oaktowner

Chromecast's APIs are open. I stream HBOGo to it, ESPN, Netflix...none of them pay any money to Google.

Amazon could add streaming to their players as easily as those companies did.

I cast Netflix, HBO Go, YouTube and a couple of different music streaming services. Occasionally even Google Play Movies when there's something that Netflix doesn't have in their library.

Thanks! Had no idea you can switch it off Silverlight.

When you say "that they talked about"...where were they talking? I can't find anything on the site about multi-room audio.

Over the last 25 years I've heard the "Tap Plastics" radio commercial in the Bay Area so many times that the jingle has burned into my brain.

But I can't compare them to Canal Plastic Center.

Hard to see how that broad penetration jibes with a $1500 price tag (if the story is correct).

They're great words to learn for anyone wishing to embiggen their vocabulary.

Those links appear to be about ads within apps, not on web pages.

They can often be annoying, but that's different than interstitials on top of a mobile web site, right?

Probably because they've been putting all of their resources into the app which they advertise so annoyingly.

But Google doesn't have power over electricity and lease rates or lists of installers -- they're just using publicly available data.

There are other sources for maps data, and many people have 3d modeling software.

So I'm not sure how this is "so much power" concentrated in one organization.

GDP growth for the US has been at 2.2-2.4 for the last 3 years[1]...if California is growing 25% faster, it isn't huge but it isn't negligible, either.

[1] http://data.worldbank.org/indicator/NY.GDP.MKTP.KD.ZG

In the parlance of the industry, AAA is indicative only of budget: "[the term AAA is] used for games with the highest development budgets and levels of promotion."[1]

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AAA_(video_game_industry)

This is certainly an extreme example, but I can't tell you how many bugs I've seen closed as "Works As Intended" where it may have been what the spec intended but certainly wasn't what the user expected is...well, it's way larger than it should be.

I've seen both engineers and product managers use this as a crutch. And, frankly, as a PM I can say the blame generally lies with the product manager. This is our job. It is to understand how this technology will be put in practice by users and to make sure we are properly distilling and prioritizing the needs of those users into requirements for the engineers.

Thanks for writing this. I was going to write something similar, but you captured this better than I would have anyway.

What struck me about this was how huge the moon looks compared to the earth. We are used to seeing this as a small object in the sky (after all, it's 2000 miles across and 200000 miles away).

But when viewed from afar...you're seeing an object with an 8K mi diameter and another with a 2K mi diameter, not that different in size at all.

Which, I guess is another way to say: the earth just ain't that big.

Cellular for internet, if the wireless doesn't reach (and Google has pretty good wireless outside on much of the campus).

Depends on what you mean by a "real" workload.

Capturing and indexing the entire web is certainly a real workload, even if it is massively psrallelizable, so it would probably run equally well on Google's infrastructure as on a supercomputer because those fast interconnects wouldn't provide much advantage, right?

However,when simulating a nuclear explosion or a weather system (maybe that's what you mean by "real" workloads?), the heavy node-to-node communication makes the supercomputer much, much better suited.

Yes, they must have meant kilowatt hours. Was there no editor?

Yeah, good questions. The thing that indicates to me is that, if we can find this one (and we exist)...there are probably lots of planets like this. Probably billions.

And if there are billions of them, then what are the odds that some of them would have plate tectonics, a deep carbon cycle and hydrogen?

Seem pretty high to me.

I'm pretty sure he means that he doesn't want anything that has both an infotainment system and a steering wheel...in other words, he doesn't want an entertainment system in a car.

Absolutely agreed.

This car gets better after you have bought it. For free! They are continually adding features that just "magically" appear. Kind of amazing.

If you turn off data and don't use the screen, you'll get much better battery life (and have approximately the same feature set as your old phone).

Old phones didn't have apps that required constant connectivity and didn't have screens at all, essentially.

So the problem is that this is comparing yesterday's phone with today's pocket-sized computer.

Note: you can still buy a feature phone today if you'd like.

Anyone remember Anthony Weiner? His infamous tweet (that ended up with him resigning from Congress) was intended to be a direct message but he started it with @, not D, so it went (briefly) to his public timeline [1].

And it seems that, when you're a congressman, posting a dick pic even briefly is enough to attract some attention.

[1] http://www.nationaljournal.com/how-weiner-fell-into-the-twit...

Yup. Moto X did the same thing. Love the phone, but I don't love the AT&T aspects of it.

Yeah, "glitch" seems to imply something minor, while this seems anything but.

He says "We have always been able, on the authority of the home secretary, to sign a warrant and intercept a phone call, a mobile phone call or other media communications," but is clearly not content with same constraint with electronic communication. He can already get a warrant and gain access to private emails; what he wants is the ability to collect all emails regardless of the existence of a warrant.

It's an amazingly huge power grab and degradation of privacy.

Google offers Gmail paid ($5/mo IIRC). With that you get support (among other benefits).

Probably more like 100 who don't care for every one that does. Or 1000. Not here on HN, of course, but in the potential customer base.

The highest tax rate in the US as recently as 1978 was 70% [1], and had been as 91% (!) from the forties through the sixties. So I don't know why you assume that a high tax rate on the very wealthiest leads to Romania, 1980.

America's incredible post-war boom and burgeoning strong middle-class all happened at a time when the very wealthiest had very high tax rates.

[1] http://taxfoundation.org/sites/taxfoundation.org/files/docs/...

Not advocating for its veracity, but [1].

[1] http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2015/06/150601122445.ht...