Antivirus systems aren't useless(I wouldn't trust their 'disinfection'; but they at least catch people reusing obsolete exploits and sometimes provide warnings that something is amiss); but this is one of those situations where hearing that antivirus software is running is a giant red flag: it usually means that a full-fat desktop/server OS with a network connection and who-knows-what-else running on it is doing the job of a dedicated computer. Quite probably being allowed to retain state over time except for the ever so occasional re-imaging. That just isn't going to go well.
Even if your application needs full Windows whatever for some reason, there are plenty of ways to keep it on a much tighter leash than just shoving a desktop at the problem and hoping Norton can save you. If a system is contained by the network so that it can only talk to the external hosts it absolutely needs; and is booting from a clean, static, image every time(with all changes discarded after any data generated during the session are moved elsewhere) you are a great deal safer.
Hydrogen is actually kind of obnoxious to deal with. It's not alien acid blood or anything; but such a small atom is capable of diffusing merrily through what any honest substance would consider a solid barrier(this usually requires elevated heat and/or pressure; but just merrily soaking into steel and reacting with the carbon in the steel to form little pockets of methane in the now-weakened iron matrix is a very cute trick). It's not terribly dangerous as a fire/explosion hazard unless allowed to build up in confined spaces. The Hindenburg's problems were at least partially down to having a giant envelope coated with aircraft dope; and 'nitrocellulose lacquer' is at least as unwise to mix with flammables as the name suggests.
Releasing the watch when it was still too unpolished, or fast enough hardware just not available, to avoid feeling 'slow' seems like a particularly strange and foolish move for Apple given how much positive press and user satisfaction they enjoyed from the fact that iOS enjoyed the perception of being much snappier and more responsive than Android(less true now, thanks to a combination of Google's 'project butter' and other improvements, plus sheer brute force on the hardware side: but definitely true in the bad old days and on bottom-feeder handsets). Apple, of all consumer electronics outfits, seem like they should most understand that "if it doesn't feel fast, it's too slow; if it does feel fast, spec-sheet preening is pointless". This is how they've always sold their mobile devices; and largely how they've approached specs for all but workstation computer products.
So, were you thinking "fresh.ly" for the painfully twee URL; or "RipeSocial" for the pointless-but-mandatory social networking tie-in? I think that the VCs would really like this one if we could get the filthy poor people out of the picture and hidden behind a nice app. Maybe one with instagram integration so that you could take pointless food pictures of your fruit right before you eat it!
He probably even resents attempts to restrict the scope and intrusiveness of marketing, so long as it can afford a suit and a few VC rounds... A marketing flack is about the least appropriate person to be complaining about someone's intrusive advertising.
Given the current silicon valley fad for doing dubiously legal things and worshiping it as 'disruption'; I'd say that this legacy economy NIMBY luddite is just unjustifiably enraged at the notion of disruptive entrepreneurship happening where it might affect his precious property values, rather than somebody elses'.
Were this a context where there was a greater general respect for the idea that "we restrict certain things because we've determined that they make quality of life worse", I'd be inclined to be more sympathetic; but here I'm going with 'entrepreneur lashes out at entrepreneurs poorer than he is for for unaesthetic in his presence'.
The extra fun is the pipework inside the reactor: It's not much of a power plant if you don't have a heat exchange loop set up so that you can actually use the reactor's heat output to run the turbines; but anything short of unobtanium does not react well to being brutally irradiated; and (unlike the outer housing/shielding) space constraints don't let you use the "Yeah, so just make it thicker, idiot..." technique to make the piping last longer. Plus, you can't just send a plumber in to swap out a defective tube inside the reactor core.
Barring other serious design flaws, this sort of piping failure isn't supposed to be a safety issue(the coolant loop that goes through the reactor isn't coupled directly to the steam turbines, since that would dump radioactive steam into the atmosphere, it instead is used to heat outside water that runs the turbines); but if enough pipes degrade and have to be sleeved or plugged you can lose substantial amounts of generating capacity, at which point it becomes harder to justify keeping the plant running(except in the 'if we run it just enough to claim that it isn't decommissioned; we won't have to pay for decommissioning" sense).
