You do realize that Windows is not a device, right? You're making an apples-to-oranges comparison by conflating the OS for the device running it.
The question you need to be asking is how long a typical PC purchased in 2001 at the time of XP's launch was supported with the latest version of Windows. Given that we were seeing rather significant performance gains in CPUs around the turn of the millennium, old hardware quickly became obsolete back then. On the flip side of that, Vista was a resource hog compared to XP, so it left a lot of XP-capable hardware in the dust when it launched just 6 years later in 2007.
Likewise, we're seeing similar performance gains in the mobile industry at the moment, with year-over-year improvements in performance of 30-50% not being uncommon, and we're also seeing major jumps in the demands being placed on the hardware by the OSes and apps. As such, just 6 years later, we're leaving old hardware in the dust. Which, again, is no different than it was with PCs.
That said, you are correct that there is a difference, and I don't want to be dismissive of that. Whereas an XP machine that had been left in the dust by Vista could continue to limp along with an additional 7 years of XP support, an iOS device would have to limp along without that support. As you were getting at, Apple has never fared well compared to Microsoft when it comes to the lifespan of their non-mobile product support. Even so, Apple does fare remarkably well compared to its competitors in the mobile space, including Microsoft, in that 6 years is an unprecedented support cycle when placed against any Android devices on the market.
I agree that it would be nice if this could be turned off on a per-app basis, but suggesting it's less invasive isn't correct, given the existence of international databases that provide locations for the vast majority of hotspots that can be observed by a car driving around. When news broke a few months back that apps were using MAC addresses to geolocate users who had location tracking turned off, a few links started circulating that would let you punch in the name of your hotspot and then would show it to you on a map, usually accurate to within a few meters.
Perhaps they could make MAC addresses available if the user allows location tracking? Seems like that would be the reasonable compromise.
Aren't you conflating consciousness (i.e. being awake and aware of one's surroundings) with sentience (i.e. being able to perceive and feel)?
Being able to recognize oneself is not a mark of consciousness; it's a mark of sentience. Animals are conscious by every definition I've ever seen, as are babies. These researchers aren't redefining the term. Rather, they're pointing out that it's occasionally being co-opted by others to suggest something more than what it actually means, which has led some of them to make claims that simply don't match reality.
I bet they've already trademarked that shape / design.
I'd bet not, since you can't trademark a product design. You're likely thinking of a design patent, which basically functions like a trademark (rather than utility patents), except that it's used for product designs instead of logos, slogans, and other trade marks. If they did trademark anything related to the iPhone X, it would be the iconography associated with it (i.e. the illustration of its outline shown in the linked blog post), rather than the product design itself.
I'm mostly doing desktop development these days, but I added Full Stack Developer as a role just to see what would happen. My estimated salary went down by about $1000. Not sure what to make of that. Are recruiters finally seeing through the buzzwords they help propagate?
Marco Arment was the original developer behind Tumblr, the original developer behind Instapaper (i.e. the first big "read it later" service on mobile), is currently the developer for the Overcast podcast app and service, but is probably most well-known in Apple tech circles these days as a blogger and podcaster (he hosts a few podcasts, the biggest one being the Accidental Tech Podcast with John Siracusa and Casey Liss).
As for why you should care? You shouldn't. Mind you, I read his blog and regularly listen to his podcasts, so I'd lump myself in as a fan of the things he has to say (which isn't to say that I agree with them, just that I like hearing them). I was fine with Slashdot covering his blog entry last year when he railed against the quality of software that Apple was putting out, because even though he later regretted having made that post, it still did an excellent job at coalescing and reflecting a broader sense of dissatisfaction among Apple users at the time. But his random thoughts on the shape of the iPhone X? Even I don't think that warrants Slashdot coverage. It was something I enjoyed reading yesterday, but it doesn't warrant reposting here.
I'm disappointed someone at Slashdot doesn't know the Konami Code by heart. It's Up Up Down Down Left Right Left Right B A Start.
