This is already happening at Lidl. I was standing in line one day and the lady in front of me asked if I had the app, because there was something like a $5 off $50 purchase coupon in there I could use. I did have the app and checked, but my coupon instead was for $15 off $150.

Thinking a little more deeply about it, every time I go there I tend to spend an average of around $125. My hypothesis is that they have that data and know a customer's average spend, so they tailor the coupon's dollar amounts to the customer to entice them to spend slightly more than they usually do.

I'd take issue with the phrasing "moved from" and would rather use "supplemented by". Controller-based interrogation is still widely used.

I would be less salty if another author received it over Murakami, but to make the jump to songwriter sets a precedent I don't particularly like. You can make a reasoned argument for authors who deserve it more than Murakami, but to switch genres sort of implies that either all the Nobel caliber authors have been exhausted, or that nobody cares about literature anymore, or that the Nobel committee made this pick to satiate the complaints over the lack of American laureates, and Bob Dylan was the best the US could offer. In any case I find it troubling.

In the end we just watched the Twitch stream, which meant I didn't get to access the service I pay for just ten miles from home, and TBS didn't get our eyeballs on their advertisements. Seems like a bad policy on their part.

[0] http://www.photopills.com/

The story takes place in an authoritarian future dystopia, where omnipresent public sensors continuously scan the Psycho-Pass of every citizen in range. The sensors measure mental state, personality, and the probability that the citizen will commit crimes, alerting authorities when someone exceeds accepted norms. To enforce order, the officers of the Public Safety Bureau carry hand weapons called Dominators.

The weapons themselves only activate if the intended target has a sufficiently high "crime coefficient", as dictated by a central AI. It's pretty interesting (if you can tolerate a pretty high level of graphic animated violence).

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Psycho-Pass

Depends on the industry. I would say probably 80% of the clients I work with still rely on faxing as a regular part of doing business. Is it the ideal way of sending documents? Probably not, but I've also never heard of anyone who had to call in technical support to clear off malware or reformat their fax machine. It just works.

They are, but they will also hit a physical wall at some point (if not already), and you'll continue trading "natural" dynamic range and low noise for software interpolated dynamic range and smoothing, which as others have noted, starts looking like Madame Tussaud's museum.

Then again, if Apple really wanted to impress me with their camera skills they would have to develop a medium format mirrorless digital camera for less than $5k. One can dream, I suppose.

If these are unmeasurable, non-modelable systems that we can never comprehend, then how can we say that they are "physical systems" that differ from the Tao?

But I will say that Sennheiser is one of my favorite companies. I've purchased 5 different items from them over the past 7 years or so (HD 555, RS 180, MM 550-X, CS 686G, and the GAME ONE headset) and they all still work to this day with fantastic audio quality. I broke the MM 550-X, out of warranty and totally my own fault, and they still replaced them with a brand new set.

I'm guessing that the average consumer has no idea what an f-stop is, or that having a maximum lens aperture of f/1.8 is any better than f/5.6 or f/16. And the people who do know probably also know that for a lens and sensor that are maybe a quarter of an inch wide, a bump in the maximum aperture is not going to make the camera perform anywhere near a dedicated camera, so the focus on that detail is a bit odd to me.

I didn't mean to imply that. But honestly, the idea that there exist physical systems in the universe that are too complex for the human brain to ever fully comprehend or model (dashing physicists hopes of a "theory of everything") sounds a lot like a higher power in the more traditional sense. I'm pretty sure that's close to the definition of the Tao, actually.

Could these phenomena collectively be considered a "higher power"?