Every time I've taken an iphone into an apple store and requested battery service, they have come up with an excuse not to do it. They instead heavily pushing me to exchange for a refurbished phone of the same model. If Apple is going to start telling people when their batteries need to be serviced, maybe they will actually start servicing batteries.

I'm afraid I disagree with you. He did not in fact embarrass Google. What Google has done is embarrass itself. As an outsider, it would have been hard for me to guess whether the accusations in the memo were accurate, but Google has just shows us all that in fact they will resort to any means necessary to protect their echo chamber. It's sad. I expected better of Google.

I work at a company that scores job candidates with an AI system, so I have some experience with this. One thing to keep in mind is that most AI systems these days are deep learning algorithms that depend on a reliable training set. If gender or racial biases exist in the training set (whether justified or not), a good deep learning system will learn these biases and propagate them. My company makes an active effort to prevent these types of biases from creeping into our system.

Just in time for the re-release of Syndicate

I'll never get how metric users can be fine with the meter being the smallest common length unit.

What's that you say? You can measure something in fractional parts of a meter? Hmm, I wonder if we could apply that same principle to inches.

My coworker's wife initially thought wtf was "Wow, that's funny." He set her straight . . . after a while ;)

I'd like to see a game that tackles religion the way Brandon Sanderson tackles religion in his Mistborn books.

Give us realistic characters that seriously contemplate the types of questions that real people ask themselves as they go through the human experience. Place those characters in situations that challenge their ideals and provoke thought. Allow the player to experience these ideas in their own way then make real, meaningful choices. Invent new religions, but treat them seriously, exploring the philosophies that are common to most religions without taking sides or trying to direct the audience toward your own biases. This is a difficult path to walk, but I'd love to see a studio pull it off.

IMO the studio that has come the closest to achieving this goal is BioWare. Their talent for placing the player in compelling ethical dilemas is one of the things that keeps me buying their games. I'd love to see a studio with BioWare's talent take on a game that dives deeper into the human religious experience.