It isn't supposed to end up in the final product; but iodine is featured in at least one of the common methamphetamine synthesis methods(if memory serves, actually the original one used by Nagai Nagayoshi in the original synthesis of methamphetamine back in the 1890s). I'm not into that kind of cooking, so I don't know the details; but I believe that that is why the DEA is so touchy about people who go through more iodine than a good little consumer should need.
Potassium iodide isn't entirely stable in air(it's somewhat hygroscopic, so humidity isn't a good idea; and in the presence of carbon dioxide and oxygen it can gradually react to form potassium carbonate and elemental iodine; but unless your packaging and storage practices are unbelievably shoddy you should be able to get much more than 3 years of shelf life. Even if you don't flush with dry nitrogen before sealing, the oxidation products aren't excitingly dangerous so whatever air is left in the bottle would just degrade a portion of the product and leave a slightly impure but still almost full strength remainder.
If sufficiently well designed, this laser tripwire system might make just casually strolling across the border harder; but the opportunity for throwing false positives into the system just seems too easy and too vast to be dealt with.
If you don't mind losing plausible deniability, basically any opaque object you can lob from a safe distance will do the job. Have India send out a search squad every time you toss a paper airplane their way? Sounds like an economic win to me. If you want plausible deniability, see what you can do to encourage the local wildlife to wander around in the border area. Put out some food for stray dogs, subsidize some local mud farmers to graze sheep, whatever. Is New Delhi going to summon your ambassador for a scolding every time some mutt trips the fence?
There are various clever schemes for making it much harder to avoid detection when passing through a laser tripwire; but how much does that help you if generating false positives is so easy and cheap that it is trivial to drown out genuine positives?
When I picture a future infested with intelligent objects dedicated to knowing as much about me as possible the word that definitely comes to mind isn't exactly 'empowering' or 'democratizing'.
The downside of 'rule of law' is that a decent suit becomes effective camouflage for all sorts of predators that might otherwise be forced to operate in the shadows.
Oh, I don't doubt that HDCP will show up(it is Intel's baby after all, even they don't take the lead on pushing it). The real hilarity will arise because a USB-C audio connector using the analog sideband pins won't be 'protected'; while one using the data pins and acting as a USB audio device potentially(but far from certainly) will; so there is epic scope for user confusion about what situations will and won't be broken by DRM. Should be a blast.
At least with video, the 'HDMI, yes, VGA, no." rule is pretty simple.
Honestly, I'd worry about the NSA second and the advertisers first(if their efforts are successful, the NSA will presumably national-security-letter them; but they'll be the ones to try it first): Some abhuman 'audience engagement metrics' weasel is already reaching orgasm somewhere at the prospect of being able to monitor biological responses to advertising with sub-second granularity.
I'm going to need a firewall and IDS for my headphone jack. Thanks a goddamn lot, 'progress'.
In principle, the state of USB power delivery is such that this should be doable(with an external dongle of some kind, if the phone has just one USB-C port and the headphones don't have a power plug you obviously need some additional hardware just to have somewhere to plug in the power); the ugly detail is that nobody actually seems to obey those specs yet(as the Google guy on a Quixotic crusade against dodgy USB-C peripherals has discovered you can't even trust a cable to not kill your device on occasion); and when it comes to something more complex like "connect to a phone's USB-C port, accept a DC input and pass through USB-C audio" your mileage will vary, probably enough to make shopping a giant PITA. Until that settles down, odds are that we'll see a lot of enthusiastic cashing in from phone OEMs on the fact that(while nominally 'standardized'/'standards-based') the market is unpredictable and untrustworthy enough that anyone without a moderately techie understanding of USB-C and a masochistic desire to shop by trial and error will basically have to purchase the accessory from whoever they bought their phone from in order to have a reasonable expectation of it actually working.
In the noble world of theory, USB-C can actually be used to do some really cool stuff(something like Microsoft's Lumia dock, while not known to actually be supported on anything except select models of Windows Phones, apparently doesn't require doing anything freaky and nonstandard over the USB-C connector); but the quality varies so widely, and the number of possible combinations is unpredictable enough, that it's hard to make use of the potential without getting burned by crap or sticking exclusively to first-party accessories.
