Please, don't disparage the good folks in the probabilistic entertainment area of the hospitality sector by such comparisons.
Casinos may be tacky; and they do suck some gambling addicts dry; but their danger to the larger economy, and to parties who don't choose to deal with them, is quite minimal. Even better, because of their tackiness and the widespread knowledge of how foolish it is to work with them when greater-than-recreational amounts of money are on the line, nobody proposes massive bailouts, or handing social security over to them to manage!
What is better, to fear what you don't know or to completely embrace it and know its weaknesses inside out? I'll opt for the latter anytime.
I use computers extensively and they don't own me.
Depending on the magnitude of 'what you don't know', and how optional it is, fear is a perfectly reasonable strategy(especially if you are already expert elsewhere and judge that you'll die before all your legacy customers do).
I never said that it was a bad plan, or that Apple wasn't anything but really good at it.
Just that, if you want 'mindblowing new stuff!' Apple is actually pretty far down the list of people to look at. When the time comes to actually buy the new stuff, they may well have a worthy entry; but they don't do tech demos, they have a comparatively tiny R&D team, and they take a positive delight in dismissing not-ready-for-prime-time concepts as idiotic, until such time as they consider them ready for prime time and swiftly reverse themselves(eg. Amazon uses novel electrophoretic display technology to build ebook device. Steve says 'Eh, nobody reads.' goes back to selling iPods. Once Apple has a tablet-size device ready, apparently people start reading again all of a sudden; because 'iBook' is there to revolutionize reading...)
Wait, somebody is deploying a campus-scale wireless network with PSK? In, um, 2013?
I have nothing against schools providing an open SSID(segregated from the internal network obviously, and QoSed to a priority below internal traffic; but bandwidth not being used for official purposes is effectively free, and the people who live nearby pay for the school system anyway, so why not?); but somebody needs to have a "RADIUS MOTHERFUCKER, DO. YOU. SPEAK. IT?" chat with the relevant network guy...
Eric Grosse, vice president for security engineering at Google, told The Washington Post: 'It's an arms race.' The crux of the issue with Google making the NSA dragnet harder (knowing if the government wants in, it will get in) is that the NSA evaluates the tactic it uses by weighing the cost with the value of the information obtained.
- yeah, it's an arms race alright. It's a kind of a race where if Google doesn't give the NSA what NSA wants, Google's employees and management will find itself on the wrong side of a gun.
You might be underestimating the influence of the 'lobby furiously' step in American politics:
Team Google, or anybody else with nontrivial US presence(or who we feel like bag-n'-dragging, which we do sometimes), can't resist legal force; but if they can resist covert surveillance, they force the spooks to go to congress (Gen. Alexander's star trek paraphernalia and all) and slug it out with the representatives of all the major technology companies who are missing out on sweet foreign contracts because of (accurate) perceptions that they are the US government's little stooges. That isn't unwinnable; but it's a lot less comfortable than just slurping packets in the shadows, or basking in the warm glow of misplaced public confidence that you only go after 'bad people'.
It's not as though the civil libertarians can win this (either the legislative flavor, or the ones who think that their guns will save them); but the NSA has crossed the line into threatening shareholder value. That's serious business, probably Unamerican. We've installed brutal, CIA-backed, military juntas in countries we don't care about for pulling shit like that.
"Now, with almost 50% better battery life as promised by Intel for Windows tablets, the OEMs have no real need to come out with Windows RT based tablets and hybrids anymore."
Why would a manufacturer buy an OS nobody seems to want instead of using Android? What's MS's advantage here?
That's the other half of why RT is failing: it isn't Windows (well, architecturally it's pretty close in every way except CPU architecture; but they deliberately throw that advantage away); but it also isn't particularly compelling as not-Windows.
The question that I'm left with is "Did Microsoft fuck up a sincere attempt at making RT actually work, through some mixture of arrogance and incompetence, or was RT just a warning to Intel that if they didn't ship something that would run Windows on a tablet, Microsoft did have other options, albeit not preferred ones?"
Indeed. I was answering the question "If you can get clean samples and ship them back to the lab, what's wrong with that?".
