All *released* versions of Android are fully open source, unreleased not so much. Honeycomb had only an early pre-release of code a couple weeks earlier, so no surprise that not only partner vendors had time to port it to their hardware.
That said, the xda guys got that early Honeycomb running (unpolished) on the Nook Color, so what you're looking for did exist, at least unofficially.
I would argue that machine adaptability does exist today, at least in simple forms.
Genetic algorithms start with no pre-defined capabilities whatsoever, only the ability to mutate and (optionally) combine with others, and environmental rules that add weight to algorithms that exhibit desirable behaviour. After sufficient successive generations (also describable as "experience"), the system successfully adapts to the environmental rules. Change those rules - and the system will adapt to the new environment.
I don't think parsing equals understanding either, whatever "understanding" actually is, but I do suspect that a fast statistical analysis of a sufficiently large database may well be indistinguishably equivalent. We really don't know for sure yet, not having a database that comes close to matching a human's lifetime of experience.
Watson's database was trained specifically in trivia, whereas humans have a far broader range of experience, including vastly more experience with use of language. Given a broad and deep enough database (and the extra speed required to search it in a reasonable time), it is quite possible that Watson's responses would be a lot more convincing.
There are obvious other differences too, like the fact that Watson was deaf and blind, which hindered its responses. These probably aren't relevant to the deeper question of understanding, but may well be necessary before most humans will accept a machine as "intelligent".
As for content creation, there is evidence that creativity may actually be as simple as weighted linking of related concepts across a broad enough range of experience, combined with a filter that self-checks the result against against that same experience. We've seen very interesting examples of this in traditionally human-dominated fields, like music. The gulf between human and machine capabilities is still very wide, but shrinking each year as Watson has demonstrated.
I would point at historical examples, and say that Moore's Law has (indirectly) resulted in similar exponential growth in a system's ability to store and search data. There is no reason to assume this won't continue to grow at a similar exponential rate.
Yes, Moore's Law does not directly state this, but it is certainly the major enabling cause of the growth of all these other metrics.
Interesting, but as you say, we still don't really know what "intelligence" actually is. "Kasparov used intelligence", but what does that mean? Years of chess experience had stored tens of thousands of statistically-important chess patterns in his memory, so that a brief, subconscious search presented a few relevant strategies? How can we be sure that what Kasparov does isn't fundamentally different to the basics of what Watson does, just on a (much) larger scale?
There is evidence to suggest that, given that the brain is a massive & sophisticated neural net, intelligence could well be no more than that which neural nets do well - weighted pattern matching - but simply on a scale we cannot yet build artificially. This happens at such a low level for us, and at such speed (thanks to massive parallelism) that the answers just "appear" in our minds, in a way we cannot easily fathom. Vision, "understanding", emotion, creativity - all these "magical" attributes may well be reducible to highly complex, semi-deterministic, patterned responses. Given Moore's Law, we should be able to start testing these hypotheses in as little as 10-15 years.
What does that tell us about how humans (with their far more limited search and memory)
I think you grossly underestimate the human brain. While computers may remember data more accurately, the capacity of humans to filter, extract meaning from and store a lifetime of high-bandwidth sensory input is truly staggering - and the ability to search a lifetime's memories in an instant without being overwhelmed by detail speaks to our brain's enormously parallel operation. It's simply incomparable to any hardware we have yet built (in 2007, all the world's supercomputers combined amounted to 0.3% of the capacity of a single human brain). But thanks to exponential growth, these supercomputers will be 10,000 times faster in only 20 years, and a single system will be at last comparable in scale to our brain. Then this field will get very interesting...
What about the fact that Watson was deaf and blind, and thus could not hear (and factor in) the other players' responses? One could argue that this was a pretty significant impairment that cost it at least one, possibly two questions. I'd call that an inhuman *dis*advantage.
But again, while all this might be relevant to professional Jeopardy matches, this wasn't one. It was simply an impressive way to show off what Watson could do, not some "humans vs machines" ultimate showdown, despite the media portrayal.
I don't know how you infer a conspiracy theory from this.
Perhaps it was the words "they have something to hide".
