It's not undeserved hubris: it's trillions of independent experiments, billions of dollars and hundreds of thousands of man-years working on the theory by lots of very smart people. The theory, quantum field theory (QFT), is simple, consistent and universal. It describes everything we can see around us, with the exception of gravity.
Trillions of experiments. Yeah, right.
Also, if your theory explains everything except for a pretty substantial fundamental force that is all around us, you might yet be in for a surprise or two regarding the accuracy and validity of your theory. Just saying, you know. Reality meets formulas, and all that.
Not all "deniers" were crackpots, at least back then.
And in all fairness, some of the science that led to the discovery of HIV was a bit dodgy, in terms of how it was executed and reported (not, in hindsight, with regard to its contents). Also, the proposed mechanisms of how HIV works were rather novel for the time, so it is not hard to see why some more conservative members of the science community might have been on the fence for a while about whether this was indeed the cause of AIDS. Add to this that even someone like Kary Mullis, who got his Nobel Prize for PCR, a fairly pivotal molecular biology technology, were skeptical, at least for a time.
Of course, nowadays, we know enormously more about the molecular mechanics of HIV and AIDS than we did back then. So by contemporary standards, even the "deniers" from back then who tried to be skeptical on actual scientific grounds look like idiots. And some of them likely were - but not all of them. Not judging from the perspective of the time they were living in.
Well, unlike Mars, there is no reason to set up a permanent colony in Antarctica.
Oh, wait... maybe a permanent settlement on Mars is pointless as well?:) Apart from the whole "backup location for humanity, in case Earth gets creamed by an asteroid no one saw coming" thing. That has some far-fetched merit of sorts. However, due to the extremely hostile environment there, chances are that a Martian colony has a much higher probability of failing than civilisation on Earth in the first place, at least for centuries to come. So even in the most optimistic scenarios, it will be the thought that counts w/r to Martian settlement.
I was not objecting to people complaining about the connector being removed: as you say, commenting on such matters is more than fair enough. What I am objecting to is the seemingly widespread notion that *all* customers are unhappy about this. No, some are, probably rightfully so. But actually, a sizeable number of customers also do not care much either way. That was all I am trying to say here: there is less drama than some observers are making this out to be.
All other things being equal, I am actually not even convinced that removing the port was a smart decision on Apple's part: quite a number of their customers do care, and the removed connector is not *that* big to begin with. OTOH, I can also see more and more headphones going wireless in the foreseeable future anyway - it is bloody convenient to not have cables dangling around, after all.
And with regard to the problem of not being able listen to music, resp. talk on the phone with headphones, at the same time as charging the phone: making power cables that allow you to plug in Lightning earphones *atop* the charger cable is a total no-brainer from an engineering perspective. I'm actually surprised they are not in the line-up yet.
You know what? I'm fully aware that Apple did not change this to please me. I am fully aware that they (almost) solely did that to make people buy more of their other products. Sure thing. Corporate logic 101.
But as this change does not interfere with my specific needs and priorities (!), I am still happy to get the iPhone 7 as is. If they had broken something I need, I might go and buy an Android device. Or stock up on iPhone 6S, to last me through the Connectorless Ice Age. But if the iPhone 7 still meets my needs, it gets bought. Simple as that. It's called informed choice, or something like that.
The point I wanted to make is that maybe, just maybe, Apple actually weighed the market balances properly before making the change. And figured out that there are enough customers who, like me, will not care enough about the old connector going away to stop buying iPhones. That's all I wanted to say. Not a general absolution of Apple, or their often enough fairly slimy corporate strategies. Nope. Just a comment that removal of that jack was not as stupid as some people make it out to be.
Nobody cares? Well, some do. I've already ordered an iPhone 7 to replace my 5S. I develop for iOS, so it makes some sense for me to replace the phone after three years. That, and I am looking forward to the larger and brighter screen, and the better camera. Anything else is just sugarcoating, though.
Ah yes, the headphone jack. Turns out that my 5S is still technically a virgin. Never used that connector. See, there are some people who never use headphones on an iPhone. Exactly these people, like myself, do not care about the removal of the jack, and are happy to order the 7 as is. I can of course see that this change bothers those users who use headphones: but maybe, just maybe, Apple did some market research before they removed the connector? So that maybe, there are not *that* few customers like myself out there as the internet community would assume?