I did a quick search to see if your code was an obscure reference to something else (since I like to give three-digit UIDs the benefit of the doubt), but so far I haven't found anything.
The notion of a national ID is anathema to much of the US population and it's something that both Democrats and Republicans don't want. Depending on who you're talking to, it's because of racial issues, immigration issues, a backdoor means for gun control, warrantless information gathering on US citizens, or some other form of unconstitutional overreach by the federal government.
That's the whole point with a system like what Illinois is putting together. It's state-run, so it evades a lot of the federal overreach concerns, and it's decentralized, so it avoids the concerns about a centralized means for control. It may even appease some of the sovereign state folks, who tend to reject the notion of issued IDs altogether, since these ones would be entirely in their control.
You can't just open the hatch, you've 14.7 lbs of pressure per square inch trying to keep that door closed, assuming it swings out.
Isn't that literally the one and only design where that problem presents itself? You cherrypicked a failed premise as your starting assumption, then said the idea doesn't work. By that logic, you could have just as easily said:
You can't fly, you've got your weight to deal with and no means by which you can generate the lift to overcome it, assuming you're strapping wings to your arms.
Sure, it's true, but it doesn't mean we can't fly. It just means that we can't fly that way. Likewise for your notion about the hatch.
For instance, here are some alternative hatch designs: 1) Rather than relying on brute force to open the hatch, use a worm gear or other form of mechanical advantage to unseal the hatch/re-pressurize the tube before you fully open it. You only need to overcome 6650 lbs. if were talking about a hatch the size of those on a submarine (i.e. [pi * 12 inches ^ 2] * 14.7 psi), so a person could easily open it on their own (e.g. worm gears can hit a 500:1 gear ratio).
2) Fully mechanize the door, that way human strength isn't a factor. It'll just open itself for you.
3) Use a sliding door for the hatch and accept that some leakage is possible and acceptable. You'd only need to overcome the friction from the differential rather than the differential itself at that point, negating the biggest of the issues. As for leakage, the hyperloop was never designed to be a perfect vacuum in the first place, so we know it's already going to be moderating the pressure as it is.
4) Try opening the door inwards. If you're concerned about the door being in the path of vehicles in the case of an unexpected opening, put it at the end of a branch from the main tube so that it can't open directly onto the tracks. That said, for as little pressure as it needs to handle, I'm not convinced it's a cause for concern in the first place, since we already build doors to handle far more than that.
All of which is to say, assuming a failed design as your starting point isn't a valid means for proving a problem can't be overcome; it's how you set up and tear down a straw man, which we shouldn't tolerate around here (even if I do agree with the point you were driving at that there are major engineering hurdles to overcome).
Speaking with regards to a similar experience I had with Suddenlink, who for a few years cut my Internet bill by $8/mo. to bundle it with cable, it had ESPN and all the other channels you'd expect in a basic cable package. It wasn't just the local stuff. By itself, it cost around $30/mo. at the time, but they were willing to pay me $8/mo. just to have it. I hooked it up to the TV so guests could use it, but I don't think any ever actually did.
On the Mac it's become surprisingly good in the last few years. It's minimal, uses less RAM and battery life than Chrome, loads and runs pages faster than Chrome, and doesn't phone home to Google like Chrome does. Of course, it does have its downsides, the biggest of which, in my opinion, is the paltry selection of extensions compared to Chrome, as well as draconian requirements that'll ensure it's extensions gallery never flourishes like Chrome's extensions have.
Sure, it's a glaring hole, but an inability to handle a particular use case does not make it a toy OS by any stretch of the imagination.
I too am waiting for the day that XCode shows up on iOS, since that'll signal a sea change in the nature of computing, but software development isn't nearly so well-suited to the interaction model of mobile devices as the apps I mentioned, all of which are more than capable of being accomplished on mobile devices today. In fact, in an increasing number of cases those tasks are better accomplished on a mobile device than on a traditional PC.
No, it doesn't. Several Android handsets are ahead of the iPhone 7's scores at this point. Which I know, because I just looked them up in the interest of fact-checking myself before making the exact same claim you just made.