I'd have said that the game Jeopardy is *primarily* about quickly answering cleverly-phrased trivia questions. The details of that (phrasing, mechanics, timing etc) are doubtless all-important to professional players, but are not really interesting in the larger context of Watson's achievement. This wasn't a professional match, it was a celebrity showcase and a PR exercise, and it succeeded admirably. Ken & Brad were simply there to show that Watson could sort trivia in the same league as the best.
If IBM were to enter Watson on the professional circuit, then yes, some changes to even the playing field slightly (like OCR on the questions - and voice recognition on the other player's responses) might be appropriate. But some people would always find some technicality to complain about - and why would IBM bother? Competing at Jeopardy is hardly their core business. I just think you are focusing too much on a largely irrelevant facet of this particular show.
You could argue that it was a bit unfair to Watson too, not equipping it with the means to hear other player's answers (the incorrect ones too, like that "1920s" answer of Ken's). Swings & roundabouts, and largely irrelevant.
One could also argue that the human brain itself simply does a form of statistical analysis on a lot of data (after many years of training). The mechanics are a little different, in that the brain uses weighted synapse connections instead of numerical data, but the process may not be so different.
And taking these techniques to a near-human level is of course a wonderful PR exercise, and quite inspirational.
Watson actually did use a trivial actuator to press the physical button.
Is it still a conspiracy now? Or are you going to argue that Watson had also an unfair advantage because it could use a room full of hardware and megawatts of power, whereas the humans had to make do with a few cubic feet of meat?
Because it was irrelevant, and would've added nothing? They didn't attach a bubble-blowing machine to it either.
I can imagine some people getting nit-picky about the exact mechanics of how Jeopardy is played. I couldn't imagine someone turning these differences into some sort of conspiracy, but there you are.
No argument there. "Just working" is a very good default. So long as there remains the choice, for the inevitable situations that the designers didn't envisage.
I certainly understand that for some people, reliability is paramount, and eliminating the possibility that they (or a rogue app) might screw something up is well worth trading off functionality. Personally I'd like a say in that, though - like rooting the phone, or at least a switch that says "Click here to live dangerously".
Who cares, if Watson's artificial reflexes gave it a few milliseconds' advantage on the buzzer? Who even cares if it'd take it a second longer to read the clue via OCR? So what if Watson would be 5% faster or 10% slower, if conditions were slightly different? Moore's Law makes that level of difference utterly irrelevant - in 18 months time, Watson will be *100% faster* (or even today, if IBM just threw more hardware at it).
Deep Blue vs Kasparov was fascinating at the time, but is uninteresting now for the same reason. A decent desktop PC can play at that level. And comparing human vs machine play styles is also largely pointless, in the same way that comparing birds and jets is pointless.
The important part, by far, is that Watson parsed the questions, linked the clues and searched for statistically relevant answers in a human-like time. The amazing fact is, it can actually do it *at all*. Now that today's systems can do this sort of language parsing and information retrieval in a "reasonable" time, it will be increasingly trivial for tomorrow's. It is now all but inevitable that we will have Watson-like systems available to the public, in numerous fields, in corporations and on the web, in your PCs and even your game consoles, in a brief handful of years.
Ah yes, these users were no doubt just as thankful for Mr Jobs saving their original iPhone's battery life by denying them a 3G connection. Perhaps they would be even more thankful if the phone restricted its CPU to half speed, and locked the screen brightness at minimum? Think of the enormous battery savings there.
I'm just thankful that there also exist phones that not only do simple app switching, but allow the *user* decide if they wish to expend a little extra power on a useful background task (and that let the user easily spot and uninstall any badly-written apps that might abuse this). Choice always trumps no choice, at least in my books.
If applications ping a server regularly to see if they have updates or if there is a message, that uses a lot more of both resources than if it subscribes to a network service that notifies the device when the same event occurs.
Subscription to network notifications are more efficient for the local CPU, but then you have to keep the phone's radio powered up to maintain the connection and stay open for notifications. If polling frequency is low, you can probably save a lot more juice by only powering up the radio briefly, every hour.