Have you ever taken a closer look at a steam turbine installation on a major vessel? I am a software developer like you, but one of my grandfathers was a ship-building engineer (on large turbine-powered ships in the 30ies and 40ies, to boot), so there is some nerdy knowledge in the family. These installations are extremely intricate, and have to be more or less woven into the fabric of the ship: a modern diesel-electric set-up is plug and play by comparison (apart from the gigantic size of the machinery involved, that is).
I assume that the actual marine engineers in that company tried to tell their managers that this would not work, but that the PR department got to make a press release first. Or something like that.
Yeah, film at 11. 60 year old rusty hulk would require extensive re-build to accommodate a propulsion plant it was never designed for.
What the hell did these guys expect? A new coat of paint, and it's ready to go again? I mean, any sane person should have approached this with a mindset of "this will likely cost more than a new build. But this is (insert famous ship name here) after all, so commercial considerations should not be the main motivators." Any other way of approaching such a job would be just hare-brained.
To be fair, none of the current fighters were tested like that, either. And a good thing this was, what with a war against a first world power likely involving nukes, and all that. Pretty messy, just to test one's new fighters.
That having been said, I am also quite wary of the flying iPhone being vulnerable to the Russians or Chinese throwing some sort of electromagnetic spanner in the works during combat. Especially the Russians have apparently become very, very good at the whole electronic warfare thing. It is really a pity that there is practically no open information about the Russian EW capabilities, only indirect hints. But these are rather worrying, actually.
EW systems are a geek's true weapon: most of these things are incredibly nerdy. But also endlessly fascinating, iff one manages to glimpse some sort of info about them (which one usually can't, as literally no one is talking about them in the open).
Of course, the W10 telemetry is seriously nosey. But as this is M$ we are talking about, I ultimately cannot see them doing much useful with it. They are probably too disorganised internally to come up with anything worse than an intrusive, ad-laden personalised version of Clippy, based on that data. Or something like that.
It's outfits like Google that give me the heebie-jeebies these days, not good old "640k is enough for everybody" M$.
Seriously. Whatever M$ has ever touched, turned to manure in short order. Think Skype et al.
On the other hand, as M$ is actually one of the less creepy tech companies out there these days (with Linkedin being very near the top), this might actually end up *improving* the business ethics of Linkedin.:)
He was exceptionally lucky to survive 9 minutes without permanent brain damage. He might have had some residual heart function which delivered some minimal oxygen to the brain for the first few minutes of his "cardiac arrest". Good to hear that he made a full recovery: stories like that are much needed morale boosters for EMTs like myself, and many others: the sad truth is that even for us who bring plenty of kit and experience to the party, CPR does not end up doing much useful in most of the cases we see. The few where it does work of course make it more than worthwhile, though.
The thing is, with proper first aid (to wit, competently done CPR from the get-go), the "reasonable recovery" rate is significantly higher than just 2%. Of course, it is important to realise that with current medical technology, it will never get any higher than ~20% or so. I have the 20% figure from a cardiologist: according to him, 80% of cardiac arrest cases are for reasons that are lethal with our current medical capabilities anyway: even with the best pre-clinical care possible, these will not result in a positive outcome (that is, anything other than, at "best", lingering death).
However, there is quite a difference between 2% and 20%. That amounts to quite a number of people who might yet have a few years (or months, as the case may be) to live *with a decent quality of life* - iff no hypoxic brain damage occurs, that is. So investing effort into improving pre-clinical medical care (and in particular, competent first responders) is not wasted. You never know whether someone you know might fall into the 18% group.
Sure. I was only saying that because the OP claimed "5K is pointless one-upping until there is an application for it.". It sure is when it comes to raw, full-screen video content - but that does not mean an Apple 5K screen intended to display OS X content is pointless.
I was under the impression that on your computer monitor, there is this thing called the operating system that is capable of providing genuine 5k content to your heart's desire. To wit, and by geeky standards: more open windows with more (typographically, at least) legible code on one and the same monitor.