There are reasons to add USB-C connectors to PCs(if nothing else, a baseline USB-C connector is just a USB3 connector that works with USB-C cables; and depending on the situation it can also have additional advantages, as a replacement for various proprietary laptop charge ports, as an alternate-mode video-out, etc.); but what this proposal will do is make it even less predictable(and it's already fairly unpredictable) what a given USB-C port will or will not be capable of.
USB-C supports analog audio through the sideband pins, so a given port might support ordinary passive headphones with nothing more than a mechanical adapter or change in connector. However, on a device with more than one USB-C port, or with USB-C ports that predate this plan, it isn't likely that all the USB-C ports have analog audio, so those passive headphones will only work on certain ports, perhaps none; but 'active' headphones with a USB audio chipset will work on any of them(including USB1.1 or better ports with a mechanical adapter). For extra fun, if USB-C headphones become ubiquitous, even devices without any USB functions will probably want to implement sideband-only USB-C ports, so people can plug headphones into them; but those will only work with passive headphones since they won't actually have a USB host controller.
As with a number of USB-C design decisions, this seems like a pretty good idea if all you care about is bleeding edge cellphones; a troublesome-but-probably-worth-it one if all you care about is cellphones and ultra-skinny laptops; but a morass of confusion and suffering the more broadly you try to make it work. The USB-C port already suffers from the 'might be capable of anything, only actually promises to be capable of almost nothing' and this will only expand that unpleasant aspect.
Facebook is supposed to act as a honeypot for worthless clickbait and help keep some of it from wandering out into the parts of the internet that don't totally suck. If they become less hospitable, there's a risk that starving herds of clickbait will start migrating and that won't be pretty.
It's particularly surprising because they had presumably wrung all the BoM reductions out of the design that they were reasonably going to be able to (barring a likely-but-unhelpful "we'll be able to implement the entire thing in a single $3 chip in 20 years!" stuff). They had already increased the integration of the major chips, done several redesigns of the board and chassis, and tinkered with what ports and peripherals were and weren't included.
Unless they were willing to go all in for a legacy product and move all the custom ICs to a cutting edge process or something, they probably ran out of savings some time back; and may well have been starting to pay more for certain things(they only included 512MB; but GDDR3 isn't exactly getting more common).
I could see keeping it around, especially to cater to the price sensitive demographics and markets, after the new console comes out; but I'm a bit surprised that they didn't hit the point where stamping out a new Xbox360 actually cost more than stamping out whatever the cheapest Xbox One costs; at which point there wouldn't be much reason to continue making them.
Arguably, the outlines of this issue were (surprisingly comprehensively) addressed by a ficticious talking egg in an 1871 children's book:
"When I use a word,' Humpty Dumpty said in rather a scornful tone, 'it means just what I choose it to mean — neither more nor less."
"The question is," said Alice, "whether you can make words mean so many different things."
"The question is," said Humpty Dumpty, "which is to be master— that's all."
Is facebook concerned that the 'content' their actual human users is too high quality or something; and needs a bit more algorithmically spewed slurry to bring the SNR back up to a comfortable level?
That was my immediate reaction: barring any hidden defects, this looks like a nice piece of hardware(and not having the Nexus series' de-facto ban on microSD slots is a nice touch); but $700 buys a lot of smartphone these days; and I'm having a hard time discerning the difference between this device and the $400-$500 range, especially since any mobile CPU that the vendor hasn't brutally crippled will either kill your battery or hit its thermal limits in short order if it actually runs at full speed, so the real-world spread in CPU and GPU performance in cellphones is sharply limited by power and cooling problems. There still is a spread; since the demand for handsets that the developing world can afford has created a large market for 'the absolute cheapest crap you can run Android on', which is still pretty slow; but "Fastest chip Qualcom sells" vs. "respectable midrange Qualcom chip" is quite likely to be an invisible difference once the phone has had 30 seconds to heat up.
Also, while the microSD slot softens the blow, why do you even make 32GB versions of a $700 phone?
As is often the case, it's the coverup that tends to be the problem.
The reward for 'successfully propagated genes, is a winner at evolution' is often pretty unimpressive from the perspective of the individual(in situations where dying horribly to save your children or other genetic kin is evolutionarily advantageous, often downright lousy); so 'yeah; but that's not an adaptive strategy!!' is largely irrelevant when choosing between plans. You'll be dead inside a century regardless of whether your genes find new hosts or not, so it just doesn't matter much.