That said, it did take Samsung quite awhile to pass it.
I'm pretty sure that argument stopped holding water at least as far back as 2015, when the performance of these devices started to pass that of various laptops and a bevy of pro-level apps like Photoshop, Office, and even CAD finally made their way to these platforms.
But hey, feel free to cling to the past by trotting out your tired old lines to try and troll folks.
1) Their major competitors rely on advertising, so disrupting the advertising market has the potential to damage their competitors.
2) Ads diminish the user experience, so disrupting their ability to operate provides immense benefit to their users and could become a differentiating factor, given that their competitors can't afford to attack ads so directly.
So yup, it's self-serving, but their interests align with consumers in this case, so we get to win.
A company operating a site without government funding should be the one to define who the trolls are on their site. Simple as that.
The First Amendment is immensely important and must be defended, even when doing so means defending abhorrent people, but we need to get over this false sense of entitlement that suggests organizations have no right to interfere with, discourage, or otherwise supervise the use of the platforms they've built. As the creators of those sites, that's their prerogative. The Constitution does not entitle anyone to use Reddit, Twitter, or Facebook. And, frankly, disallowing certain types of speech may be in the best interests of those companies, in much the same way that a business catering to families would be smart to throw out someone who refused to stop shouting obscenities. Again, it's their prerogative.
We need to stop pretending that the First Amendment means there are no consequences to the things we say.
Could this mean that those "trolls" may eventually be marginalized and/or cut off from access to businesses that the rest of us take for granted? Absolutely! But that's how things are supposed to work. While there may not be legal consequences to (most of) the things we say, there still are consequences, both good and bad. Whether that's a YouTube celebrity like PewDiePie losing financial sponsors because he used racial slurs, Target being boycotted over their bathroom stance regarding transexuals, or talking heads landing high-paying jobs at partisan news organizations because of their willingness to say sensationalist things, there are consequences to the things we say.
Again, we need to stop pretending the First Amendment protects us from all consequences.
Or don't, in which case you'll have to deal with some massive cognitive dissonance as you have to reconcile that you keep getting kicked off of sites with your false belief that you're entitled to use them.
Contrary to what you seem to think, iPhones sold under contract from Apple ARE covered under warranty for the length of the contract. AppleCare+ (i.e. an extended warranty) has been a part of those contracts from the very start.
The people in this suit were sold iPhones under contract from their carriers, not Apple. I'm not opposed to warranties lasting the length of a contract's term, but shouldn't that burden be on the one offering the contract, rather than on the manufacturer?
While there was a gaffe with that demo, it actually wasn't a problem with Face ID. Rather, whoever was prepping those iPhones didn't do something they should have done, which resulted in the presenter triggering a standard security mechanism that everyone who uses Touch ID probably recognized immediately.
As a security precaution, iPhones are currently designed to require that the user enter their passcode instead of using Touch ID: 1) Every time the iPhone is restarted. 2) If it's been more than a week since the last time the passcode was entered and more than 8 hours since the last time it was unlocked. 3) After too many failed attempts to unlock the iPhone via Touch ID.
Based on the message displayed on the demo iPhone X, it looks like Face ID has those same precautions and that they happened to run into #2, which was an entirely avoidable blunder. All they needed to do was have someone go through and made sure that each of those devices was unlocked via passcode sometime in the prior week. The fact that they didn't meant that they got egg all over their face right as they were trying to introduce a marquee feature.
You can bet someone got a chewing out over that mistake.
So, a few things: 1) Their demonstration suggests it relies on accelerometer readings to know when to activate the sensor, since they had to raise the device before it started looking for faces. You can probably also click the power button to activate it, but either way, it doesn't appear to be always-on.
2) From what we understand, it isn't using the camera to detect faces. Rather, it's using something more akin to the Kinect, since it's projecting 30,000 IR dots and then sensing them via a basic IR sensor to create a 3D mesh.
