taoistextremist

Isn't Xiaomi subsidized by the government? Hard to compete against that in price.

I guess it depends on your interests, but I'd suggest going to meetups centered around activities that necessitate or strongly encourage socializing. I go to meetups to speak a different language, and I tend to make pretty good friends at those since the meetups typically revolve around just getting a meal and talking with everybody about life.

Aside from that, maybe you could try taking up a hobby you didn't think you'd be interested in? Pretty much any reasonably sized city seems to have meetups for learning how to salsa dance, for example, which is inherently a very social scene where people all get to know each other.

The EU is originally an economic union with aspirations for political unity. Taxes is actually really appropriate for it to be involved in if you consider why it was formed in the first place.

As far as I've always understood it (I poke around on Chinese internet from time to time), it was mostly just a little joke because Xi is kinda pudgy. I think the backlash is because this kind of messes with an attempted cult of personality.

In a way, this is all kind of a free market solution to energy over-use (I'm not saying this happens all the time), companies develop electronics to be more efficient so that customers will look at how much less they'll spend on electricity, so energy companies will (due to their monopolies in many parts of the world) raise prices to keep their revenues consistent, which means there's an incentive to make electronics even more efficient.

I live in the burbs, but whenever I'm down in Detroit, what I really get is something like "get out more" or "try something new". This could just be my age talking, I'm in my 20s and that's a calling I think people in general get around this time, but I honestly do feel like Detroit encourages me to step out of my comfort zone.

>I really think they should work to bring back the daily city/event stories too.

I remember this showing me how great some places are across the world that I never thought of, when they were daily (or was it weekly?) a different city/country. At the risk of sounding ignorant, I remember learning just how modern and developed Namibia's urban life is from one of these.

Nothing covered in this article is stuff I'd consider very complicated, but I took a class on graph theory and the kinds of algorithms and concepts covered in the second half of that course were much more complex, though the fact that I hadn't taken a modern algebra class probably hurt me with some of those things, not to mention the class was also about the relation to combinatorics which presents much more interesting, though more complicated, problems.

Line was originally Japanese, it was just acquired by a Korean company, explaining the lack of market share in that country. I think Kakao predates pretty much all modern messengers, including Kik, so it's kind of surprising they never reached out of Korea very much.

A quick look at the prices, Stride is under half the price of Slack. No idea if quality correlates with price here since I've never touched Stride.

I don't agree that distributed ledgers are a bad idea, though ones that can be controlled by large amounts of computing power might be. In general, though, something that doesn't rely on central trust to accurately record something seems like a really good idea, to me. I'm more interested in applications in civics such as voting, though. I don't know whether blockchain is the best solution because AFAIK it would be difficult to anonymize individuals, but if a workable solution could be made this could renew public trust in historically corrupt institutions around the world, and steel other ones against becoming corrupt.

Facebook is ripping off a larger variety of apps than WeChat, it seems more like they're trying to push into Snapchat's market share.

I'm not familiar with payments being a feature on iMessage or Messenger, though. Unless you mean just the money transfers to friends, which existed on Facebook's desktop Messenger first IIRC, so it doesn't appear to be ripping off WeChat (which in my experience doesn't really support money transfers in quite the same way, unless we're talking about hongbao).

Also, weren't stickers a thing on Kakao Talk and LINE before WeChat?

Isn't that part of the reason why they restructured and departments like Waymo are now separate from Google? I would imagine this way they have people more familiar with these types of services running things at the higher levels instead of having the same CEO and other administrative roles managing a bunch of unrelated or loosely related products.

I don't think so. He could have given away money in a more discreet fashion and it would be evident that he did so and not have been for publicity.

I'd be interested to see how they intend to make this plan successful, then. There's no other avenue for the rail to collect revenue in that case, unless its economic benefit is already a significant net profit for the government. It may be, for all I know, it allows higher population density and encourages market participation, both of which increase taxes collected.

It is hard to see how it'll really convince many people not already taking public transit to use it, though. Cars are pretty expensive to have anywhere in Europe with the price of gas and typically more discouraging laws for car ownership (not sure what they're like specifically in Germany), I can't imagine it's a large cross-section of the population that drives because it's cheaper.

I'm not sure how Germany organizes their rail systems, but I'm guessing the rail companies profit from increased property values like in much of the world. This makes free public transport potentially workable (and even profitable) at least in the subway aspect. The US does not exercise a system like this in the vast majority of cases.

