bending are a thing. Like, if I were to lose $300 for saying I bummed a smoke at the bar two weeks ago, I'd never admit it, but if it was to test the effectiveness of vapes, I'd be completely honest.

The article is available at the NEJM. It says "Participants assigned to the rewards and redeemable deposit groups were eligible to earn $100, $200, and $300 if at 1, 3, and 6 months after the quit date, respectively, they submitted blood or urine samples for testing and the samples were negative for nicotine metabolites"

So self-reporting bias doesn't seem to be a concern for this group.

Okay, but I missed out your first line:

The purpose of the AI is *not* to serve you.

AI has a great many purposes. I'd argue that many of those Google implement it for are indeed to serve the customer. When I look at my phone in the morning, it telling me my commute to work is backed up and here's an alternate route isn't serving Google or showing me more ads. It's making my phone more useful which might make me stick with Android when I next upgrade.

Recognizing that I'm at work and might want to listen to instrumental music offers a better service.

Arguing that AI by Google is currently only used for the purpose of increasing ad views is to distract from the many ways it's used that don't increase ad views but simply make their services better and more useful than those of the competition.

The purpose of the AI is to serve *Google's* interest, and Google earn money by selling your eyeballs to advertisers (with the exception of a couple of paid service like the non-free Youtube Music and Youtube Premium), which means the AI optimizes for one single thing :
- make you stay as much as possible on youtube (thus prolonging your exposure to lucrative ads).

You do realize that the purpose of the subscription is to get ad free access?

Device manufacturers pay royalties when they sell a device that supports GPS. There might be an exception for cell phones that only use GPS for 911 calls - but GPS is not free.

10 U.S.C. 2281(b) states that GPS shall be provided without direct user fees. A royalty would be a user fee. Can you point to any evidence of such royalties being charged to anyone for civil use of the GPS signal?

Obviously there could be royalties payable to mapmakers but that's for something far beyond identifying your coordinates.

A car at 10mph feels incredibly slow to a driver. It will, however, do a whole lot of damage to a person (or indeed bend some metal on another car) if there's an impact. A bicycle has much less mass so will therefore do a lot less damage at the same speeds, in addition to being more maneuverable, having better visibility for the cyclist as opposed to the driver, and having a shorter stopping distance.

just re-release the nexus 5x with updated internals (and same nexus 5x price)

As someone who purchased four Nexus 5x phones, each of which is now bricked due to the bootloop fault, I think Google would rather that phone be forgotten. Honestly it was an embarrassment the way in which Google knew of issues with that device and didn't stand behind their customers.

It was widely announced and isn't exactly hidden. [link only works on Chrome 65]

Also, they're free services and apps that you can't fucking uninstall even if you want to - the best you can do is revert all upgrades to the installed but unwanted google app.

Can't you just root your phone and remove these apps? Or did you buy a phone from someone other than Google that doesn't let you and now you're complaining about the app maker, not the phone maker?

MS is a winner in schools now because they have leveraged their corporate management tools to the classroom.

All the schools around here use Chromebooks. They're massively successful in education because of their low upfront costs, long battery life, low power and very easy management. Google Docs is a staple tool in education.

No human driver could have seen that woman in time to stop, but a car equipped with infrared lidar should be able to. Time to update the sensors on the test fleet.

Any evidence for that statement? You can't rely on the video - digital cameras have much, much poorer dynamic range than the human eye. When you drive at night, you don't have nearly as dramatic a cut-off in your vision as is shown in the video. That's just one reason why you couldn't rely on digital cameras alone (at least those relying on visible light) to detect obstacles in a moving car. You could use a camera operating outside the visible spectrum and therefore could illuminate much higher without dazzling oncoming drivers.

Seems like a strange attitude. Google have been publishing their support cycle and end of life for years - certainly since we'll before the Nexus 5x and 6p.