Adoptive parents, cases of material-mixups at fertility clinics, and cuckolds are all in exactly the same situation in terms of genetic inheritance; but the first group explicitly chose that outcome; the second didn't choose it; but didn't suffer it because of malice(much less malice from their partner, which is usually a worse problem than incompetence by some random lab tech); and the third group is in that situation because they are being lied to, on a matter usually considered important, by a partner. The genetic 'problem' is largely irrelevant; but the 'substantial probability of deliberate deception by a trusted insider' problem is usually a pretty dire sign.
Aren't you missing the fact that(for the purposes of the study at least, I'm not sure if common use differs from this) 'cuckolded father' means 'man raising a child he is not the father of under the mistaken belief that he is the father'?
Even if your promiscuous-poor-people-and-negroids theory pans out; it only implies an increase in cuckoldry if that promiscuity leads to incorrect assignments of paternity and paternal obligation. You could be so enthusiastically promiscuous that even your heterozygotic twins sometimes have different fathers; and it still wouldn't count as "cuckoldry" for the purposes of this study unless you've successfully deceived at least some of the fathers in question about which children are theirs(and, while it's obviously easier for a child to not be yours if promiscuity is the norm; knowledge of the fact that promiscuity is the norm probably makes people more skeptical about paternity, and thus trickier to mislead about it).
If this study actually claimed that 'expected number of fathers across all children born to a given woman' were low and largely constant across cultures; then yes, the existence of situations of high promiscuity and little or no expectation of nuclear family stability would be a counterexample. It's just that it doesn't do that. it only addresses successful deceptions about paternity; which apparently are some combination of 'not something that people actually try as often as believed' and 'something that people do try; but have a lousy success record on'(with the inclusion of some populations where genetic paternity testing isn't an inexpensive and mature technology, which suggests that whatever difficulties exist in successful cuckolding aren't merely a product of DNA testing).
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Antivirus systems aren't useless(I wouldn't trust their 'disinfection'; but they at least catch people reusing obsolete exploits and sometimes provide warnings that something is amiss); but this is one of those situations where hearing that antivirus software is running is a giant red flag: it usually means that a full-fat desktop/server OS with a network connection and who-knows-what-else running on it is doing the job of a dedicated computer. Quite probably being allowed to retain state over time except for the ever so occasional re-imaging. That just isn't going to go well. Even if your application needs full Windows whatever for some reason, there are plenty of ways to keep it on a much tighter leash than just shoving a desktop at the problem and hoping Norton can save you. If a system is contained by the network so that it can only talk to the external hosts it absolutely needs; and is booting from a clean, static, image every time(with all changes discarded after any data generated during the session are moved elsewhere) you are a great deal safer.
Hydrogen is actually kind of obnoxious to deal with. It's not alien acid blood or anything; but such a small atom is capable of diffusing merrily through what any honest substance would consider a solid barrier(this usually requires elevated heat and/or pressure; but just merrily soaking into steel and reacting with the carbon in the steel to form little pockets of methane in the now-weakened iron matrix is a very cute trick). It's not terribly dangerous as a fire/explosion hazard unless allowed to build up in confined spaces. The Hindenburg's problems were at least partially down to having a giant envelope coated with aircraft dope; and 'nitrocellulose lacquer' is at least as unwise to mix with flammables as the name suggests.
Releasing the watch when it was still too unpolished, or fast enough hardware just not available, to avoid feeling 'slow' seems like a particularly strange and foolish move for Apple given how much positive press and user satisfaction they enjoyed from the fact that iOS enjoyed the perception of being much snappier and more responsive than Android(less true now, thanks to a combination of Google's 'project butter' and other improvements, plus sheer brute force on the hardware side: but definitely true in the bad old days and on bottom-feeder handsets). Apple, of all consumer electronics outfits, seem like they should most understand that "if it doesn't feel fast, it's too slow; if it does feel fast, spec-sheet preening is pointless". This is how they've always sold their mobile devices; and largely how they've approached specs for all but workstation computer products.