And of course, multitasking complicates this too. It's a fixed power cost to keep the radio going for any number of potential notifications, whereas multiple apps polling, even occasionally, multiplies the power drain. System management of the radio can clearly help (by possibly e.g. only allowing it on for brief windows to allow both polling and subscribing background apps to connect - foreground apps would of course get unrestricted access).
There's a balance between unrestricted multitasking & potential battery drain, and as Google said, optimising this is Hard. But the user can be involved too - I rather like Android's approach of showing you exactly what is causing the unexpected battery drain you're seeing. This has saved my bacon by pinpointing badly-written apps and settings I accidentally left on, more than once.
There's a wide range of much cheaper options in AU from various carriers, ranging from $45/month for unlimited calls + texts, down to $1/month + 10c/min + 10c flag with 10c texts. And of course all incoming calls/texts are free, so Google's method is fine for us.
Media serving (as the phone in your video is doing) is only one of DLNA's abilities (albeit the most common). UPnP AV allows separate Server, Renderer and Control components, and a Server can push to a remote Renderer just as easily (iMediaShare and others do this, as I said above). Or a Controller can instruct a remote Renderer to stream from a different remote Server, or any other combination.
Another example of DLNA pushing is Microsoft's "Play To" in Windows. I use this to push music from my laptop to my Yamaha amplifier, though it also works to my phone, my Xbox, XBMC, other PCs etc - much the same as your Apple TV, except it's built in to my amp (I can also tell my amp to pull from a PC etc; it works both ways). Other Android apps I'm aware of that do this are UPnPlay and Andromote.
Windows has a UPnP Framework component of its own, of course, but there are variousotheropensource cross-platform libraries for apps to use. Hardware and software support is far wider than AirPlay.
Air Play is an Apple-specific protocol. The DLNA spec (based on UPnP AV) does all that and much more. It's also supported by around 8000 devices including Xbox, PS3 and many TVs, all major platforms, and a huge list of software.
I happen to like iMediaShare (free, Android and iPhone). With it, I can stream videos from my server to my phone, music from my phone to my amplifier, photos from Picasa to my friend's TV, or just use my phone as a remote controller for various devices and apps.
I can't imagine going back to a single-vendor protocol that only works on a couple of devices.
It's doubtful you could turn a profit even if there were 24 carat gold bars lying on the moon surface waiting to be picked up.
Just need to repurpose that military mass driver (qf. earlier comment about flinging moon rocks as weapons). Of course, catching them might be problematic.
Parachutes would help. And come to think of it, you wouldn't even have to fold them up first.
To be fair, if you're looking at the setup cost of a solar farm, you'd also have to consider the considerable energy & waste required to build the nuclear power plant too. Then there's operation, maintenance costs and lifespan of each to consider as well. Total cost of any system can difficult to measure accurately, especially when considering indirect effects, and can often iceberg unexpectedly.
I tend to feel that renewable (as much as possible) is the best long-term solution, but there are many short-term practical reasons to consider nuclear power as a viable option too. I wonder if there are any really comprehensive cost studies that compare solar, wind, geothermal, coal, nuclear, gas, wave, biomass etc, and that go into significant depth about indirect costs.
Placebo works if you think it's going to work. If you're given a pill that actually does work - and you're told it's going to work - then you get placebo + physical, for double-plus effectiveness.
In fact, from what Dr Ben said, if people feel the drug taking effect, that enhances the placebo effect even more - even if the drug is actually having the opposite effect. The placebo effect can be so strong it can actually override any opposite effect of the drug - but if the drug is really doing what they believe it is, the resulting combined effect is enhanced most of all.
It's not that "medicine" like homeopathy doesn't help people (thanks solely to the placebo effect), it's that it's a) way overpriced for what it is (i.e. pure water), and b) that money could be spent on real, effective medicine that actually helps people in addition to the placebo effect (and in fact reinforces the placebo effect even further).
It's more or less the actual amount owed to the artists for licencing. They claimed they couldn't pay it out because they couldn't identify the artists on the pending list, but of course they didn't try very hard. The class action suit merely convinced them that it was simpler to just turn over the owed money as a settlement (presumably keeping the interest) to the plaintiffs, rather than identifying and paying the individual artists.
