Well if you believe in the “promote the useful arts” logic (I do, to an extent) then having exclusive rights to things like “butter” smooth animations makes companies like Apple more willing to invest in them, which is in the consumer’s interest.
I don’t like when patents get used by big companies against small ones, but I also don’t see why a company of Google’s size should be able to just freeload on Apple’s meticulously designed interactions (that the author praises effusively) instead of designing their own.
I remember hearing a story about Walmart founder Sam Walton at an annual vendors meeting. He walked up onto the stage and pulled his glasses out of his pocket and a bunch of his personal effects got pulled out and spilled on the floor and he got on his hands and knees to pick them up before going on stage. Then in another meeting with a completely different set of people he did the same exact thing. The guy who told me the story asked him what was going on and he said that the vendors in the room were making American median income and he was one of the richest guys in the world and he had to bring himself down a notch if he was going to connect with them.
This kind of stuff is harder to do now, since the first one would have been on Twitter within minutes.
I find myself playing the Leveling Game with cleaners, drivers, etc. and talking about the football team or similar. But it also feels the most preening kind of status assertion — like Harvard grads telling you they went to school “in Boston.” The worst offender is Warren Buffett, whose self professed lifestyle of a $100K house and McDonalds which is just a way of saying “I’m so superior to you that the granite countertops and Michelin restaurants you lust over and will never afford are so meaningless to my amazingly enlightened soul that I could have them for free and don’t bother.”
Is Wikidata how, for example, when a particular football team wins the Super Bowl, its articles are updated, the articles about the Super Bowl are updated, the article about the list of teams that have won multiple Super Bowls is updated, etc... all very quickly? Or is that just an army of volunteers.
People exhibit such bot-like behavior in certain circumstances that the burden of proof for calling something a bot is extremely high. If you saw sports fans in a stadium you’d think they were bots authored by the team’s robotics division — the same behaviors manifest in online discussions of politics. It's like how CAPTCHAs today are virtually unsolvable for humans -- we meatbags are more bot than the bots.
The “cloud car” that Waymo and Uber promise is really cool... until you have kids. I think it will be big business for singles but as a parent I can’t imagine not owning a car. The car has the car seats, books, toys, snacks, diapers, etc in it at all times. I can’t imagine Ubering around schlepping all that shit.
I feel like all of this IoT hardware should be rented rather than bought. If your piece of crap can suddenly stop working, I don't want to own it. Rent it to me and take it back when it's useless.
Sure, if you're a creative professional or Mac developer you are probably making at a minimum 20x the cost of this box. If you're in an office a rack mount helps save a lot of desk space, which more than pays for itself. Also lets you get away from the sound.
I feel that the law needs to have more customization due to power imbalances than it does today. Google cloning a startup's product should be less legal than a startup cloning Google's. A low-level employee should have few restrictions on planning a startup while employed, but a senior exec making millions has more power to stay unemployed for some time, a greater insight into his employer's business, etc, and perhaps should have more restrictions on the same. But business law doesn't usually have any such calibration for situation, the way that criminal law does where they take into account who you are and what situation you are in to determine a punishment.
When you sell your privacy you hurt all of us, and regulation is the tool for collective action problems. If you sell data to Walmart that lets them build a psychological profile of a shopper from their purchase history, they can use that to psychologically profile me.
Yeah, Sims are normally owned and operated by airlines, but if I was a manufacturer whose flagship model had suddenly acquired a reputation as a deathtrap I would be spending every dollar I could to fix the problem, regardless of tradition, including buying simulators and even renting them for free out to airlines.
You may not go looking to participate in fights, but as a spectator event, fights certainly draw the largest viewerships, whether it's a fight on the street, or the Super Bowl, or a war.
It's a hugely privileged point of view to think that people could pass up multiple dollars of discounts to preserve the rather abstract notion of their privacy. That's why this shit needs to be regulated with the force of law and not make unreasonable expectations of consumers.
Yes, but the Brazilian Constitution is basically a "suggestion" for Jair Bolsonaro, even more than the US Constitution is a suggestion for Donald Trump. Clearly the Brazilian Constitution does not have the protection of force, which is ultimately what gives a law its existence.
In the 90s Bose speakers used to be the thing for upper middle class men. They used to proudly show off their systems when you visited their houses. Is this still the case?
I'm not sure it's harder. More countries have successfully shot stuff into space than have build an airliner industry (US, Canada, France, Russia, Brazil).