In short, all the cheap-enough-to-actually-be-useful sampling mechanisms can't ship the sample back to the lab, so you are stuck with either getting accurate pH numbers (for a ridiculously tiny number of samples, mostly taken by humans on research ships, which cost considerable money to field) or worthlessly imprecise pH numbers(for the much larger number of chunks of ocean that you could have comparatively cheap autonomous systems flitting through).
They want a sensor that can do lab-grade results when built into a little gliderbot that putzes around autonomously for a few years and occasionally chirps back data over a satellite link(which is all doable, except for the pH sensing bit).
"I bet nowadays kids get expelled for that, at a minimum."
God help you if the school is using some 'cloud' or hosted service to manage their email or whatnot. Obtaining a teacher's credentials would probably be about a zillion CFAA violations and an interstate matter... At least if it's all onsite, their legal options are more limited.
"See Apple, the thing is, these big media events used to be about introducing jaw-dropping, mind blowing new technology."
Has Apple ever been about 'mind blowing new technology'? As long as I can remember, they've been about well polished, high-production-value implementations of technology that already existed.
On the plus side, users only used to write their password on a sticky note stored under their keyboard. Now they'll be scribbling it everywhere they touch, and only have 9 resets!
Why do they need real-time results? If you can get clean samples and ship them back to the lab, what's wrong with that?
Compared to data transmission, shipping is expensive:
For peanuts, relatively speaking, you can build a little underwater glider style robot (or just a buoy or something) that will autonomously putter about as the currents take it for months to years, depending on how you power it and how lucky you get in terms of system failure.
If you can put the suitable sensor on such a vehicle, it becomes possible to measure pH at zillions of locations throughout the oceans with relatively cheap and expendable swarm robots. If you need to ship the sample back to the lab, you suddenly need a system complex enough to handle both going forth into the world and to send the sample in for recovery. Much more challenging.
That, and the faster your ship gets, the more the tenuous (but not nonexistent) flecks of gas and dust in interstellar space start looking like kinetic kill vehicles(at ~ 5% of C, any helium you encounter will punch you like alpha radiation, and faster or larger makes things worse)... Luckily, radiation doesn't imperil most of material science's little toys, at all.
The last time we were peasants who paid our feudal masters for the right to toil on his lands for a pittance and own next to nothing, we had bubonic plague and didn't have cable TV. Truly, a triumph of the human spirit!
When Google, Yahoo, and Facebook join together to assert that the state of surveillance on the internet is out of hand, you know you are totally fucked.
It's like having the horsemen of the apocalypse criticizing your policy decisions.
I'd be curious to know how (though probably never will) regional price sensitivities will factor in to the decision to launch or not launch a device such as this in various areas:
Especially now that 'current-gen handheld' is dangerously close to 'surprisingly endurable even on a large TV, if TV-out exists, and probably shares many components with common cellphones', the notion of shoving a cost-optimized version of one into a box along with a component video cable and calling it a console in markets too price sensitive to be good sellers for your 'serious' console might actually work pretty well. However, outside of the hardcore, it might work a little too well even among people who could afford your 'real' console; but really just want to putz around on something so why pay more?
I wonder if that will factor into Sony's regional release strategy: a screenless, battery-less, not wildly powerful Cortex-A9/SGX543 ARM SoC board isn't likely to be getting more expensive as time passes, and online sales from the back catalog are likely to be either pure profit or pure cost recovery of a game that flopped long ago; but having such a potentially-aggressively-priced option on the market might not help move newer products...
I suspect that it's deep hibernation or nothing (unless you are talking world-ships on a scale that would give most Kuiper belt objects inferiority issues) in that area. Replacing humans as they wear out has never been a huge problem, dealing with upkeep on the functional ones definitely has.
fresh water supplies at crisis levels and extreme weather happening more often... worst idea evar!
Age-related mortality has a certain special flavor to it, by virtue of being inevitable; but suitably motivated humans can trivially breed substantially above replacement rates even when living rather shorter lives than they do now (and, particularly when talking about women with dubious access to medical care, they often do live substantially shorter lives when breeding well above replacement rates...)
Old people who just won't die, damn it, will present problems of their own; but birthrate is the name of the game when it comes to population size (sure, there's war, famine, and pestilence; but you need a truly epic instance of any of these to equal the demographic effect of, say, the not-even-state-coerced shift in birthrates seen in places that can afford cool stuff like 'birth control' and 'college parties'.)