They're cleared of all liability and they've agreed to try a little harder next time, but there are no damages, statutory or otherwise. They're paying out only the owed royalties, just delayed for a few years (would've been indefinitely, but they got called on it).
You must be awfully insecure, reading one critique of a single aspect of a platform into a general attack.
Except that it's hardly one critique, is it? A quick glance over your comment history shows you with multiple comments in virtually every Apple- or Android-related post, pointing out flaws in Android (or Microsoft, Windows etc) and defending flaws in iOS or Apple. These "critiques" seem to make up about 80% of your total comment volume (even your sig is a clue). And you've been doing this for literally years.
But yeah, this is Slashdot, it gets the same platform wars as the rest of the net, and I'm often guilty of getting into arguments myself. Nonetheless, it's clear that you're pretty quick to leap on the slightest unconfirmed rumour (like this one) to gleefully "critique" anything that might be a threat to your beloved Apple.
Step one: allow a million tablet devices to be released with Android
Misconceived. Android is open source; Google can't disallow anything except their own (non-open) apps & services like the Android Market (which they have been doing, on almost all released tablets).
Step two: Make a new version of Android for Tablets that runs on none of them and only on a new wave of tablets.
A bit like iOS 4 not running on older devices? Anyway, we've only got some random, non-Google suit's claim that this is even the case.
Step three: Developer making tablet specific software now required to target two classes of devices.
Hardly. An Android developer need merely target an earlier version of the OS like Froyo or Gingerbread, and their app will run just the same on a Honeycomb tablet.
Step Four: Mu-ha-ha
Huh? Is that just there to make Google look evil or something? Are they supposed to be pleased about this hypothetical situation?
I don't get why you so regularly attack anything non-Apple. Is it just platform insecurity?
Slashdot Mirror
All *released* versions of Android are fully open source, unreleased not so much. Honeycomb had only an early pre-release of code a couple weeks earlier, so no surprise that not only partner vendors had time to port it to their hardware.
That said, the xda guys got that early Honeycomb running (unpolished) on the Nook Color, so what you're looking for did exist, at least unofficially.
I would argue that machine adaptability does exist today, at least in simple forms.
Genetic algorithms start with no pre-defined capabilities whatsoever, only the ability to mutate and (optionally) combine with others, and environmental rules that add weight to algorithms that exhibit desirable behaviour. After sufficient successive generations (also describable as "experience"), the system successfully adapts to the environmental rules. Change those rules - and the system will adapt to the new environment.
I don't think parsing equals understanding either, whatever "understanding" actually is, but I do suspect that a fast statistical analysis of a sufficiently large database may well be indistinguishably equivalent. We really don't know for sure yet, not having a database that comes close to matching a human's lifetime of experience.
Watson's database was trained specifically in trivia, whereas humans have a far broader range of experience, including vastly more experience with use of language. Given a broad and deep enough database (and the extra speed required to search it in a reasonable time), it is quite possible that Watson's responses would be a lot more convincing.
There are obvious other differences too, like the fact that Watson was deaf and blind, which hindered its responses. These probably aren't relevant to the deeper question of understanding, but may well be necessary before most humans will accept a machine as "intelligent".
As for content creation, there is evidence that creativity may actually be as simple as weighted linking of related concepts across a broad enough range of experience, combined with a filter that self-checks the result against against that same experience. We've seen very interesting examples of this in traditionally human-dominated fields, like music. The gulf between human and machine capabilities is still very wide, but shrinking each year as Watson has demonstrated.
I would point at historical examples, and say that Moore's Law has (indirectly) resulted in similar exponential growth in a system's ability to store and search data. There is no reason to assume this won't continue to grow at a similar exponential rate.
Yes, Moore's Law does not directly state this, but it is certainly the major enabling cause of the growth of all these other metrics.
Interesting, but as you say, we still don't really know what "intelligence" actually is. "Kasparov used intelligence", but what does that mean? Years of chess experience had stored tens of thousands of statistically-important chess patterns in his memory, so that a brief, subconscious search presented a few relevant strategies? How can we be sure that what Kasparov does isn't fundamentally different to the basics of what Watson does, just on a (much) larger scale?
