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Comment Decent but not a masterpiece (Score 1) 94

It's not a masterpiece by any stretch, but it's a decent movie overall. Say it with me: Every movie does not need to be a masterpiece or artistically innovative. The story of this particular movie is about the characters, not the setting. The setting only exists to tell the character story with AI as the macguffin. It could just as easily have been an evil sorcerer. Sure it's basically I Robot, but that's fine. It's different enough.

If you went into it expecting some sort of tour de force of scientific accuracy, well, the first city shots would clue you in that it ain't that even if you didn't already get that vibe. What was holding up those aerial trains? What about the lousy ergonomics of those holographic UIs and how would they even work? And that's before you get to the obviously anime inspired mechs and the logic of sending an untrained analyst on the mission (though at least they address that last bit in the movie).

Here's the thing. It clearly wasn't trying to be scientifically accurate. It was very clearly a live action mecha anime story whether the producers realized that's what they were making or not.

Comment Deliberate overbooking (Score 1) 77

Now they just need to make the standard overbooking illegal. "But we need to overbook so we can break even" No mate, you need to charge fares that break even without fraudulently selling seats that are already reserved. "But then we'll be running below capacity when people don't show" Right, mate. But those no-shows have *paid* for the seat they aren't occupying. See previous answer and don't or rebook refund no-shows. "But then air travel will be more expensive." Oh, such a tragedy that passengers pay the real cost of air transport.[1]

[1] I'm pretty sure airports themselves are subsidized and I'm not necessarily arguing for that to change. But the cost of carriage on the vehicle itself is a different matter (fuel, staffing, etc.).

Comment Good. I hope they lose hard (Score 1) 59

Good. Finally someone going after them for it. I hope they lose *hard*. When I went through that process, I ended up getting very rude by the end of it. Very rude. One or maybe two retention offers and I will hold that in check because the person on the phone isn't responsible for the script they have to follow. But There is a line after which my patience no longer exists. My experience was made worse by the person on the other end of the phone having barely intelligible English.

Comment That dehydration bit might be a bigger problem (Score 2) 220

That the woman was diagnosed with dehydration after she was released might be a bigger headache for the police than the arrest itself. They have a duty of care once they take someone into custody and that diagnosis would seem to suggest they did not take that duty seriously.

Comment He has a good point (Score 1) 75

I've been saying for many years that the path we've been taking for computer vision, natural language processing, and other things, has been wrong. But I don't mean wrong in the sense that the direction we've been going is not useful. Rather, I mean that we do a lot more then edge detection, pattern matching, and the like. Because we can understand not only the semantics of specific words, but how they relate to the real world and our experiences, we can apply a layer of error detection and correction that pattern matching scheme, however elaborate, cannot. And that's leaving aside the actual meaning of the words themselves which is often contradictory without context (and even with context sometimes). It seems clear to me that multiple techniques working in tandem will be required to accomplish the end goal. A similar analysis applies to vision (like autonomous cars would need), etc.

It's obviously possible to build a reasonably low powered device that is reasonably portable that can decode natural language (and vision and a lot of other things). There are, after all, billions of biological ones already on the planet. We just need to work out how we manage it in the first place.

Comment Re:subway beat the footlong case so they may win t (Score 1) 80

Presumably showing that they purchased sufficient tuna from suppliers would be enough to shift the complaint to their supplier(s) if there is even any claim left. Especially when combined with the deleterious effect cooking and canning have on DNA, the very limited sample size that was tested, and the non-lab conditions before getting to the lab for testing.

Comment Unidentified means "we don't know" (Score 1) 187

Of course they aren't definitively stating that *unidentified* things are not X, Y, or Z. There are good reasons not to do that, not least of which is the sheer number of things that any given unidentified object isn't. But also different unidentified or unknown things can have different causes. It's far more productive to focus on identifying what something is rather than enumerating what it isn't. Though, of course, ruling out some causes can help with identifying the real cause. But, again, that has to be on a case by case basis. Not all events will be caused by the same thing. However, unless you can definitively identify something as terrestrial in origin, it still could be extra-terrestrial (which includes meteors and the like, not just aliens, by the way).

Comment Is it even legal? (Score 1) 182

Seems like turning this on without active consent may turn out to be illegal in at least some jurisdictions. (Might even qualify as theft depending on the specific laws in effect.) And, for that matter, it may even violate the terms of service from the device owner's ISP and lead to them having their internet disconnected. And then there's the liability quagmire for some random passerby or neighbor doing something illegal on the device owner's internet connection. I'm kind of hoping Amazon gets a major legal black eye on this one.

Note that I'm not saying their sidewalk network idea itself is the problem. It's the notion of enabling it by default that is.

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Doubt isn't the opposite of faith; it is an element of faith. - Paul Tillich, German theologian and historian

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