3) Even if raising it isn't necessary to trigger the sensors, if the accelerometer is telling it it's stationary, it can stay off 99.9% of the time and just do a quick IR pulse every fraction of a second to see if anything's moved. Likewise, if the proximity sensor is telling it it's in a pocket or pressed to your ear it can stay off 100% of the time.
4) Even if it is always-on (which, again, it doesn't appear to be), they're claiming it gets 2 hours better battery life than the iPhone 7, so they must have figured out some way to optimize things.
I was trying to remember the name of that company yesterday when I heard the announcement, since I knew Apple had been in the bidding for them, but I couldn't remember if it was Apple or Microsoft who ended up buying them out. Thanks!
No one is forcing you to use Touch ID now. It's always been optional. Plenty of people simply use a password while disabling the biometrics, and I'd expect that the same will be true here.
By that logic, wouldn't Apple be considered underpriced?
After all, they don't pay commissions, so the products have to sell themselves, but they have also had the highest retail sales in the world for the last several years running (the second place retailer has been Tiffany's, but at last I heard, Apple had annual sales around $6000/sqft to Tiffany's $3000/sqft, with the margin growing each year). As such, the only reasonable conclusion we can reach from what you've said is that Apple is pricing their wares too cheap, which may mean that you're the first person ever on Slashdot to suggest that Apple is pricing their stuff for cheap.
Of course, the summary is bunk as well. After all, it would suggest that Apple's retail sales are failing outright because they don't pay commissions, despite the evidence to the contrary.
You're assuming Face ID relies on photos (like most other smartphone facial recognition systems), but so far as we know, it doesn't. Rather, it works a lot more like the Kinect.
Basically, it uses an infrared dot projector and infrared sensor in the new "TrueDepth Camera System" to create a three-dimensional mesh of the user's face by projecting 30,000 IR dots onto your face, then detecting how they relate to each other. Based on the distances between the dots the phone is able to generate a 3D mapping of your face which is then mathematically represented, hashed, and stored in the Secure Enclave, in much the same way that fingerprints are handled with Touch ID. All of that is done without necessarily needing a photo to be taken. And, just to conjecture a bit, I wouldn't be surprised to find out that they apply filtering to the IR sensor when it's used for Face ID so that it doesn't capture the wavelengths associated with body heat emitted from faces (since filtering in that way would make it easier to track the dots), meaning that they may not even capture an image of your face in the infrared spectrum at all, let alone in the visible spectrum.
But, going back to the OP's question, Apple has explicitly confirmed to various news outlets that all information collected via Face ID stays on their user's devices, so even if they captured a photo, they've confirmed they won't get it.
Slashdot Mirror
You do realize that Windows is not a device, right? You're making an apples-to-oranges comparison by conflating the OS for the device running it.
The question you need to be asking is how long a typical PC purchased in 2001 at the time of XP's launch was supported with the latest version of Windows. Given that we were seeing rather significant performance gains in CPUs around the turn of the millennium, old hardware quickly became obsolete back then. On the flip side of that, Vista was a resource hog compared to XP, so it left a lot of XP-capable hardware in the dust when it launched just 6 years later in 2007.
Likewise, we're seeing similar performance gains in the mobile industry at the moment, with year-over-year improvements in performance of 30-50% not being uncommon, and we're also seeing major jumps in the demands being placed on the hardware by the OSes and apps. As such, just 6 years later, we're leaving old hardware in the dust. Which, again, is no different than it was with PCs.
That said, you are correct that there is a difference, and I don't want to be dismissive of that. Whereas an XP machine that had been left in the dust by Vista could continue to limp along with an additional 7 years of XP support, an iOS device would have to limp along without that support. As you were getting at, Apple has never fared well compared to Microsoft when it comes to the lifespan of their non-mobile product support. Even so, Apple does fare remarkably well compared to its competitors in the mobile space, including Microsoft, in that 6 years is an unprecedented support cycle when placed against any Android devices on the market.