This is likely true; but mortality salience isn't one of those factors that you really get conscious control over, any more than fear of flying is cured through statistical demonstration of its (superb) safety record...
"I suspect, the governments — the leading stewards of the research dollars — aren't particularly interested in lengthening the lifespans"
I suspect that it hinges more on 'lengthening lifespans' vs. 'slowing aging'. Weak, sick, old people are not something anybody with medical or pension obligations really want living longer. If people became weak, sick, and old more slowly, though, you'd score more person-years of post-childhood, post-education, experienced labor (and, given most people's preparations for retirement, having them just say 'eh, fuck it' and stop working could largely be avoided, with the added "benefit" of keeping young workers in cheap, entry-level positions for much longer periods of time).
If this sort of research were steered purely by economic considerations, 'anti-aging' would probably be be behind dealing with common causes of mortality in children and young adults; but would be ahead of treating things that mostly kill old people. (Also worth remembering: 'the governments', if a useful generalization can be drawn at all, are heavily skewed toward people who are themselves... not exactly getting any younger. Compare the US population generally with Congress. If legislating with one foot in the grave doesn't increase the apparent need for anti-aging research, I'm not sure what would...)
It sounds like they've realized that letting 'slacktivists' do ineffectual things may actually have less overall impact on social order than trying to preserve the illusion of perfect order. A reasonable conclusion, given how frequently people get mad as hell and rant about it on the internet a bit, feel as though they've done something, and then go back to their day.
no thanks. I'm more interested in moveing devices from mechanical to solid state, not the other way around.
I suspect that you'll have enough change left over to wipe your tears away. They aren't even going to pretend that it's as good; but it'll be markedly cheaper and less awful than those "Just carry an HDD in a battery powered wifi enclosure and access it with our App!" abortions that people market as capacity expansion...
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Please, don't disparage the good folks in the probabilistic entertainment area of the hospitality sector by such comparisons.
Casinos may be tacky; and they do suck some gambling addicts dry; but their danger to the larger economy, and to parties who don't choose to deal with them, is quite minimal. Even better, because of their tackiness and the widespread knowledge of how foolish it is to work with them when greater-than-recreational amounts of money are on the line, nobody proposes massive bailouts, or handing social security over to them to manage!
What is better, to fear what you don't know or to completely embrace it and know its weaknesses inside out? I'll opt for the latter anytime.
I use computers extensively and they don't own me.
Depending on the magnitude of 'what you don't know', and how optional it is, fear is a perfectly reasonable strategy(especially if you are already expert elsewhere and judge that you'll die before all your legacy customers do).
I never said that it was a bad plan, or that Apple wasn't anything but really good at it.
Just that, if you want 'mindblowing new stuff!' Apple is actually pretty far down the list of people to look at. When the time comes to actually buy the new stuff, they may well have a worthy entry; but they don't do tech demos, they have a comparatively tiny R&D team, and they take a positive delight in dismissing not-ready-for-prime-time concepts as idiotic, until such time as they consider them ready for prime time and swiftly reverse themselves(eg. Amazon uses novel electrophoretic display technology to build ebook device. Steve says 'Eh, nobody reads.' goes back to selling iPods. Once Apple has a tablet-size device ready, apparently people start reading again all of a sudden; because 'iBook' is there to revolutionize reading...)
Wait, somebody is deploying a campus-scale wireless network with PSK? In, um, 2013?
I have nothing against schools providing an open SSID(segregated from the internal network obviously, and QoSed to a priority below internal traffic; but bandwidth not being used for official purposes is effectively free, and the people who live nearby pay for the school system anyway, so why not?); but somebody needs to have a "RADIUS MOTHERFUCKER, DO. YOU. SPEAK. IT?" chat with the relevant network guy...
Eric Grosse, vice president for security engineering at Google, told The Washington Post: 'It's an arms race.' The crux of the issue with Google making the NSA dragnet harder (knowing if the government wants in, it will get in) is that the NSA evaluates the tactic it uses by weighing the cost with the value of the information obtained.
- yeah, it's an arms race alright. It's a kind of a race where if Google doesn't give the NSA what NSA wants, Google's employees and management will find itself on the wrong side of a gun.
