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Comment Re:anyone really want these ? (Score 1) 236

A touchscreen doesn't negate that, either. Lack of physical controls does. They are not mutually exclusive. Oh, and my new vehicle also has a real dashboard with display in front of the driver, like a vehicle should have (unlike a Tesla). AND it ALSO has an HUD display with speed, speed limit, nav info, etc, as well. AND it has voice controls. So all options are on the table.

You are right. A screen that does not replace physical controls is a nice thing.

And I agree. Any vehicle that doesn't have a proper dashboard in front of me, where I need to look to the side to see important information, is a no-buy for me.

Comment Re:anyone really want these ? (Score 1) 236

yes, it's a short list. But it's a start and a kind of "red line". I am hopeful they move that line to include other things that people use while driving all the time.

Are big screens nice? Sure, yes.

But if I have a choice between good physical controls and a big touch screen, I'll take the buttons and switches any day, thank you.

Comment Re:anyone really want these ? (Score 1) 236

My 10 year old BMW has voice commands and a map that's always been more than enough for me. Sure, it's not as large, but while driving I don't want a big map - I want an indicator that tells me "next turn left in 500m" - and I have that, not on the main display but right in front of me on the dashboard. Newer models have it on a HUD.

Nothing in what you wrote makes a LARGE screen necessary.

Comment Re:Slippery Slope (Score 1) 263

The border agents had the authority to examine the information on his phone without a warrant.

Correction, the dystopian interpretation of the constitution purveyed by our current lunatic fringe Supreme Court is that they have the authority to do so. The constitution says otherwise, but at some point, our government stopped actually reading it.

Comment Re:Get rid of homework (Score 3, Interesting) 50

But you simply can't rely on homework scores to be a proxy of learning or time spent studying anymore.

You never could. Parents do their kids' homework all the time, or siblings, or friends. Ideally, teachers should give a large pile of optional homework. State right up front that although they will grade it, it will not count towards your final grade, and the grade on each homework paper will be given as a percentage of the problems attempted, not of the total set of problems. So if you do five problems and get them all right, you get 100, and if you do 50 problems and get most of them right, you get 90. At that point, the purpose of homework is primarily to help the students learn, rather than being primarily a way to evaluate the students. Give some participation points for doing some of the homework, but not based on correctness.

This has three benefits. First, the smart kids who understand the material quickly will do just enough to make sure they understand it and then will stop wasting their time, but will still have feedback on the work that they did do. Second, the teachers won't have to grade as much work from students who don't really need that much extra work. Third, no at-home cheating, whether by technology or by other people will distort their grades.

Obviously this doesn't work for everything — essays, for example — but for general homework, it's a big win.

Brief daily quizzes on the previous day's material will force them to.

You can certainly do that along with what I suggested, though I'm not sure how much difference it will make in the grand scheme of things.

Also, It's not like students have the excuse of, "I couldn't study, I didn't have anyone to explain X to me" anymore. The very AI that they might otherwise use to cheat on their homework can also explain to them the things they missed in last year's algebra class that are blocking them from learning this year's calculus, or whatnot. Congrats - you now have an infinitely patient personal tutor who will spend hours dumbing things down for you until you get it. Now you have no excuse - learn the material. It becomes all about actually putting the time in.

Agreed.

Comment Re: Better late than never (Score 1) 65

I'm not sure I like the idea of Google, never mind Apple (or even worse, Samsung) skimming off the top of every single purchase I make.

On the other hand, the fraud losses are a lot lower, and as far as I know the transaction fee is the same, and the credit card company pays the 0.15% fee out of their cut. So while it theoretically *could* eventually drive up the rate in the future, I don't think that's happening currently.

Comment anyone really want these ? (Score 4, Insightful) 236

I don't know a single person who ever said that they want more or bigger touchscreens in their car.

Quite the opposite. I want physical controls and so do most people I've talked to. This is a car, not an iPad. Most of it I should be able to operate without taking my eyes off the road. And a touchscreen doesn't offer that.

In fact, Euro NCAP agrees. If you want a 5-star rating, you need physical controls.

The only people who want touchscreens are the car manufacturers, because it's cheaper and easier.

Comment Re:How do you play videos inside an MRI machine? (Score 1) 41

OK, off topic, but how do you display videos to somebody inside an MRI scanner? The magnetic / EMF forces those machines generate are pretty titanic, and any piece of metal gets sucked into the center of it.

