Had the iPhone 7 switched from Lightning to USB-C, this would kind of make sense. Put USB-C ports on the laptops and now all accessories (chargers, headphones, displays, Thunderbolt, USB devices, etc.) could use the same port across all devices. But with the iP7 using Lightning, losing the Macbook headphone jack would really suck. You couldn't use Lightning headphones on the Macbook without an additional USB-C to Lightning female dongle (on top of your USB-C to Lightning male for charging your phone, USB-C to USB-A dongle(s) for regular USB devices like flash drives, USB-C to HDMI dongle for displays, etc.), and to use regular stereo jack headphones on both devices would require carrying 2 dongles. Most wireless headphones only pair to one device at a time so it would be super inconvenient to use the same wireless headphones on two devices.

I'm a big scifi nerd and I'd love for FTL travel/communication to be proven possible, but if it ever is, it likely won't be via quantum entanglement.

Here's an analogy: We have a red ball and a black ball. We randomly put each one into a sealed box so that it's impossible to tell which ball is in which. I take one on my spaceship and fly away from you at top speed, you do the same in the opposite direction. When we're a light year apart, we both open our boxes. Mine is red, so I immediately know that yours must be black, and vice versa. We were able to determine the color of a ball 1ly away instantaneously, even though it would take at least a year for any message like "mine is the red one" to reach the other.

However, this doesn't mean we can send information FTL. Even with an unlimited supply of balls, the best I can do for any particular ball is know that yours is the opposite color. I can't manipulate the color or choose the order in order to send information FTL, at least not without some side channel of communication which must necessarily happen at c or slower. (If the side channel communication was FTL then we'd just use that to communicate and skip the entanglement part.)

Even jerks need freedom of speech, but trademark protection goes far beyond just freedom of speech. Trademark protection means the full force of government -- the courts, the criminal justice system, the police (to enforce the court's decisions), the military (to enforce economic sanctions), customs & border control, etc. -- can be wielded by the trademark holder to enforce their sole ownership of a term. Do you think it's right that the government should be forced to spend millions of tax payer dollars to enforce someone's exclusive use of an offensive term?

If that were true, there would have been half a dozen other people documenting the conference for "experience", but there weren't, so you're proven wrong.

Creators/artists of any skill level should not be expected to work for free for the "experience" or "exposure" as a cost cutting measure. http://theoatmeal.com/comics/e...

As a liberal from Maryland, I'd like to add that O'Malley was such a terrible governor that a solid blue state elected a virtually unknown Republican to succeed him.

You mean, stop verbing nouns?

In my experience it's not just a head tracking issue. Just the feeling of seeing your avatar walking around in the virtual world, while your real body is stationary, was enough to cause nausea in a lot of people.

Games where your avatar remains seated in a cockpit, like a fighter sim, were no problem. You can crane your neck to look around the cockpit from different positions and angles without any nausea (provided the head tracking works well enough), because both your avatar and your real body are seated and not moving. The lack of G forces from the motion of the craft were apparently not a problem.

On the other hand, I'm not convinced that even a perfect head tracking VR helmet will ever work for FPS-type games where your avatar is walking around while your real body sits still.

It's not paranoia if they really are out to get you.

One branch of government profits from hospitals unintentionally misusing your private information, then another branch of government takes those profits to fund the intentional and illegal misuse of your private information.

Figuring out liability for human drivers is insanely complicated. You just don't notice it because drivers are generally removed from the issue; there is a whole industry (car insurance) whose existence depends on profiting from driver liability and thus deals with all of the complications for you. They even figure out things like risks of being hit by an uninsured driver and factor that into the cost. The only cases they don't handle are when 2 uninsured motorists get into an accident, and then the courts can get involved.

Insurance companies will figure out the risks of various types of autonomous car failures and to what extent their liability costs can be recouped from the manufacturers (due to negligence), from the passengers, from the other parties involved, etc. Then they will set their insurance rates for autonomous cars so that they can cover liabilities and still make a profit. If they underestimate their liabilities then they raise their rates or go out of business. The autonomous cars could even require proof of insurance to be installed or downloaded in order to operate, making them very difficult or impossible to operate without proof of coverage. That will pretty much eliminate the problem of uninsured drivers.

The only thing that would hold back autonomous cars is if the risks are estimated to be too high, making the insurance rates so expensive that it outweighs the convenience. Given how unsafe most human drivers are, I think the autonomous car manufacturers would have to do a really terrible job for that to become an issue.

I work in the closed captioning industry, and I'd say anything less than 95% accuracy is actually WORSE than nothing. Automatic Speech Recognition (ASR) has no concept of context or situational awareness. The mistakes they make tend to be not in the simple common words and phrases, but concentrated in the nouns, especially proper nouns: names of people, places, companies, products, etc. Even at 80% accuracy, which is quite good for the current best speaker independent ASR systems, you're looking at 2 words out of every 10 being substituted with the wrong word, completely changing the meaning of the phrases. Imagine the chaos if (major news network)'s closed captioning reported some celebrity or politician as saying "I'm not a fan of Jews." when they actually said "I'm not a fan of juice." (Which would be 83% accurate!) Wars have been started for one misheard word out of a thousand; imagine how bad 200 out of 1000 would be.

Here's an article about a HUMAN transcription error that caused a pretty major ruckus. Now imagine this kind of problem being an order of magnitude worse:
http://www.people.com/people/article/0,,20693447,00.html

People who lost hearing later in life tend to do better with high error rate ASR because they know what words sound like and can figure out easy substitutions, e.g. Juice vs. Jews, Election vs. Erection, etc., but people who were born deaf or lost hearing before language acquisition cannot easily make these substitutions in their head because they don't "hear" the word sounds when they read them.

I had terrible experiences with their drives and tech support. In one instance, to solve a Windows blue screen problem, their support told us to update the firmware on the drive, which bricked it. They then refused to return/repair the drive because "firmware updates void your warranty." In another case, we needed a quick replacement on a failed drive so we requested advance replacement. They immediately charged our card MSRP (double the actual retail price), but then it took them over 30 days to actually ship the replacement.

Zombies are the ideal fantasy opponent for a doomsday scenario. They have most of the strengths of humans, thus (supposedly) requiring heavy firepower and good tactics to defend against them, but being sub-human (lacking a soul, whatever) and extremely dangerous, there is little to no aversion to the use of violence against them.

Put it another way, if a prepper told anyone that they were loading up on weapons to be able to attack fellow humans during a crisis, they would be labeled psycho and probably have their weapons taken away.

But... if they're gearing up to fight "zombies", they can stockpile all the weapons they want and only appear to be a little paranoid.