I agree that it would be nice if this could be turned off on a per-app basis, but suggesting it's less invasive isn't correct, given the existence of international databases that provide locations for the vast majority of hotspots that can be observed by a car driving around. When news broke a few months back that apps were using MAC addresses to geolocate users who had location tracking turned off, a few links started circulating that would let you punch in the name of your hotspot and then would show it to you on a map, usually accurate to within a few meters.
Perhaps they could make MAC addresses available if the user allows location tracking? Seems like that would be the reasonable compromise.
Aren't you conflating consciousness (i.e. being awake and aware of one's surroundings) with sentience (i.e. being able to perceive and feel)?
Being able to recognize oneself is not a mark of consciousness; it's a mark of sentience. Animals are conscious by every definition I've ever seen, as are babies. These researchers aren't redefining the term. Rather, they're pointing out that it's occasionally being co-opted by others to suggest something more than what it actually means, which has led some of them to make claims that simply don't match reality.
I bet they've already trademarked that shape / design.
I'd bet not, since you can't trademark a product design. You're likely thinking of a design patent, which basically functions like a trademark (rather than utility patents), except that it's used for product designs instead of logos, slogans, and other trade marks. If they did trademark anything related to the iPhone X, it would be the iconography associated with it (i.e. the illustration of its outline shown in the linked blog post), rather than the product design itself.
From what it looks like, he was behind Flickr, not Tumblr.
I'm mostly doing desktop development these days, but I added Full Stack Developer as a role just to see what would happen. My estimated salary went down by about $1000. Not sure what to make of that. Are recruiters finally seeing through the buzzwords they help propagate?
Marco Arment was the original developer behind Tumblr, the original developer behind Instapaper (i.e. the first big "read it later" service on mobile), is currently the developer for the Overcast podcast app and service, but is probably most well-known in Apple tech circles these days as a blogger and podcaster (he hosts a few podcasts, the biggest one being the Accidental Tech Podcast with John Siracusa and Casey Liss).
As for why you should care? You shouldn't. Mind you, I read his blog and regularly listen to his podcasts, so I'd lump myself in as a fan of the things he has to say (which isn't to say that I agree with them, just that I like hearing them). I was fine with Slashdot covering his blog entry last year when he railed against the quality of software that Apple was putting out, because even though he later regretted having made that post, it still did an excellent job at coalescing and reflecting a broader sense of dissatisfaction among Apple users at the time. But his random thoughts on the shape of the iPhone X? Even I don't think that warrants Slashdot coverage. It was something I enjoyed reading yesterday, but it doesn't warrant reposting here.
I'm disappointed someone at Slashdot doesn't know the Konami Code by heart. It's Up Up Down Down Left Right Left Right B A Start.
I did a quick search to see if your code was an obscure reference to something else (since I like to give three-digit UIDs the benefit of the doubt), but so far I haven't found anything.
The notion of a national ID is anathema to much of the US population and it's something that both Democrats and Republicans don't want. Depending on who you're talking to, it's because of racial issues, immigration issues, a backdoor means for gun control, warrantless information gathering on US citizens, or some other form of unconstitutional overreach by the federal government.
That's the whole point with a system like what Illinois is putting together. It's state-run, so it evades a lot of the federal overreach concerns, and it's decentralized, so it avoids the concerns about a centralized means for control. It may even appease some of the sovereign state folks, who tend to reject the notion of issued IDs altogether, since these ones would be entirely in their control.
You can't just open the hatch, you've 14.7 lbs of pressure per square inch trying to keep that door closed, assuming it swings out.
Isn't that literally the one and only design where that problem presents itself? You cherrypicked a failed premise as your starting assumption, then said the idea doesn't work. By that logic, you could have just as easily said:
You can't fly, you've got your weight to deal with and no means by which you can generate the lift to overcome it, assuming you're strapping wings to your arms.
Sure, it's true, but it doesn't mean we can't fly. It just means that we can't fly that way. Likewise for your notion about the hatch.