There is evidence to suggest that, given that the brain is a massive & sophisticated neural net, intelligence could well be no more than that which neural nets do well - weighted pattern matching - but simply on a scale we cannot yet build artificially. This happens at such a low level for us, and at such speed (thanks to massive parallelism) that the answers just "appear" in our minds, in a way we cannot easily fathom. Vision, "understanding", emotion, creativity - all these "magical" attributes may well be reducible to highly complex, semi-deterministic, patterned responses. Given Moore's Law, we should be able to start testing these hypotheses in as little as 10-15 years.
What does that tell us about how humans (with their far more limited search and memory)
I think you grossly underestimate the human brain. While computers may remember data more accurately, the capacity of humans to filter, extract meaning from and store a lifetime of high-bandwidth sensory input is truly staggering - and the ability to search a lifetime's memories in an instant without being overwhelmed by detail speaks to our brain's enormously parallel operation. It's simply incomparable to any hardware we have yet built (in 2007, all the world's supercomputers combined amounted to 0.3% of the capacity of a single human brain). But thanks to exponential growth, these supercomputers will be 10,000 times faster in only 20 years, and a single system will be at last comparable in scale to our brain. Then this field will get very interesting...
What about the fact that Watson was deaf and blind, and thus could not hear (and factor in) the other players' responses? One could argue that this was a pretty significant impairment that cost it at least one, possibly two questions. I'd call that an inhuman *dis*advantage.
But again, while all this might be relevant to professional Jeopardy matches, this wasn't one. It was simply an impressive way to show off what Watson could do, not some "humans vs machines" ultimate showdown, despite the media portrayal.
I don't know how you infer a conspiracy theory from this.
Perhaps it was the words "they have something to hide".
I'd have said that the game Jeopardy is *primarily* about quickly answering cleverly-phrased trivia questions. The details of that (phrasing, mechanics, timing etc) are doubtless all-important to professional players, but are not really interesting in the larger context of Watson's achievement. This wasn't a professional match, it was a celebrity showcase and a PR exercise, and it succeeded admirably. Ken & Brad were simply there to show that Watson could sort trivia in the same league as the best.
If IBM were to enter Watson on the professional circuit, then yes, some changes to even the playing field slightly (like OCR on the questions - and voice recognition on the other player's responses) might be appropriate. But some people would always find some technicality to complain about - and why would IBM bother? Competing at Jeopardy is hardly their core business. I just think you are focusing too much on a largely irrelevant facet of this particular show.
You could argue that it was a bit unfair to Watson too, not equipping it with the means to hear other player's answers (the incorrect ones too, like that "1920s" answer of Ken's). Swings & roundabouts, and largely irrelevant.
One could also argue that the human brain itself simply does a form of statistical analysis on a lot of data (after many years of training). The mechanics are a little different, in that the brain uses weighted synapse connections instead of numerical data, but the process may not be so different.
And taking these techniques to a near-human level is of course a wonderful PR exercise, and quite inspirational.
Watson actually did use a trivial actuator to press the physical button.
Is it still a conspiracy now? Or are you going to argue that Watson had also an unfair advantage because it could use a room full of hardware and megawatts of power, whereas the humans had to make do with a few cubic feet of meat?
Because it was irrelevant, and would've added nothing? They didn't attach a bubble-blowing machine to it either.
I can imagine some people getting nit-picky about the exact mechanics of how Jeopardy is played. I couldn't imagine someone turning these differences into some sort of conspiracy, but there you are.
No argument there. "Just working" is a very good default. So long as there remains the choice, for the inevitable situations that the designers didn't envisage.
I certainly understand that for some people, reliability is paramount, and eliminating the possibility that they (or a rogue app) might screw something up is well worth trading off functionality. Personally I'd like a say in that, though - like rooting the phone, or at least a switch that says "Click here to live dangerously".