You might be underestimating the influence of the 'lobby furiously' step in American politics:
Team Google, or anybody else with nontrivial US presence(or who we feel like bag-n'-dragging, which we do sometimes), can't resist legal force; but if they can resist covert surveillance, they force the spooks to go to congress (Gen. Alexander's star trek paraphernalia and all) and slug it out with the representatives of all the major technology companies who are missing out on sweet foreign contracts because of (accurate) perceptions that they are the US government's little stooges. That isn't unwinnable; but it's a lot less comfortable than just slurping packets in the shadows, or basking in the warm glow of misplaced public confidence that you only go after 'bad people'.
It's not as though the civil libertarians can win this (either the legislative flavor, or the ones who think that their guns will save them); but the NSA has crossed the line into threatening shareholder value. That's serious business, probably Unamerican. We've installed brutal, CIA-backed, military juntas in countries we don't care about for pulling shit like that.
"Now, with almost 50% better battery life as promised by Intel for Windows tablets, the OEMs have no real need to come out with Windows RT based tablets and hybrids anymore."
Why would a manufacturer buy an OS nobody seems to want instead of using Android? What's MS's advantage here?
That's the other half of why RT is failing: it isn't Windows (well, architecturally it's pretty close in every way except CPU architecture; but they deliberately throw that advantage away); but it also isn't particularly compelling as not-Windows.
The question that I'm left with is "Did Microsoft fuck up a sincere attempt at making RT actually work, through some mixture of arrogance and incompetence, or was RT just a warning to Intel that if they didn't ship something that would run Windows on a tablet, Microsoft did have other options, albeit not preferred ones?"
Indeed. I was answering the question "If you can get clean samples and ship them back to the lab, what's wrong with that?".
In short, all the cheap-enough-to-actually-be-useful sampling mechanisms can't ship the sample back to the lab, so you are stuck with either getting accurate pH numbers (for a ridiculously tiny number of samples, mostly taken by humans on research ships, which cost considerable money to field) or worthlessly imprecise pH numbers(for the much larger number of chunks of ocean that you could have comparatively cheap autonomous systems flitting through).
They want a sensor that can do lab-grade results when built into a little gliderbot that putzes around autonomously for a few years and occasionally chirps back data over a satellite link(which is all doable, except for the pH sensing bit).
"I bet nowadays kids get expelled for that, at a minimum." God help you if the school is using some 'cloud' or hosted service to manage their email or whatnot. Obtaining a teacher's credentials would probably be about a zillion CFAA violations and an interstate matter... At least if it's all onsite, their legal options are more limited.
"See Apple, the thing is, these big media events used to be about introducing jaw-dropping, mind blowing new technology."
Has Apple ever been about 'mind blowing new technology'? As long as I can remember, they've been about well polished, high-production-value implementations of technology that already existed.
On the plus side, users only used to write their password on a sticky note stored under their keyboard. Now they'll be scribbling it everywhere they touch, and only have 9 resets!
Why do they need real-time results? If you can get clean samples and ship them back to the lab, what's wrong with that?
Compared to data transmission, shipping is expensive:
For peanuts, relatively speaking, you can build a little underwater glider style robot (or just a buoy or something) that will autonomously putter about as the currents take it for months to years, depending on how you power it and how lucky you get in terms of system failure.
If you can put the suitable sensor on such a vehicle, it becomes possible to measure pH at zillions of locations throughout the oceans with relatively cheap and expendable swarm robots. If you need to ship the sample back to the lab, you suddenly need a system complex enough to handle both going forth into the world and to send the sample in for recovery. Much more challenging.
That, and the faster your ship gets, the more the tenuous (but not nonexistent) flecks of gas and dust in interstellar space start looking like kinetic kill vehicles(at ~ 5% of C, any helium you encounter will punch you like alpha radiation, and faster or larger makes things worse)... Luckily, radiation doesn't imperil most of material science's little toys, at all.
Try to adopt a historical perspective:
The last time we were peasants who paid our feudal masters for the right to toil on his lands for a pittance and own next to nothing, we had bubonic plague and didn't have cable TV. Truly, a triumph of the human spirit!