Nitpick: in Europe, a typical freight train carries more like 4000 tons, not 10k. 10k trains are the multi-mile thingies you guys run across the Great Plains in the US. Here, we are a bit more limited w/r to train length, and some other factors. Your point is of course still valid, though.
Even if you could, the connection aspect would not be your only worry. Brain death usually leads to death of the remaining body in fairly short order, due to complications from a fairly large piece of decaying goo in the former person's skull. The rest of the body goes on, but those brain cells are dead, and start decaying. Presumably, one could actively remove the dead brain tissue, and fill the cavity with the connections needed for the ghola to work (to make an inaccurate Dune reference). Still. Science fiction, for now.
After all these years, VR is still a technology desperately looking for a problem that it is actually needed for. Sure, Oculus headsets are nifty things: but outside some niche applications, actually useful they are not.
Either Mr. Zuckerberg has a vision that no one else is capable of seeing yet, or they are going to waste an enormous amount of money on what amounts to a buzzword frenzy.
I never said I thought it particularly likely that the neural network Google has come up with is inherently limited to Go-playing capabilities equal to, or less, of that found in gifted humans. However, with these networks you do have the issue that you never quite know where their limit is. Specifically, for some networks, throwing more hardware at them makes them more capable - but for others, that only has a very weak effect (if one at all).
Or put differently: if hardware was all that mattered, whales would be way more intelligent than humans (their brains are significantly larger, after all).
Nope, not necessarily. You are making a small but significant mistake here. If AlphaGo was a conventional program that was somehow able to actually, reliably analyse what it is doing... and to plan ahead based on fine-tuned (but known) heuristics that we as the designers of the system understand... but that no human player could ever use due to their complexity (computational and/or time-wise)... then it would stand to reason that future versions of it stand a good chance of pulling ahead of humans for all time.
But AlphaGo is not such a program. Sure, it learns from its mistakes (it is designed that way). But as we don't understand the inner workings of the net that well, there might well be a level of play at which such neural net based systems simply ceiling out at. And maybe, just maybe, that ceiling is actually within reach of gifted human players. Which would mean that no clear dominance can actually be established either way.
Have you ever considered the option that they track any and all purchases, and just give out those reward cards to create a believable front for them tracking and analysing all purchases on a per-person basis? (in addition to also wanting to create a stronger retailer-customer bond via said programmes, for those customers who fancy such a thing)
Note that this is actually not necessarily evil: I actually can't imagine why the likes of Safeway, Rewe et al. would ever care about you as a person. As in: that they would ever spy on you on a personal level. Like actually evaluating the fact that you bought a certain mix of products to reveal that you, as a person, live a particular lifestyle. Or something like that. To them, you really are just a number. All they care about is that they can optimise the stacking of their shelves, and their storage keeping and wholesale purchasing.
But they do care to track what goes on in their stores. They do care about every single customer, on a statistical level. But given existing privacy laws, the presence of a database of customer purchase histories on company computers would be a huge red flag.
Unless, of course, if there is a "customer care" programme which ostensibly tracks purchases for the hundreds of thousands of customers who voluntarily signed up for it. Do you really think these databases were ever audited whether they *only* contain the records of customers that signed up?
On the other hand, they might just not bother, if they have enough people with frequent customer cards. Who knows. But I would certainly not discount the possibility that everything gets tracked and stored permanently anyway.
However, it is certainly not conjecture that most large retail outfits are actually multi-nationals. Which, by and large, centralise their IT, purchase and logistics operations across countries to some degree. It is also pretty much both logical and normal that said multi-nationals routinely store and analyse data about customer behaviour.
Do you really think that the likes of Rewe and Tesco would bother to exempt Belgium from these analyses?
It's cute how you assume that data about what exactly you bought, and when, is not stored anyway. Sure it might be technically illegal to do that: until TTIP passes, at least. But how exactly are you going to prove that they do not analyse the data regardless? Most large retail operations are multi-nationals anyway, who might have their data centres in a different jurisdiction to begin with.
Nah, if you pay with plastic, you get tracked. Anywhere, anytime. Period.
