60 karma · joined March 4, 2008
The driver states in his video description that he was "watching stopped traffic to my right". Think how you would react were you in full control of a car in that instance. You have a virtually stopped lane of traffic to your right, you see cars braking about 100 ft ahead of you. Wouldn't you start slowing down? I would, as clearly travelling as fast as the driver is where all surrounding traffic is slowing or stopped doesn't make sense, however the driver doesn't appear to slow down at all, by his own admission focused on the cars to his right. Was he legitimately distracted by cars to his right, or was he depending on the car's situational awareness? I'm leaning towards the latter, what I believe is an affordance offered by autopilot systems.
I think we'll start hearing and seeing many such "success" stories of close calls involving autopilot, but I'm not sure how many of these will be incidents of autopilot truly saving an otherwise attentive driver by reacting faster/better than the attentive driver. It seems to me that autopilot is going to be both cause and saviour in far too many cases.
I'm not sure Phoenix was ever a reaction to XUL. Phoenix was more a reaction to the kitchen sink feature-list of Netscape 5 and Mozilla Application Suite, seeking to pare down the feature set to a minimally viable browser.
In XUL (and moreso XBL) Mozilla had a web technology that there was talk of submitting for standardization and which brought with it a level of expression that HTML didn't offer at the time. As HTML, CSS and JavaScript have evolved, XUL/XBL bring less and less to the table.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nasta%CA%BFl%C4%ABq_script
[2] https://medium.com/@eteraz/the-death-of-the-urdu-script-9ce9...
Why doesn't that make sense? Is a YouTube user naturally a Google Drive user? A Gmail user naturally a Blogger user? This seems to only make sense to Google, and not their users.
I don't know how much overlap there was between YouTube users and Google account users, but Google merged the two simply to boost the profile of Google+. People who wanted to comment on YouTube videos with their Google+ pals and their real identities were already doing that -- on Google+. The forcing of Google+ on YouTube offered no discernible benefit to YouTube users that could not have been offered while maintaining YouTube as a distinct social network.
As a Google+ user, the utter disregard towards YouTube and its distinct identity severely annoyed me.
Augmenting a story with accountability and completeness is arguably the primarily responsibility of newspapers and journalists, especially in the Internet era.
The author of the article is arguing that more revolutionary than being the first (or even the best) at something is subsequently making that innovation accessible to as many people as possible. This is something both Unix and Windows have achieved, Android is trying to achieve, but I'm not sure Apple is even interested in.
Perhaps a more apt analogy would be the invention of the automobile vs. the assembly line. True, the automobile was a genuine innovation, but the assembly line put the automobile within reach of everyone.
With this view in mind, it's okay that Apple wants to focus on pushing the envelope in what its car can do. Likewise, it's okay that Google wants to focus on making those or similar innovations accessible to as many as possible.
Anecdotally, I routinely have around 100 tabs open and Firefox runs for days on end, if not weeks. It only gets closed for OS updates requiring a restart.