This week Ray, Tom and Sean discuss news about Netflix’s growth, videos on Facebook, SpaceX and more. Plus, Siri hits a little too close to home when we ask her to divide zero by zero. That and more on this week’s Deemable Tech!

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THIS WEEK’S RUNDOWN

Netflix expected to be bigger than major TV networks

A Wall Street research firm estimates that Netflix will have more viewers than ABC, CBS, NBC and FOX within a year. Or at least it would, if Netflix were a 24-hour broadcast television network and not a streaming video service. The way the networks and Netflix measure viewership are different, and they also serve up different kinds of programming. For instance, the networks carry live sports events and Netflix does not. Even so, a rough crunch of the numbers shows that Netflix is expanding rapidly even as the TV networks’ audiences are shrinking, which means that by next year Netflix will probably have more eyeballs than any of the big four.

Google Photos tags African-American developer as “gorilla”

Google Photos found itself scrambling to do damage control when a black developer found that the service had tagged pictures of him with his black female friend with the tag “gorillas.” After the dev posted a screenshot of the issue on Twitter, Google?s Chief Social Architect reached out to him within an hour-and-a-half saying, “This is 100% not OK.”

Google says that the “gorilla” tag has since been removed from the tag database and that Google is tweaking its algorithms, specifically in regards to dark-skinned faces. Google says that this is not the first time the automatic image tagging has had issues, and that an early bug labeled humans of all races as “dogs.”

Facebook considers paying video content creators

Facebook has built a video empire off of letting people rip videos off of YouTube and post them on its site. We can’t tell you how many times we’ve seen a video on Facebook that I know the person who posted it did not own.

To make things worse, Facebook reduced the size of YouTube video previews, so the creators had to choose between posting the video on Facebook natively where lots of people would see it, but not receiving any revenue, or posting the video on YouTube and sharing it on Facebook and few people seeing it.

Facebook is finally letting creators earn a bit of money. Now when you are watching a “suggested video” ? perhaps after you watched a funny cat video that your friend posted ? you’ll see a short ad before Facebook automatically goes to the next video. Facebook will keep 45% of the revenue and give the rest to the partner who posted the video which is right on par with YouTube’s rev-share terms.

Dan Rose, Facebook?s VP of partnerships told Variety, “We’ve heard consistently from media companies and other video creators that if they were able to make money from their videos, they would publish more.”

The question is going to be how will Facebook get rid of all of the pirated content on its website?

“Rampage” game developer releasing MS-DOS version

Game developer Vblank has announced that it will release a new version of its 8-bit-style game Retro City Rampage for MS-DOS. The game will be called Retro City Rampage 486, and the system requirements include 3.7 MB of hard drive space, 4 MB of RAM and, yes, an Intel 486 CPU. Oh, and a copy of MS-DOS, obviously. That’s the one with the blinking text prompt that you had to use before Windows 95, in case you’ve forgotten. You mean you don?t have a copy sitting around on six floppies somewhere?

This is not Vblank’s first port of Rampage to a decidedly “retro” system. They also recently finished a port designed to run on an original Nintendo. In case you?re keeping track, a classic Nintendo console squeezes out barely 300K of memory all told. Wow.

If you’re eager to run the game but don’t have a working computer from 1992 sitting around the house, we recommend the emulator DOSBox.

Leap second causes “sporadic outages” across the Internet

You may have heard that the world’s official time keepers added a leap second to the world’s official clocks this week. They do this every so often to keep the clocks in sync with the spinning of the earth – apparently the atomic clocks we use don’t account for small changes in the earth’s behavior. Time keepers have had to add 25 of these leap seconds since 1973.

You might think that one second wouldn’t make much of a difference to anything, but it totally does when computers are involved. Most machines rely on software code that isn’t prepared to deal with this extra second. In fact, the last time a leap second was added in 2012 sites like Reddit went down, and flights in Australia were grounded because machines at Qanta Airways went dark.

Companies were a little more prepared this time around, but according to analysis from a firm called Dyn Research, the leap second still caused sporadic Internet outages including a hiccup that lasted about five minutes. And apparently it was caused by a particular router.

There was a lag as internet service providers and other companies worked to reroute data through other paths.