Slashdot Mirror
It's not undeserved hubris: it's trillions of independent experiments, billions of dollars and hundreds of thousands of man-years working on the theory by lots of very smart people. The theory, quantum field theory (QFT), is simple, consistent and universal. It describes everything we can see around us, with the exception of gravity.
Trillions of experiments. Yeah, right.
Also, if your theory explains everything except for a pretty substantial fundamental force that is all around us, you might yet be in for a surprise or two regarding the accuracy and validity of your theory. Just saying, you know. Reality meets formulas, and all that.
Not all "deniers" were crackpots, at least back then.
And in all fairness, some of the science that led to the discovery of HIV was a bit dodgy, in terms of how it was executed and reported (not, in hindsight, with regard to its contents). Also, the proposed mechanisms of how HIV works were rather novel for the time, so it is not hard to see why some more conservative members of the science community might have been on the fence for a while about whether this was indeed the cause of AIDS. Add to this that even someone like Kary Mullis, who got his Nobel Prize for PCR, a fairly pivotal molecular biology technology, were skeptical, at least for a time.
Of course, nowadays, we know enormously more about the molecular mechanics of HIV and AIDS than we did back then. So by contemporary standards, even the "deniers" from back then who tried to be skeptical on actual scientific grounds look like idiots. And some of them likely were - but not all of them. Not judging from the perspective of the time they were living in.
Well, unlike Mars, there is no reason to set up a permanent colony in Antarctica.
Oh, wait... maybe a permanent settlement on Mars is pointless as well? :) Apart from the whole "backup location for humanity, in case Earth gets creamed by an asteroid no one saw coming" thing. That has some far-fetched merit of sorts. However, due to the extremely hostile environment there, chances are that a Martian colony has a much higher probability of failing than civilisation on Earth in the first place, at least for centuries to come. So even in the most optimistic scenarios, it will be the thought that counts w/r to Martian settlement.
I was not objecting to people complaining about the connector being removed: as you say, commenting on such matters is more than fair enough. What I am objecting to is the seemingly widespread notion that *all* customers are unhappy about this. No, some are, probably rightfully so. But actually, a sizeable number of customers also do not care much either way. That was all I am trying to say here: there is less drama than some observers are making this out to be.
All other things being equal, I am actually not even convinced that removing the port was a smart decision on Apple's part: quite a number of their customers do care, and the removed connector is not *that* big to begin with. OTOH, I can also see more and more headphones going wireless in the foreseeable future anyway - it is bloody convenient to not have cables dangling around, after all.
And with regard to the problem of not being able listen to music, resp. talk on the phone with headphones, at the same time as charging the phone: making power cables that allow you to plug in Lightning earphones *atop* the charger cable is a total no-brainer from an engineering perspective. I'm actually surprised they are not in the line-up yet.
You know what? I'm fully aware that Apple did not change this to please me. I am fully aware that they (almost) solely did that to make people buy more of their other products. Sure thing. Corporate logic 101.
But as this change does not interfere with my specific needs and priorities (!), I am still happy to get the iPhone 7 as is. If they had broken something I need, I might go and buy an Android device. Or stock up on iPhone 6S, to last me through the Connectorless Ice Age. But if the iPhone 7 still meets my needs, it gets bought. Simple as that. It's called informed choice, or something like that.
The point I wanted to make is that maybe, just maybe, Apple actually weighed the market balances properly before making the change. And figured out that there are enough customers who, like me, will not care enough about the old connector going away to stop buying iPhones. That's all I wanted to say. Not a general absolution of Apple, or their often enough fairly slimy corporate strategies. Nope. Just a comment that removal of that jack was not as stupid as some people make it out to be.
Nobody cares? Well, some do. I've already ordered an iPhone 7 to replace my 5S. I develop for iOS, so it makes some sense for me to replace the phone after three years. That, and I am looking forward to the larger and brighter screen, and the better camera. Anything else is just sugarcoating, though.
Ah yes, the headphone jack. Turns out that my 5S is still technically a virgin. Never used that connector. See, there are some people who never use headphones on an iPhone. Exactly these people, like myself, do not care about the removal of the jack, and are happy to order the 7 as is. I can of course see that this change bothers those users who use headphones: but maybe, just maybe, Apple did some market research before they removed the connector? So that maybe, there are not *that* few customers like myself out there as the internet community would assume?