I'm pretty sure that they check IRC activity when making capacity-planning decisions for the FEMA detention camps...
When Google, Yahoo, and Facebook join together to assert that the state of surveillance on the internet is out of hand, you know you are totally fucked.
It's like having the horsemen of the apocalypse criticizing your policy decisions.
I'd be curious to know how (though probably never will) regional price sensitivities will factor in to the decision to launch or not launch a device such as this in various areas:
Especially now that 'current-gen handheld' is dangerously close to 'surprisingly endurable even on a large TV, if TV-out exists, and probably shares many components with common cellphones', the notion of shoving a cost-optimized version of one into a box along with a component video cable and calling it a console in markets too price sensitive to be good sellers for your 'serious' console might actually work pretty well. However, outside of the hardcore, it might work a little too well even among people who could afford your 'real' console; but really just want to putz around on something so why pay more?
I wonder if that will factor into Sony's regional release strategy: a screenless, battery-less, not wildly powerful Cortex-A9/SGX543 ARM SoC board isn't likely to be getting more expensive as time passes, and online sales from the back catalog are likely to be either pure profit or pure cost recovery of a game that flopped long ago; but having such a potentially-aggressively-priced option on the market might not help move newer products...
This is Sony: everything they know about 'sharing' they learned from RIAA fishing expeditions...
Its Vita signs are weak; but it isn't dead yet.
Great news for Interstellar travel!
I suspect that it's deep hibernation or nothing (unless you are talking world-ships on a scale that would give most Kuiper belt objects inferiority issues) in that area. Replacing humans as they wear out has never been a huge problem, dealing with upkeep on the functional ones definitely has.
fresh water supplies at crisis levels and extreme weather happening more often... worst idea evar!
Age-related mortality has a certain special flavor to it, by virtue of being inevitable; but suitably motivated humans can trivially breed substantially above replacement rates even when living rather shorter lives than they do now (and, particularly when talking about women with dubious access to medical care, they often do live substantially shorter lives when breeding well above replacement rates...)
Old people who just won't die, damn it, will present problems of their own; but birthrate is the name of the game when it comes to population size (sure, there's war, famine, and pestilence; but you need a truly epic instance of any of these to equal the demographic effect of, say, the not-even-state-coerced shift in birthrates seen in places that can afford cool stuff like 'birth control' and 'college parties'.)
This is likely true; but mortality salience isn't one of those factors that you really get conscious control over, any more than fear of flying is cured through statistical demonstration of its (superb) safety record...
"I suspect, the governments — the leading stewards of the research dollars — aren't particularly interested in lengthening the lifespans"
I suspect that it hinges more on 'lengthening lifespans' vs. 'slowing aging'. Weak, sick, old people are not something anybody with medical or pension obligations really want living longer. If people became weak, sick, and old more slowly, though, you'd score more person-years of post-childhood, post-education, experienced labor (and, given most people's preparations for retirement, having them just say 'eh, fuck it' and stop working could largely be avoided, with the added "benefit" of keeping young workers in cheap, entry-level positions for much longer periods of time).
If this sort of research were steered purely by economic considerations, 'anti-aging' would probably be be behind dealing with common causes of mortality in children and young adults; but would be ahead of treating things that mostly kill old people. (Also worth remembering: 'the governments', if a useful generalization can be drawn at all, are heavily skewed toward people who are themselves... not exactly getting any younger. Compare the US population generally with Congress. If legislating with one foot in the grave doesn't increase the apparent need for anti-aging research, I'm not sure what would...)
It sounds like they've realized that letting 'slacktivists' do ineffectual things may actually have less overall impact on social order than trying to preserve the illusion of perfect order. A reasonable conclusion, given how frequently people get mad as hell and rant about it on the internet a bit, feel as though they've done something, and then go back to their day.
no thanks. I'm more interested in moveing devices from mechanical to solid state, not the other way around.
I suspect that you'll have enough change left over to wipe your tears away. They aren't even going to pretend that it's as good; but it'll be markedly cheaper and less awful than those "Just carry an HDD in a battery powered wifi enclosure and access it with our App!" abortions that people market as capacity expansion...
I have this vague memory of a device called the 'iPod Mini' being wildly popular and widely considered portable...