Stories like this have been sufficient to convince me to stay far away from Apple Card or any other financial instrument directly entangled with the tools of my daily life.
Anyone with, say, a fifth grader in the US can compare notes with parents elsewhere in the country. If your experience is at all like mine you'll be startled at the (odd to me!) shared culture. Especially if they spend time online.
A big part of why I like shopping at Costco is that they generally don't sell garbage. Their filter doesn't always match mine, but they do have a meaningful filter.
Temperature isn't a power source; heat flowing across a temperature gradient can be. But that brings us back to the first problem - how to make it flow.
I work with live tardigrades under a microscope and you could easily squish them with a little metal pick, or by pressing on the glass coverslip.
Tardigrades are very different from amoeba. They have a well-defined cuticle exoskeleton surrounding a liquid space, about 1000 cells, while an amoeba is single cell and highly deformable.
I suspect if you really tried to deposit a pile of tardigrades on your finger and squeezed really tight you could probably damage them with the ridges of your fingerprints. I don't know enough about the biophysics of finger pressure and how the surfaces interact, and I wouldn't really want to do this (feels cruel, even if they have very limited nervous systems).
Google has squandered so much good will over the years. This is a good example: expenses wouldn't even be a rounding error, and it could have given so many average folks a positive experience with the company.
This isn't what goog-411 was. You would dial Google's 1800 number, and then tell a voice prompt the name of the business and location, and google would try and automate looking the business up and then route the call for you by ringing them automatically. In the pre-smart phone era, this would allow you to call a business with just your dumb phone. GOOG-411 is completely worthless in the smart phone era (discontinued in 2010).
It's worth mentioning that goog-411 enabled at least a couple very niche internet subcultures in the early 2000's. When skype brought in free 1800 calling, GOOG-411 could be used as a way to dial any business with skype for free (so no credit card info associated with an account). Think Xbox live lobbies but its a dozen kids on a call, muted, and taking turns unmuting to prank call (harass) businesses all day. I watched a childhood friend spend a summer doing this with a group he met playing mmo's/forums, two of which ended up making it as famous streamers over a decade later. I imagine this experience is very common for a type of kid that grew up online in a certain era (mw2), and google could probably see the tool was garnering a disproportionate amount of abuse
This isn't what goog-411 was. You would dial Google's 1800 number, and then tell a voice prompt the name of the business and location, and google would try and automate looking the business up and then route the call for you by ringing them automatically. In the pre-smart phone era, this would allow you to call a business with just your dumb phone. GOOG-411 is completely worthless in the smart phone era (discontinued in 2010).
It's worth mentioning that goog-411 enabled at least a couple very niche internet subcultures in the early 2000's. When skype brought in free 1800 calling, GOOG-411 could be used as a way to dial any business with skype for free (so no credit card info associated with an account). Think Xbox live lobbies but its a dozen kids on a call, muted, and taking turns unmuting to prank call (harass) businesses all day. I watched a childhood friend spend a summer doing this with a group he met playing mmo's/forums, two of which ended up making it as famous streamers over a decade later. I imagine this experience is very common for a type of kid that grew up online in a certain era (mw2), and google could probably see the tool was garnering a disproportionate amount of abuse
Aha! Minor blast from the past. I just realised my a/c might still be alive on there and there it was. I think I logged in after 3 or 4 years. Old Reader. I think I had deleted my a/c on Ino Reader. I used to follow couple of niche Hindi blogs and they shut down years ago; some Engish language as well (from all over the world). Most of them were anon. I kept coming back for years but they were gone. That's what killed the RSS/blogs for me, not the demise of Google Reader. It stopped being the place I knew in my own individual/idiosyncratic way.
I suspect something similar would happen to podcasts for me, maybe sooner than I am hoping for. And podcast player apps.
Or about building tables… I don’t think hacking has to exclusively be about programming and computers.
If you submit a story about raising pigs or building a table on a weekend, it would probably get a lot of interaction. Please think about doing it. I’d love to hear the story!
There are some really good details in the article. But, to quote:
> Despite more than a decade of predictions of its failure, the project has persevered — even if its completion is in limbo.
reply