Have you ever taken a closer look at a steam turbine installation on a major vessel? I am a software developer like you, but one of my grandfathers was a ship-building engineer (on large turbine-powered ships in the 30ies and 40ies, to boot), so there is some nerdy knowledge in the family. These installations are extremely intricate, and have to be more or less woven into the fabric of the ship: a modern diesel-electric set-up is plug and play by comparison (apart from the gigantic size of the machinery involved, that is).
I assume that the actual marine engineers in that company tried to tell their managers that this would not work, but that the PR department got to make a press release first. Or something like that.
Yeah, film at 11. 60 year old rusty hulk would require extensive re-build to accommodate a propulsion plant it was never designed for.
What the hell did these guys expect? A new coat of paint, and it's ready to go again? I mean, any sane person should have approached this with a mindset of "this will likely cost more than a new build. But this is (insert famous ship name here) after all, so commercial considerations should not be the main motivators." Any other way of approaching such a job would be just hare-brained.
To be fair, none of the current fighters were tested like that, either. And a good thing this was, what with a war against a first world power likely involving nukes, and all that. Pretty messy, just to test one's new fighters.
That having been said, I am also quite wary of the flying iPhone being vulnerable to the Russians or Chinese throwing some sort of electromagnetic spanner in the works during combat. Especially the Russians have apparently become very, very good at the whole electronic warfare thing. It is really a pity that there is practically no open information about the Russian EW capabilities, only indirect hints. But these are rather worrying, actually.
EW systems are a geek's true weapon: most of these things are incredibly nerdy. But also endlessly fascinating, iff one manages to glimpse some sort of info about them (which one usually can't, as literally no one is talking about them in the open).
Mrs. Merkel and Mr. Juncker (and many others, like Mr. Schulz) worked long and hard to achieve just this outcome. Should not surprise anyone.
Of course, the W10 telemetry is seriously nosey. But as this is M$ we are talking about, I ultimately cannot see them doing much useful with it. They are probably too disorganised internally to come up with anything worse than an intrusive, ad-laden personalised version of Clippy, based on that data. Or something like that.
It's outfits like Google that give me the heebie-jeebies these days, not good old "640k is enough for everybody" M$.
Seriously. Whatever M$ has ever touched, turned to manure in short order. Think Skype et al.
On the other hand, as M$ is actually one of the less creepy tech companies out there these days (with Linkedin being very near the top), this might actually end up *improving* the business ethics of Linkedin. :)
He was exceptionally lucky to survive 9 minutes without permanent brain damage. He might have had some residual heart function which delivered some minimal oxygen to the brain for the first few minutes of his "cardiac arrest". Good to hear that he made a full recovery: stories like that are much needed morale boosters for EMTs like myself, and many others: the sad truth is that even for us who bring plenty of kit and experience to the party, CPR does not end up doing much useful in most of the cases we see. The few where it does work of course make it more than worthwhile, though.
The thing is, with proper first aid (to wit, competently done CPR from the get-go), the "reasonable recovery" rate is significantly higher than just 2%. Of course, it is important to realise that with current medical technology, it will never get any higher than ~20% or so. I have the 20% figure from a cardiologist: according to him, 80% of cardiac arrest cases are for reasons that are lethal with our current medical capabilities anyway: even with the best pre-clinical care possible, these will not result in a positive outcome (that is, anything other than, at "best", lingering death).
However, there is quite a difference between 2% and 20%. That amounts to quite a number of people who might yet have a few years (or months, as the case may be) to live *with a decent quality of life* - iff no hypoxic brain damage occurs, that is. So investing effort into improving pre-clinical medical care (and in particular, competent first responders) is not wasted. You never know whether someone you know might fall into the 18% group.
Sure. I was only saying that because the OP claimed "5K is pointless one-upping until there is an application for it.". It sure is when it comes to raw, full-screen video content - but that does not mean an Apple 5K screen intended to display OS X content is pointless.
I was under the impression that on your computer monitor, there is this thing called the operating system that is capable of providing genuine 5k content to your heart's desire. To wit, and by geeky standards: more open windows with more (typographically, at least) legible code on one and the same monitor.
