Because antitrust law is made of words that mean things. There is no field, anywhere, in which Google has the monopolistic position necessary, or has been shown to be in an oligopolic group necessary, to invoke antitrust law against the company. Not search, not ads, not mobile, not e-mail, not anywhere. They have competition, and healthy competition, in literally every field.
I answered the breathless and silly question you asked here instead of punching in your surely-not-Google search engine of choice with exactly the level of seriousness with which I regarded it. HTH. HAND.
the primary reason i purchased an kobo aura one is the red led back light, so i can read at night without messing with my sleep cycle. it's a killer feature. you'd be wise to consider it.
"They don't go to the grocery store for social interaction..."
False. Sometime I go to the grocery store for social interaction. You know, to get out. I generally go to a particular wine shop cause I like chatting with the guy at the counter. The idea that we do all this "stuff" ("processes") to get "stuff" done, and then separately we go somewhere for the express and sole purpose of socializing, is just clearly wrong. It's all mixed in. We're social creatures. We socialize while at the barber shop. We socialize at the grocery store. We socialize at work. At church. At football or soccer games. If we attempt to "refactor" out the "process" to make it more efficient, fine. But, don't pretend like whatever we replace that effort with we're not going to be socializing while we do that new thing.
It's frankly really sad that we have all these people that used to be persons we knew and visited with at the checkout counter, now they're in some warehouse being super efficient having no time to visit with coworkers while they work, meanwhile, we pretend that stuff magically shows up at grocery stores and we can walk in and walk out and magic and future wow.
Since you're posting anecdotal evidence, let me post my own:
> We socialize at the grocery store.
I never go to the grocery store for socializing. When I was still in England, I constantly ordered online. Now it's a chore and I miss england.
> We socialize while at the barber shop.
I shave my head to avoid having to go to the barber shop.
> We socialize at work.
I work remotely to avoid having to deal with that.
> At church.
Not religious. Probably because I'd have to go to church if I were.
> At football or soccer games.
I play tennis just so I don't have to deal with a team.
I can't wait for this technology to make its way here. The grocery lines on saturdays are insane. Also maybe that means the shops will be open longer hours and I can go in the middle of the night so I can avoid meeting people even more.
But you come to HN and read the comments because... I mean, the comments are the social portion. Not pure facts. They're other peoples views. So, I mean, you kinda socialize when get your news here and post pleasant comments interacting with other readers. So, I take it, you totally get what I'm saying.
You're going to back up your claim with anecdotal evidence? The overwhelming majority of people do not go to the grocery store as a social exercise. People view it as a chore. They want to get in and out as soon as possible.
"You're going to back up your claim with anecdotal evidence?The overwhelming majority of people do not go to the grocery store as a social exercise."
Wait, where's your evidence for this claim? I live in a small town in Croatia and, no, the overwhelming majority of the people in my neighborhood are not in a hurry to get their shopping over with. The speed at which groceries are acquired is just one metric out of many influencing their experience.
This is not to say that progress is necessarily bad or that checkout lines are great, merely that reducing every transaction down to its economic value risks overlooking other, less quantifiable aspects of the transaction.
You're biased by your experience, because you live in a world that's starkly segmented between work and play. I lived there, too, so I understand your perspective. But your values -- and Silicon Valley values in general -- are not necessarily universal.
His personal feeling and experience of going to stores is "anecdotal evidence"?
Where is your three-year, peer-reviewed study into the emotional motives of shoppers? After all, you flatly stated that "The overwhelming majority of people do not go to the grocery store as a social exercise."
Since you seem to be a very serious, data-minded person: CITATION PLEASE.
Well maybe you too should take your turn to back your claim with evidence!
I shop fast too. I get in and out as fast as I can, because - after all - the attendants in the store where I go to would not know a leaf of spinach from a leaf of kale...
The same applies to my electronics shopping...
...at least I can justify the guys there not knowing kale!
Jokes aside: not all stores are like that, and not all people shop like that.
I can think of many elderly people using shopping as a main daily source of social interaction.
Diversity means choice and choice is generally good.
I think the interesting point here is that when you remove social interaction and product advice from physical stores, then really you might as well only buy online... and Amazon is the king of online.
i have to agree. i hate any level of socializing at the supermarket - i'm there to get what i need and be gone. i don't mind running into friends i like, but i really get annoyed running into casual acquaintances due to the social niceties.
The original Leap Motion was awesome. But there was no adoption of it. It would have been great to see it included in laptops, for instance. Just my opinion, this is because, well, the same reason there are all sorts of arbitrary names for command line switches. The people that could build this already have something that works for them, so why spend time building out a whole new interface for other folks, average folks. Same reason why OSS has been great for programmers, not so great for consumers. Majority of the effort has gone to tooling and platforms, not to the non-technical user side of things.
I was one of the pre-orderers for the original Leap Motion. I played around with making apps for it within the first few weeks.
It was pretty bad. I was fighting the API the whole time because its post-processed palm and finger positioning data was noisy and and error-prone, and it didn't have a raw mode. The API would frequently lose track of individual fingers. You also couldn't do any hand gestures that involved your palm pointing horizontally instead of up/down because it would lose track of your occluded fingers. It also had issues tracking fingers when you held them together (as if you were going to karate-chop something). It's just too many quirks to deal with if you're trying to do hand position and gesture input.