Who cares, if Watson's artificial reflexes gave it a few milliseconds' advantage on the buzzer? Who even cares if it'd take it a second longer to read the clue via OCR? So what if Watson would be 5% faster or 10% slower, if conditions were slightly different? Moore's Law makes that level of difference utterly irrelevant - in 18 months time, Watson will be *100% faster* (or even today, if IBM just threw more hardware at it).
Deep Blue vs Kasparov was fascinating at the time, but is uninteresting now for the same reason. A decent desktop PC can play at that level. And comparing human vs machine play styles is also largely pointless, in the same way that comparing birds and jets is pointless.
The important part, by far, is that Watson parsed the questions, linked the clues and searched for statistically relevant answers in a human-like time. The amazing fact is, it can actually do it *at all*. Now that today's systems can do this sort of language parsing and information retrieval in a "reasonable" time, it will be increasingly trivial for tomorrow's. It is now all but inevitable that we will have Watson-like systems available to the public, in numerous fields, in corporations and on the web, in your PCs and even your game consoles, in a brief handful of years.
Ah yes, these users were no doubt just as thankful for Mr Jobs saving their original iPhone's battery life by denying them a 3G connection. Perhaps they would be even more thankful if the phone restricted its CPU to half speed, and locked the screen brightness at minimum? Think of the enormous battery savings there.
I'm just thankful that there also exist phones that not only do simple app switching, but allow the *user* decide if they wish to expend a little extra power on a useful background task (and that let the user easily spot and uninstall any badly-written apps that might abuse this). Choice always trumps no choice, at least in my books.
If applications ping a server regularly to see if they have updates or if there is a message, that uses a lot more of both resources than if it subscribes to a network service that notifies the device when the same event occurs.
Subscription to network notifications are more efficient for the local CPU, but then you have to keep the phone's radio powered up to maintain the connection and stay open for notifications. If polling frequency is low, you can probably save a lot more juice by only powering up the radio briefly, every hour.
And of course, multitasking complicates this too. It's a fixed power cost to keep the radio going for any number of potential notifications, whereas multiple apps polling, even occasionally, multiplies the power drain. System management of the radio can clearly help (by possibly e.g. only allowing it on for brief windows to allow both polling and subscribing background apps to connect - foreground apps would of course get unrestricted access).
There's a balance between unrestricted multitasking & potential battery drain, and as Google said, optimising this is Hard. But the user can be involved too - I rather like Android's approach of showing you exactly what is causing the unexpected battery drain you're seeing. This has saved my bacon by pinpointing badly-written apps and settings I accidentally left on, more than once.
Good thing we don't have to pay 90c/min.
There's a wide range of much cheaper options in AU from various carriers, ranging from $45/month for unlimited calls + texts, down to $1/month + 10c/min + 10c flag with 10c texts. And of course all incoming calls/texts are free, so Google's method is fine for us.
Media serving (as the phone in your video is doing) is only one of DLNA's abilities (albeit the most common). UPnP AV allows separate Server, Renderer and Control components, and a Server can push to a remote Renderer just as easily (iMediaShare and others do this, as I said above). Or a Controller can instruct a remote Renderer to stream from a different remote Server, or any other combination.
Another example of DLNA pushing is Microsoft's "Play To" in Windows. I use this to push music from my laptop to my Yamaha amplifier, though it also works to my phone, my Xbox, XBMC, other PCs etc - much the same as your Apple TV, except it's built in to my amp (I can also tell my amp to pull from a PC etc; it works both ways). Other Android apps I'm aware of that do this are UPnPlay and Andromote.
Windows has a UPnP Framework component of its own, of course, but there are various other opensource cross-platform libraries for apps to use. Hardware and software support is far wider than AirPlay.
Air Play is an Apple-specific protocol. The DLNA spec (based on UPnP AV) does all that and much more. It's also supported by around 8000 devices including Xbox, PS3 and many TVs, all major platforms, and a huge list of software.
I happen to like iMediaShare (free, Android and iPhone). With it, I can stream videos from my server to my phone, music from my phone to my amplifier, photos from Picasa to my friend's TV, or just use my phone as a remote controller for various devices and apps.