"Bill Gates"
"Expert in the field"
malicious snickering... :)
Nitpick: in Europe, a typical freight train carries more like 4000 tons, not 10k. 10k trains are the multi-mile thingies you guys run across the Great Plains in the US. Here, we are a bit more limited w/r to train length, and some other factors. Your point is of course still valid, though.
Even if you could, the connection aspect would not be your only worry. Brain death usually leads to death of the remaining body in fairly short order, due to complications from a fairly large piece of decaying goo in the former person's skull. The rest of the body goes on, but those brain cells are dead, and start decaying. Presumably, one could actively remove the dead brain tissue, and fill the cavity with the connections needed for the ghola to work (to make an inaccurate Dune reference). Still. Science fiction, for now.
After all these years, VR is still a technology desperately looking for a problem that it is actually needed for. Sure, Oculus headsets are nifty things: but outside some niche applications, actually useful they are not.
Either Mr. Zuckerberg has a vision that no one else is capable of seeing yet, or they are going to waste an enormous amount of money on what amounts to a buzzword frenzy.
I never said I thought it particularly likely that the neural network Google has come up with is inherently limited to Go-playing capabilities equal to, or less, of that found in gifted humans. However, with these networks you do have the issue that you never quite know where their limit is. Specifically, for some networks, throwing more hardware at them makes them more capable - but for others, that only has a very weak effect (if one at all).
Or put differently: if hardware was all that mattered, whales would be way more intelligent than humans (their brains are significantly larger, after all).
Nope, not necessarily. You are making a small but significant mistake here. If AlphaGo was a conventional program that was somehow able to actually, reliably analyse what it is doing... and to plan ahead based on fine-tuned (but known) heuristics that we as the designers of the system understand... but that no human player could ever use due to their complexity (computational and/or time-wise)... then it would stand to reason that future versions of it stand a good chance of pulling ahead of humans for all time.
But AlphaGo is not such a program. Sure, it learns from its mistakes (it is designed that way). But as we don't understand the inner workings of the net that well, there might well be a level of play at which such neural net based systems simply ceiling out at. And maybe, just maybe, that ceiling is actually within reach of gifted human players. Which would mean that no clear dominance can actually be established either way.
Have you ever considered the option that they track any and all purchases, and just give out those reward cards to create a believable front for them tracking and analysing all purchases on a per-person basis? (in addition to also wanting to create a stronger retailer-customer bond via said programmes, for those customers who fancy such a thing)
Note that this is actually not necessarily evil: I actually can't imagine why the likes of Safeway, Rewe et al. would ever care about you as a person. As in: that they would ever spy on you on a personal level. Like actually evaluating the fact that you bought a certain mix of products to reveal that you, as a person, live a particular lifestyle. Or something like that. To them, you really are just a number. All they care about is that they can optimise the stacking of their shelves, and their storage keeping and wholesale purchasing.
But they do care to track what goes on in their stores. They do care about every single customer, on a statistical level. But given existing privacy laws, the presence of a database of customer purchase histories on company computers would be a huge red flag.
Unless, of course, if there is a "customer care" programme which ostensibly tracks purchases for the hundreds of thousands of customers who voluntarily signed up for it. Do you really think these databases were ever audited whether they *only* contain the records of customers that signed up?
On the other hand, they might just not bother, if they have enough people with frequent customer cards. Who knows. But I would certainly not discount the possibility that everything gets tracked and stored permanently anyway.
Guilty as accused, at least up to a point.
However, it is certainly not conjecture that most large retail outfits are actually multi-nationals. Which, by and large, centralise their IT, purchase and logistics operations across countries to some degree. It is also pretty much both logical and normal that said multi-nationals routinely store and analyse data about customer behaviour.
Do you really think that the likes of Rewe and Tesco would bother to exempt Belgium from these analyses?
It's cute how you assume that data about what exactly you bought, and when, is not stored anyway. Sure it might be technically illegal to do that: until TTIP passes, at least. But how exactly are you going to prove that they do not analyse the data regardless? Most large retail operations are multi-nationals anyway, who might have their data centres in a different jurisdiction to begin with.
Nah, if you pay with plastic, you get tracked. Anywhere, anytime. Period.