Assuming it is installed inside somehow, you can avoid the projectile risk by not using any ferrous metal in its construction. Non-ferrous metals (e.g. dental fillings) aren't a problem in an MRI, though you may feel the electrical eddy currents induced by the magnetic fields. For something like an LCD panel, you'd probably want to shield the ever-living crap out of it to minimize problems, and I'm not even certain that it is feasible for that reason, but that's different from the LCD panel physically flying off the mount.

Comment Re:Time for another anti-trust investigation Googl (Score 5, Informative) 40

as evil is almost always necessary when the stated goal of your business is to maximize shareholder value at all costs

Don't interpret this as me having an opinion on this specific article (I don't), but that's a gross misrepresentation of what the law requires. As someone running a business, you *do* have a fiduciary duty to the stockholders, but that's not the same thing as requiring you to maximize shareholder value at all costs. Doing what is best for the company and the shareholders does not strictly mean more dollars.

For example, if a company had a choice whether to make a drone that would make a lot of money by selling to militaries, but would be used to annihilate the shareholders, no rational person would claim that the fiduciary duty requires them to build the drone.

More broadly, companies have a responsibility to behave ethically, for two reasons:

  • Perceptions of unethical behavior can impact a company's long-term profitability by discouraging customers/users.
  • Unethical behavior is often illegal, and when it isn't illegal, it often becomes illegal as soon as a company demonstrates that it is possible.

In other words, behaving unethically is how companies find themselves massively regulated in ways that negatively impact long-term profits. Every antitrust suit is an example of this, as the only reason those laws exist is because some company previously behaved unethically.

Comment Re:Is it ragebait, or (Score 1) 215

The older people get, the more set in their ways they become, and the less they like change. So basically, people become more conservative as they age, and less tolerant of things they don't understand. They also accumulate more wealth and favor keeping more of it (fiscal conservatism). And so on. This is generally a well-understood phenomenon.

Anyone who was not a liberal at 20 years of age had no heart, while anyone who was still a liberal at 40 had no head.

- Winston Churchill (among others)

To be fair, back then, 40 was old. But yes, you get my point.

Comment Re:Cities? (Score 5, Insightful) 53

When companies throw around terms like "cities and towns" for drone logistics, they are usually talking about sprawling suburban developments with neat, wide-open lawns, not dense urban cores.

Well, yeah, but those are still cities. Almost twice as many people live in parts of cities that are not "dense urban cores".

And the dense areas involve apartment complexes with hundreds or thousands of units and interior halls, so they're not delivering one package to the building; they're delivering a hundred. It wouldn't make sense to send drones for that.

But if you can handle the suburban sprawl with drones, that's a huge logistics win, because that's where all the time is spent — not by somebody going to an urban-core building and dropping a hundred packages in the mail room, but by somebody going to a hundred individual houses and dropping off a hundred packages one at a time.

Comment Re:How this may play out (Score 4, Interesting) 72

I don't think that's correct? Possibly I'm misreading this, but it looks like the study involved giving two things, both the Keytruda, and a separate personalized vaccine.

You're not misreading it. It is individualized. Different cancers express different antigens, and the mRNA vaccine needs to construct something that expresses those same antigens to train the immune system to attack them.

The nice thing about mRNA, is that it is potentially relatively cheap to synthesize mRNA strands and replicate them. It won't be hundreds of dollars, but it won't be millions, either. Right now, I think it's hundreds of thousands per patient, but that will go down over time as they streamline the process of taking a sample of the tumor and determining an mRNA gene sequence that matches said cancer. And economies of scale on the equipment will also probably help.

It may also be the case that it becomes less individualized over time. At some point, we might reach the point where they have a bunch of pre-sequenced antigens that are all ready to go, and someone just keys in a list of antigens, and a piece of software spits out the mRNA sequence. At that point, it is still individualized, but with a much, much more streamlined process for generating it.

Note that I don't work in this field, so take all of this as the opinion of an educated layperson observer. :-)

Comment Re:Is it ragebait, or (Score 3) 215

X is bad for our democracy because it's controlled by money - money can purchase access to eyeballs through "promoted" Tweets (or whatever they call them now), and money is the basis of the design of X's algorithm (well, that and Musk's ego). So when the oligarchs, massive corporations, and egomaniacs control the information that people see, it quickly destroys democracy and becomes unhealthy for all of us.

And by that, you mean X is bad for our democracy because it is a for-profit corporation. Free speech and corporate fiscal sponsorship of that speech have been at odds since time immemorial. The problem is that the corporate sponsorship seems to be winning and the free speech seems to be losing, drowned out by the voices of those who have more money, more bots, etc.

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