Maybe it's improved since then, but after one day back around the initial launch I basically gave up on the tech for hand tracking, deciding that it was just not a good approach.
I bought 5 I was so excited. I ended up selling 4 after realizing that they were gonna require more time than I'd expected. I need to go back and see if they've since improved their platform.
Sure! With V2 we saw a more robust and granular hand model, with every finger and joint in the hand being identified. Significantly better performance against ambient light. And huge improvements to how the software handled finger occlusion.
A lot of these improvements were diminished when we went to VR -- new angles, complex backgrounds, different ambient lighting conditions. So we made the Orion software, which was an even bigger step up:
- lower latency
- longer range
- better and faster hand recognition
- vastly improved robustness to cluttered backgrounds and ambient light
AFAIK they rolled out some laptops and keyboards with it, but everybody I know that tried them gave up for various reasons.
It's hard enough to come up with compelling interactions using it already, adding technical issues and limitations meant enthusiasm died down. Now it's filed as "these fancy things that never really worked right" and attention has shifted to newer gadgets. I think it would be quite hard after that to convince manufacturers to integrate it again, since the first attempt didn't result in much outside the VR use case.
I've been meaning to come back to it and check out what's changed, but there is a long list of things I've been meaning to check out ;)
The "state" has no place in regulating competitive video games by use of force. Already in place no doubt was the ability of the state to enforce private party contracts. But, bringing the state into the mix... that's like saying the state, i.e. the citizens, have some standing in every such contract/instance. This is bad,
University is the new H.S. You know it. I know it. Everyone knows it. We have publicly funded high schools. It's time we have publicly funded universities. If the U.S. wishes to be competitive globally we need a well trained, educated workforce unencumbered by mountains of debt at the very time their supposed to be making their first "adult decisions" (buying a home, having kids, choosing which city to live in). Lump this in with climate change and universal health care, as far as I'm concerned. This is 2016, not 1850. It's not every person for themselves on the frontier. Almost everything we consume is touched by folks far away, requires IP to be built, and public infrastructure to get to you. This "there are no externalities that we need to worry about", "I can take care of myself mythology is so blatantly false at this point", it's b.s. and I just consider someone that starts with that as a set of axioms for their world view as ignorant or delusional.
University is not the new high school. Community college and trade school is the new high school. Not everyone is suited to a university education, or wants one.
I oversimplified. I would say that all three of those should be an option, that one should not consider their education complete till they'd gotten through either university, college, or a trade school. I'm even a huge advocate of apprenticeships. I suppose those could be rolled up into the trade school category. But I believe that leaving university out of that group (only counting college and trade school) ignores a large and important portion of the economy. Also, the liberal arts portion of schooling is important for a citizen.
Why is humanity still pumping unsustainable levels of greenhouse gases into the atmosphere when all the science points to that being a road that leads to catastrophic consequences which we can't predict?
First, this is a classic example of tragedy of commons - if you lower emissions, then you bear all the costs but a tiny fraction of the benefit;
Second, even if coordination can be solved, by and large the groups/areas that can make a meaningful reduction are not the groups/areas that will bear most of the consequences, there's no such thing as a single, aligned direction of interest/benefit for humanity.
For what it's worth, I've given up my car (I live within easy biking distance of work), live in a small townhouse (heating costs $20/month in the winter thanks to good insulation and neighbors eliminating heat loss to the sides). I purchase few goods, and try to keep most things as long as possible. Most of my entertainment/shopping is within walking/biking distance. I try to limit waste and compost/recycle everything I can.
My electrical usage is so low that I don't think installing solar would be a net win in carbon emissions.
Based on various calculators, my carbon footprint is about half that of a typical American. Now can I ask for a 28% decrease in carbon emissions?
I'm vegan. I ride public transit when possible, and moved next door to my job so I don't need to commute on a daily basis, I buy used whenever possible, and try not to buy stuff I don't need. I take carbon into consideration when making holiday plans (a few plane rides can double a persons carbon footprint). I compost. Future changes I'm trying to make include going to local farmers market and growing more of my own food, switching to solar power. But, realistically, I'm only one person. If everyone went vegan today, gave up cars (for bikes) and planes (for electric trains), and we started growing 51% of our food locally we'd be well on our way to meeting carbon emission reduction goals. The technology has been around for awhile. The will to make the choices has not. Which is why, I'm a pessimist on these issues.
The point of going to Mars is to give humanity a plan b, not as a vacation with lots of hiking and other outdoor leisure stuff. Considering how much time an Earthling spends indoors, it's not a huge leap to spend all of one's time indoors. Building underground and staying inside. There, problem solved. Makes a whole lot more sense than making our first attempt at colonizing a whole new would at the distances we'd be looking at with Titan.
The new Blackberry DTEK60 is based on Android but supposedly hardened and has much longer term security updates. You can still use the Play store. I know, Blackberry? But seriously, it's not a bad looking phone and has good hardware specs.
All the same, I'm in the same boat as you. Thinking about switching to land-line and buying a separate camera and GPS navigation device. Hello 1990's! Idk. Not liking my options.
The DTEK60 sounds interesting. If Blackberry can get this to market for a realistic price (300-400 is okay, 700 is not) I will probably get one of those.
How have there been no anti-trust related issues here?!