I can't imagine going back to a single-vendor protocol that only works on a couple of devices.
That table you linked to says the annual production of molybdenum is 80 kilotonnes, which is not exactly rare.
It also says that the annual production of electronics-grade silicon is only 5 kilotonnes, so our needs aren't going to be a problem.
It's doubtful you could turn a profit even if there were 24 carat gold bars lying on the moon surface waiting to be picked up.
Just need to repurpose that military mass driver (qf. earlier comment about flinging moon rocks as weapons). Of course, catching them might be problematic.
Parachutes would help. And come to think of it, you wouldn't even have to fold them up first.
To be fair, if you're looking at the setup cost of a solar farm, you'd also have to consider the considerable energy & waste required to build the nuclear power plant too. Then there's operation, maintenance costs and lifespan of each to consider as well. Total cost of any system can difficult to measure accurately, especially when considering indirect effects, and can often iceberg unexpectedly.
I tend to feel that renewable (as much as possible) is the best long-term solution, but there are many short-term practical reasons to consider nuclear power as a viable option too. I wonder if there are any really comprehensive cost studies that compare solar, wind, geothermal, coal, nuclear, gas, wave, biomass etc, and that go into significant depth about indirect costs.
Placebo works if you think it's going to work. If you're given a pill that actually does work - and you're told it's going to work - then you get placebo + physical, for double-plus effectiveness.
In fact, from what Dr Ben said, if people feel the drug taking effect, that enhances the placebo effect even more - even if the drug is actually having the opposite effect. The placebo effect can be so strong it can actually override any opposite effect of the drug - but if the drug is really doing what they believe it is, the resulting combined effect is enhanced most of all.
It's not that "medicine" like homeopathy doesn't help people (thanks solely to the placebo effect), it's that it's a) way overpriced for what it is (i.e. pure water), and b) that money could be spent on real, effective medicine that actually helps people in addition to the placebo effect (and in fact reinforces the placebo effect even further).
The actual press release and individual settlement details (apologies for the karma whoring). Yet to be ratified by the stakeholders.
It's more or less the actual amount owed to the artists for licencing. They claimed they couldn't pay it out because they couldn't identify the artists on the pending list, but of course they didn't try very hard. The class action suit merely convinced them that it was simpler to just turn over the owed money as a settlement (presumably keeping the interest) to the plaintiffs, rather than identifying and paying the individual artists.
They're cleared of all liability and they've agreed to try a little harder next time, but there are no damages, statutory or otherwise. They're paying out only the owed royalties, just delayed for a few years (would've been indefinitely, but they got called on it).
You must be awfully insecure, reading one critique of a single aspect of a platform into a general attack.
Except that it's hardly one critique, is it? A quick glance over your comment history shows you with multiple comments in virtually every Apple- or Android-related post, pointing out flaws in Android (or Microsoft, Windows etc) and defending flaws in iOS or Apple. These "critiques" seem to make up about 80% of your total comment volume (even your sig is a clue). And you've been doing this for literally years.
But yeah, this is Slashdot, it gets the same platform wars as the rest of the net, and I'm often guilty of getting into arguments myself. Nonetheless, it's clear that you're pretty quick to leap on the slightest unconfirmed rumour (like this one) to gleefully "critique" anything that might be a threat to your beloved Apple.
Step one: allow a million tablet devices to be released with Android
Misconceived. Android is open source; Google can't disallow anything except their own (non-open) apps & services like the Android Market (which they have been doing, on almost all released tablets).
Step two: Make a new version of Android for Tablets that runs on none of them and only on a new wave of tablets.
A bit like iOS 4 not running on older devices? Anyway, we've only got some random, non-Google suit's claim that this is even the case.
Step three: Developer making tablet specific software now required to target two classes of devices.
Hardly. An Android developer need merely target an earlier version of the OS like Froyo or Gingerbread, and their app will run just the same on a Honeycomb tablet.
Step Four: Mu-ha-ha
Huh? Is that just there to make Google look evil or something? Are they supposed to be pleased about this hypothetical situation?
I don't get why you so regularly attack anything non-Apple. Is it just platform insecurity?