All recent Nexus phones have always-on hotword support. I just tested it from 20 feet ("OK Google, what's the weather like tomorrow") and it worked fine.
In this message I'm trying to make the argument I think they would make (I personally use monospaced fonts).
It's not that Acme can't use monospaced fonts, it's that Rob/Russ/others don't want to use them. Proportional fonts are better fonts, so why not use them instead? One possible reason is that existing code formatting conventions assume that text is lined up in columns, but we have a tab key that magically lines things up: it's the whole job of the tab key. So, why not forget about space-based alignment, use the tab key for the job it was built to do, and get the advantage of using pretty fonts?
A significant fraction of the Go core engineers use proportional fonts when programming. On their screens, hard tabs are the only tabs that work. Spaces on proportional fonts are too tiny to be useful for moving code around.
It takes some practice to learn how to dictate a response the way that you would type it. However, it has a lot of advantages. For instance I was able to dictate this response to my smartphone in a lot less time than would have taken to type it.
Feel free to say "Hello" to get a quick tutorial of the assistant features. The Google app understands searches as well as assistant-like features (like "send a text" or "open Facebook")
I think the best use of taxpayer money would be improving the airport experience.
The high speed rail initiatives suggested cost many billions of dollars per city served. Suppose that, instead, we spent those billions to remake our airports.
For instance, imagine moving the "terminal" to the city center, with a high speed rail line (inside security) that takes you directly to the runway. There must be some way to use a billion dollars for significantly faster baggage service, and another billion for faster security.
Hopefully this would cut a lot of time from the average flight. Airports would get much smaller because people wouldn't be waiting around in them.
Normal watches are jewelry because they no longer have any other purpose for most people. Those who aren't interested in the fashion part of watches have largely stopped wearing them.
This seems similar to those who said that smart phones were for corporate e-mail when the iPhone came out. The iPhone changed the whole purpose of a smartphone.
The new high speed rail line between San Francisco and Los Angeles is projected to cost $68 billion. Atlanta built a new international airport terminal for $1.4 billion. I'd think at those prices we could fix the TSA delays between LAX and SFO for less money than building a high speed rail line to link them.
The Wikipedia article shows that passenger trains use about 35% less energy per passenger/mile than the average car. If fuel efficiency for cars rose to 40 mpg (less than a Prius), they'd be equivalent.
The Go runtime keeps track of the number of goroutines that are currently executing and ensures that this doesn't go above GOMAXPROCS. As soon as a goroutine enters a system call it is excluded from this count. If there aren't enough threads to run GOMAXPROCS goroutines the runtime may launch a new one.
See pkg/runtime/proc.c (entersyscall, ready, and matchmg).