So, were you thinking "fresh.ly" for the painfully twee URL; or "RipeSocial" for the pointless-but-mandatory social networking tie-in? I think that the VCs would really like this one if we could get the filthy poor people out of the picture and hidden behind a nice app. Maybe one with instagram integration so that you could take pointless food pictures of your fruit right before you eat it!
He probably even resents attempts to restrict the scope and intrusiveness of marketing, so long as it can afford a suit and a few VC rounds... A marketing flack is about the least appropriate person to be complaining about someone's intrusive advertising.
Given the current silicon valley fad for doing dubiously legal things and worshiping it as 'disruption'; I'd say that this legacy economy NIMBY luddite is just unjustifiably enraged at the notion of disruptive entrepreneurship happening where it might affect his precious property values, rather than somebody elses'. Were this a context where there was a greater general respect for the idea that "we restrict certain things because we've determined that they make quality of life worse", I'd be inclined to be more sympathetic; but here I'm going with 'entrepreneur lashes out at entrepreneurs poorer than he is for for unaesthetic in his presence'.
The extra fun is the pipework inside the reactor: It's not much of a power plant if you don't have a heat exchange loop set up so that you can actually use the reactor's heat output to run the turbines; but anything short of unobtanium does not react well to being brutally irradiated; and (unlike the outer housing/shielding) space constraints don't let you use the "Yeah, so just make it thicker, idiot..." technique to make the piping last longer. Plus, you can't just send a plumber in to swap out a defective tube inside the reactor core.
Barring other serious design flaws, this sort of piping failure isn't supposed to be a safety issue(the coolant loop that goes through the reactor isn't coupled directly to the steam turbines, since that would dump radioactive steam into the atmosphere, it instead is used to heat outside water that runs the turbines); but if enough pipes degrade and have to be sleeved or plugged you can lose substantial amounts of generating capacity, at which point it becomes harder to justify keeping the plant running(except in the 'if we run it just enough to claim that it isn't decommissioned; we won't have to pay for decommissioning" sense).
It isn't supposed to end up in the final product; but iodine is featured in at least one of the common methamphetamine synthesis methods(if memory serves, actually the original one used by Nagai Nagayoshi in the original synthesis of methamphetamine back in the 1890s). I'm not into that kind of cooking, so I don't know the details; but I believe that that is why the DEA is so touchy about people who go through more iodine than a good little consumer should need.
Potassium iodide isn't entirely stable in air(it's somewhat hygroscopic, so humidity isn't a good idea; and in the presence of carbon dioxide and oxygen it can gradually react to form potassium carbonate and elemental iodine; but unless your packaging and storage practices are unbelievably shoddy you should be able to get much more than 3 years of shelf life. Even if you don't flush with dry nitrogen before sealing, the oxidation products aren't excitingly dangerous so whatever air is left in the bottle would just degrade a portion of the product and leave a slightly impure but still almost full strength remainder.
If sufficiently well designed, this laser tripwire system might make just casually strolling across the border harder; but the opportunity for throwing false positives into the system just seems too easy and too vast to be dealt with.
If you don't mind losing plausible deniability, basically any opaque object you can lob from a safe distance will do the job. Have India send out a search squad every time you toss a paper airplane their way? Sounds like an economic win to me. If you want plausible deniability, see what you can do to encourage the local wildlife to wander around in the border area. Put out some food for stray dogs, subsidize some local mud farmers to graze sheep, whatever. Is New Delhi going to summon your ambassador for a scolding every time some mutt trips the fence?
There are various clever schemes for making it much harder to avoid detection when passing through a laser tripwire; but how much does that help you if generating false positives is so easy and cheap that it is trivial to drown out genuine positives?
You think that the objects will be working for you?
When I picture a future infested with intelligent objects dedicated to knowing as much about me as possible the word that definitely comes to mind isn't exactly 'empowering' or 'democratizing'.
The downside of 'rule of law' is that a decent suit becomes effective camouflage for all sorts of predators that might otherwise be forced to operate in the shadows.
Oh, I don't doubt that HDCP will show up(it is Intel's baby after all, even they don't take the lead on pushing it). The real hilarity will arise because a USB-C audio connector using the analog sideband pins won't be 'protected'; while one using the data pins and acting as a USB audio device potentially(but far from certainly) will; so there is epic scope for user confusion about what situations will and won't be broken by DRM. Should be a blast.