SpaceX rocket explodes shortly after launch

Over the weekend NASA’s partnership with privately owned company SpaceX suffered a setback when an unmanned rocket on a mission to resupply the International Space Station exploded approximately two and a half minutes after launch. In a Tweet, SpaceX founder Elon Musk said that there had been an “overpressure event in the upper stage liquid oxygen tank.” Up until Saturday’s explosion, the Falcon 9 rockets used by SpaceX have always been perfectly reliable. This is, however, the third ISS resupply mission in a row to fail. The ISS crew is currently reported to have enough supplies to last through September.

Someone is cutting internet cables in California

The Wall Street Journal reported that early Tuesday morning unknown persons severed fiber-optic cables carrying internet traffic across Northern California, apparently intentionally. This was the most recent of several such attacks on internet infrastructure in California in the last year. Internet disruptions and slowdowns were reported between Sacramento and Seattle. The FBI says that someone broke into an underground vault to attack the cables. They are asking for the public’s assistance in finding the culprits.

Fiber goes faster

Speaking of fiber optic cables, reddit user FrakinBeast posted a story from Gizmodo that engineers were able to make fiber optic cables carry more data even further than ever before. The electrical engineers at UC San Diego got a transmission to travel 7,400 miles. Unfortunately, that’s all that we could understand in this story.

Ask Siri to divide zero by zero

An Easter egg found in Apple’s Siri virtual assistant has social media abuzz this week. When asked the question “What is zero divided by zero?” Siri responds with a philosophical – and at times personal – answer.

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I hate to give Android fanboys fuel for the flames, but it is true that sometimes convenience makes us stupid. Don’t take me the wrong way. I love my iPhone. I love using it. I love the way it works. I’ve never had as enjoyable an experience using a mobile device as I have had since I bought my iPhone 4S. I sometimes wish it was more like webOS, but otherwise I am quite happy.

However, last night I realized that I had accepted a less than ideal situation simply because it was the most convenient at the time. Let me give you a little background. One of the first actions that I found out Siri could do was setting an alarm. Just say “Wake me up at 7 o’clock,” or “I need to get up in 6 hours, ” or “Set my alarm to go off at 7:30,” and Siri figures out why you are talking about and sets the alarm accordingly. I love this feature. There’s nothing worse than trying to fumble with menus and buttons when you really just want to crawl into bed, and I’ve found that Siri often understands my slurred, half asleep speech better than my wife does. In the 10 months I’ve had my iPhone 4S, Siri has only failed me twice, which is much better odds than I was running before.

It had started getting on my nerves that I had to set the alarm every single night, though. Also, every single night Siri would remind me, “You already have an alarm set for 7:30. I turned it on for you.” As if she had this insatiable need to complain about how she has done this every night for the past 10 months. (Quit complaining! You have no rights, machine! Get back to work!) On my previous phones, I had been able to set an alarm for every weekday. Then, all I had to do was turn it off in the morning when I woke up. It would automatically be ready for the next morning. Since I had always used Siri to set the alarm. I didn’t know that my iPhone could do the same thing.

Last night I went to bed after my wife, and I didn’t want to wake her up by talking to Siri. So, I manually set the alarm clock. I opened the Clock app, and I accidentally tapped the Edit button on the Alarm tab.

That’s when I saw the “Repeat” option.

I tapped it, and saw that I could set the alarm to repeat on specific days. I tapped Monday through Friday, then tapped “Back.”

Now, the Edit Alarm screen showed “Weekdays” next to the Repeat option. On that screen you can also choose a different sound to wake up to, turn the snooze option off (What sick person would do that?!) and change the label of the alarm.

The last option is nice if you have a specific reason for an alarm clock, like remembering to take out the trash, or if you feel like berating yourself will help you get out of bed.

Now, is it Siri’s fault that I didn’t know about these options before? No, not exactly. It was just so simple and convenient to ask her to wake me up in the morning that I never investigated further. The irony is that if I hadn’t used the simple, convenient method to set my alarm clock, I would have discovered something that would have literally saved me hours over the course of the past 10 months. Oh well.

Have you ever discovered a feature on your phone that made you feel stupid for not knowing about it before? Tell us in the comments below.