Of course, there's also the fact that if you have a well-designed system, free transport should encourage a lot more economic activity that'll pay back into the funding of the system. That's another thing many cities in the US lack.

When I go to more rural areas I find LTE isn't as frequently available on Verizon. I'm not sure if they're still eventually planning on expanding coverage there or if they've abandoned any plans given other carriers have filled the market.

I was wrong about China Mobile, it is just WCDMA, but China Telecom is using CDMA.

>CDMA is only used in a single country

As far as I'm aware, two Chinese carriers, China Mobile and China Telecom, use CDMA. China Telecom I believe for everything, China Mobile for its 3G (4G in general is a bit harder to come by there in my experience, so often the only option for mobile data is 3G).

So will these phones ever support CDMA or is that just going to be ignored? I wonder how they're doing in the US specifically considering their phones can't be used on two of the larger carriers in the country.

>The great thing about a headphone port is that if you stick something in it you won't ever hear anything over the speaker.

This still kind of depends on good software. On the Galaxy S5 (which I've managed to get along with still), the built-in voicemail app will play over the speakers despite having headphones in. Led to some embarrassing moments the few times I've listened to voicemail in public.

>as a result of its strong bias against Android

I'm not familiar with this, and the most prevalent Snapchat users among my friends are Android users.

The point is there is a gender disparity between professions, and so my argument is that this isn't entirely surprising.

I won't disagree with you, except maybe to point out I don't think it's necessarily just biological, but psychological/physiological gender as well that causes the difference. There is some evidence, though last I checked inconclusive, that gender identity has a fairly strong relation with certain brain structures. I don't think it would be surprising that these differences also cause people to gravitate towards certain interests.

Not to say it's always 100% going to make them go towards those interests, before anybody accuses me of making that claim, but it's fairly apparent as far as I'm concerned that even given equal opportunity, people of different genders aren't attracted to the same fields in equal proportion. Gender in multiple senses determines how the brain develops, so it would be surprising if these fields were demographically equal.

I think making an equal opportunity approach is definitely the right thing, but equal outcome I think ends up holding people back and forcing others into fields they won't enjoy. It's working not on the idea of cultivating individual people's passions but forcing them to fit some ideal.

In any case, though, I don't think any of this means that women should be disproportionately affected by having a child. I'm willing to buy the argument that it's societally caused due to expectations and men taking less time off than women for their children.

This would create a new argument in support of piracy.

In the realm of innocent fun with this stuff, just how much time would it take to insert myself into the entirety of a movie? I'm just imagining how fun it would be to invite friends around to watch something we're all excited about, only to convincingly insert my face into the main character's.

What is a "regular password" in this context? For anything I'm concerned for the security of, I use a unique password, and for other things (accounts for job applications, my accounts on sites like Duolingo, Coursera, and others that I don't spend money on), I use the same password. I can't think of why I'd reuse a password for an account I actually care about.

>Perhaps that means we’ll be seeing an AI-powered Xerox instant camera in the future…

I know this is just the writer and not Fuji Xerox, but how would that even work? Instant cameras use an analog medium, so it seems like anything you could do with AI would be limited.

Makes me think how I've just given up on doing any kind of complicated formatting with word processing software. They give you the tools for it, it seems, but you start adding tables and graphics and equations, the minute you hit enter and go to a new line it somehow displaces itself or some other odd behavior. And it's not exclusive to Microsoft.

If I ever need to do something like that I just pull out a text editor and start writing stuff up in TeX now, which while it doesn't really cause me any distress because I've learned TeX, is kind of ridiculous for the many people who've had no reason to learn TeX because they expected word processors to work as advertised.

I have this suspicion, though, that not all these streaming services will fare well. Sadly, yeah, there's going to be a handful and it'll feel similar to cable, but I think some will forego an independent streaming platform (or abandon ones later on) and license it out to the bigger players, especially because people aren't going to shell out money for each individual service. Though besides Hulu and Netflix, I don't know who else is a big streamer of third-party content. HBO does it with movies but nothing else AFAIK.

Maybe some other studios will copy the Hulu approach and create a group of networks all housed on one platform, but I do think it's going to be hard for anybody to push their way into the streaming market without a large backlog of media like Disney.