At least with video, the 'HDMI, yes, VGA, no." rule is pretty simple.
Honestly, I'd worry about the NSA second and the advertisers first(if their efforts are successful, the NSA will presumably national-security-letter them; but they'll be the ones to try it first): Some abhuman 'audience engagement metrics' weasel is already reaching orgasm somewhere at the prospect of being able to monitor biological responses to advertising with sub-second granularity.
I'm going to need a firewall and IDS for my headphone jack. Thanks a goddamn lot, 'progress'.
In principle, the state of USB power delivery is such that this should be doable(with an external dongle of some kind, if the phone has just one USB-C port and the headphones don't have a power plug you obviously need some additional hardware just to have somewhere to plug in the power); the ugly detail is that nobody actually seems to obey those specs yet(as the Google guy on a Quixotic crusade against dodgy USB-C peripherals has discovered you can't even trust a cable to not kill your device on occasion); and when it comes to something more complex like "connect to a phone's USB-C port, accept a DC input and pass through USB-C audio" your mileage will vary, probably enough to make shopping a giant PITA. Until that settles down, odds are that we'll see a lot of enthusiastic cashing in from phone OEMs on the fact that(while nominally 'standardized'/'standards-based') the market is unpredictable and untrustworthy enough that anyone without a moderately techie understanding of USB-C and a masochistic desire to shop by trial and error will basically have to purchase the accessory from whoever they bought their phone from in order to have a reasonable expectation of it actually working.
In the noble world of theory, USB-C can actually be used to do some really cool stuff(something like Microsoft's Lumia dock, while not known to actually be supported on anything except select models of Windows Phones, apparently doesn't require doing anything freaky and nonstandard over the USB-C connector); but the quality varies so widely, and the number of possible combinations is unpredictable enough, that it's hard to make use of the potential without getting burned by crap or sticking exclusively to first-party accessories.
There are reasons to add USB-C connectors to PCs(if nothing else, a baseline USB-C connector is just a USB3 connector that works with USB-C cables; and depending on the situation it can also have additional advantages, as a replacement for various proprietary laptop charge ports, as an alternate-mode video-out, etc.); but what this proposal will do is make it even less predictable(and it's already fairly unpredictable) what a given USB-C port will or will not be capable of.
USB-C supports analog audio through the sideband pins, so a given port might support ordinary passive headphones with nothing more than a mechanical adapter or change in connector. However, on a device with more than one USB-C port, or with USB-C ports that predate this plan, it isn't likely that all the USB-C ports have analog audio, so those passive headphones will only work on certain ports, perhaps none; but 'active' headphones with a USB audio chipset will work on any of them(including USB1.1 or better ports with a mechanical adapter). For extra fun, if USB-C headphones become ubiquitous, even devices without any USB functions will probably want to implement sideband-only USB-C ports, so people can plug headphones into them; but those will only work with passive headphones since they won't actually have a USB host controller.
As with a number of USB-C design decisions, this seems like a pretty good idea if all you care about is bleeding edge cellphones; a troublesome-but-probably-worth-it one if all you care about is cellphones and ultra-skinny laptops; but a morass of confusion and suffering the more broadly you try to make it work. The USB-C port already suffers from the 'might be capable of anything, only actually promises to be capable of almost nothing' and this will only expand that unpleasant aspect.
Facebook is supposed to act as a honeypot for worthless clickbait and help keep some of it from wandering out into the parts of the internet that don't totally suck. If they become less hospitable, there's a risk that starving herds of clickbait will start migrating and that won't be pretty.
It's particularly surprising because they had presumably wrung all the BoM reductions out of the design that they were reasonably going to be able to (barring a likely-but-unhelpful "we'll be able to implement the entire thing in a single $3 chip in 20 years!" stuff). They had already increased the integration of the major chips, done several redesigns of the board and chassis, and tinkered with what ports and peripherals were and weren't included.
Unless they were willing to go all in for a legacy product and move all the custom ICs to a cutting edge process or something, they probably ran out of savings some time back; and may well have been starting to pay more for certain things(they only included 512MB; but GDDR3 isn't exactly getting more common).
I could see keeping it around, especially to cater to the price sensitive demographics and markets, after the new console comes out; but I'm a bit surprised that they didn't hit the point where stamping out a new Xbox360 actually cost more than stamping out whatever the cheapest Xbox One costs; at which point there wouldn't be much reason to continue making them.
Arguably, the outlines of this issue were (surprisingly comprehensively) addressed by a ficticious talking egg in an 1871 children's book:
"When I use a word,' Humpty Dumpty said in rather a scornful tone, 'it means just what I choose it to mean — neither more nor less."
"The question is," said Alice, "whether you can make words mean so many different things."
"The question is," said Humpty Dumpty, "which is to be master— that's all."
If you want the cameras and optics to not suck, that adds up if you plan to have an array of them.
Is facebook concerned that the 'content' their actual human users is too high quality or something; and needs a bit more algorithmically spewed slurry to bring the SNR back up to a comfortable level?
That was my immediate reaction: barring any hidden defects, this looks like a nice piece of hardware(and not having the Nexus series' de-facto ban on microSD slots is a nice touch); but $700 buys a lot of smartphone these days; and I'm having a hard time discerning the difference between this device and the $400-$500 range, especially since any mobile CPU that the vendor hasn't brutally crippled will either kill your battery or hit its thermal limits in short order if it actually runs at full speed, so the real-world spread in CPU and GPU performance in cellphones is sharply limited by power and cooling problems. There still is a spread; since the demand for handsets that the developing world can afford has created a large market for 'the absolute cheapest crap you can run Android on', which is still pretty slow; but "Fastest chip Qualcom sells" vs. "respectable midrange Qualcom chip" is quite likely to be an invisible difference once the phone has had 30 seconds to heat up.
Also, while the microSD slot softens the blow, why do you even make 32GB versions of a $700 phone?
As is often the case, it's the coverup that tends to be the problem.
The reward for 'successfully propagated genes, is a winner at evolution' is often pretty unimpressive from the perspective of the individual(in situations where dying horribly to save your children or other genetic kin is evolutionarily advantageous, often downright lousy); so 'yeah; but that's not an adaptive strategy!!' is largely irrelevant when choosing between plans. You'll be dead inside a century regardless of whether your genes find new hosts or not, so it just doesn't matter much.
Adoptive parents, cases of material-mixups at fertility clinics, and cuckolds are all in exactly the same situation in terms of genetic inheritance; but the first group explicitly chose that outcome; the second didn't choose it; but didn't suffer it because of malice(much less malice from their partner, which is usually a worse problem than incompetence by some random lab tech); and the third group is in that situation because they are being lied to, on a matter usually considered important, by a partner. The genetic 'problem' is largely irrelevant; but the 'substantial probability of deliberate deception by a trusted insider' problem is usually a pretty dire sign.
Aren't you missing the fact that(for the purposes of the study at least, I'm not sure if common use differs from this) 'cuckolded father' means 'man raising a child he is not the father of under the mistaken belief that he is the father'?
Even if your promiscuous-poor-people-and-negroids theory pans out; it only implies an increase in cuckoldry if that promiscuity leads to incorrect assignments of paternity and paternal obligation. You could be so enthusiastically promiscuous that even your heterozygotic twins sometimes have different fathers; and it still wouldn't count as "cuckoldry" for the purposes of this study unless you've successfully deceived at least some of the fathers in question about which children are theirs(and, while it's obviously easier for a child to not be yours if promiscuity is the norm; knowledge of the fact that promiscuity is the norm probably makes people more skeptical about paternity, and thus trickier to mislead about it).
If this study actually claimed that 'expected number of fathers across all children born to a given woman' were low and largely constant across cultures; then yes, the existence of situations of high promiscuity and little or no expectation of nuclear family stability would be a counterexample. It's just that it doesn't do that. it only addresses successful deceptions about paternity; which apparently are some combination of 'not something that people actually try as often as believed' and 'something that people do try; but have a lousy success record on'(with the inclusion of some populations where genetic paternity testing isn't an inexpensive and mature technology, which suggests that whatever difficulties exist in successful cuckolding aren't merely a product of DNA testing).