For instance, here are some alternative hatch designs:
1) Rather than relying on brute force to open the hatch, use a worm gear or other form of mechanical advantage to unseal the hatch/re-pressurize the tube before you fully open it. You only need to overcome 6650 lbs. if were talking about a hatch the size of those on a submarine (i.e. [pi * 12 inches ^ 2] * 14.7 psi), so a person could easily open it on their own (e.g. worm gears can hit a 500:1 gear ratio).
2) Fully mechanize the door, that way human strength isn't a factor. It'll just open itself for you.
3) Use a sliding door for the hatch and accept that some leakage is possible and acceptable. You'd only need to overcome the friction from the differential rather than the differential itself at that point, negating the biggest of the issues. As for leakage, the hyperloop was never designed to be a perfect vacuum in the first place, so we know it's already going to be moderating the pressure as it is.
4) Try opening the door inwards. If you're concerned about the door being in the path of vehicles in the case of an unexpected opening, put it at the end of a branch from the main tube so that it can't open directly onto the tracks. That said, for as little pressure as it needs to handle, I'm not convinced it's a cause for concern in the first place, since we already build doors to handle far more than that.
All of which is to say, assuming a failed design as your starting point isn't a valid means for proving a problem can't be overcome; it's how you set up and tear down a straw man, which we shouldn't tolerate around here (even if I do agree with the point you were driving at that there are major engineering hurdles to overcome).
Speaking with regards to a similar experience I had with Suddenlink, who for a few years cut my Internet bill by $8/mo. to bundle it with cable, it had ESPN and all the other channels you'd expect in a basic cable package. It wasn't just the local stuff. By itself, it cost around $30/mo. at the time, but they were willing to pay me $8/mo. just to have it. I hooked it up to the TV so guests could use it, but I don't think any ever actually did.
On the Mac it's become surprisingly good in the last few years. It's minimal, uses less RAM and battery life than Chrome, loads and runs pages faster than Chrome, and doesn't phone home to Google like Chrome does. Of course, it does have its downsides, the biggest of which, in my opinion, is the paltry selection of extensions compared to Chrome, as well as draconian requirements that'll ensure it's extensions gallery never flourishes like Chrome's extensions have.
Sure, it's a glaring hole, but an inability to handle a particular use case does not make it a toy OS by any stretch of the imagination.
I too am waiting for the day that XCode shows up on iOS, since that'll signal a sea change in the nature of computing, but software development isn't nearly so well-suited to the interaction model of mobile devices as the apps I mentioned, all of which are more than capable of being accomplished on mobile devices today. In fact, in an increasing number of cases those tasks are better accomplished on a mobile device than on a traditional PC.
No, it doesn't. Several Android handsets are ahead of the iPhone 7's scores at this point. Which I know, because I just looked them up in the interest of fact-checking myself before making the exact same claim you just made.
That said, it did take Samsung quite awhile to pass it.
I'm pretty sure that argument stopped holding water at least as far back as 2015, when the performance of these devices started to pass that of various laptops and a bevy of pro-level apps like Photoshop, Office, and even CAD finally made their way to these platforms.
But hey, feel free to cling to the past by trotting out your tired old lines to try and troll folks.
It's both, in this case.
1) Their major competitors rely on advertising, so disrupting the advertising market has the potential to damage their competitors.
2) Ads diminish the user experience, so disrupting their ability to operate provides immense benefit to their users and could become a differentiating factor, given that their competitors can't afford to attack ads so directly.
So yup, it's self-serving, but their interests align with consumers in this case, so we get to win.
A company operating a site without government funding should be the one to define who the trolls are on their site. Simple as that.
The First Amendment is immensely important and must be defended, even when doing so means defending abhorrent people, but we need to get over this false sense of entitlement that suggests organizations have no right to interfere with, discourage, or otherwise supervise the use of the platforms they've built. As the creators of those sites, that's their prerogative. The Constitution does not entitle anyone to use Reddit, Twitter, or Facebook. And, frankly, disallowing certain types of speech may be in the best interests of those companies, in much the same way that a business catering to families would be smart to throw out someone who refused to stop shouting obscenities. Again, it's their prerogative.
We need to stop pretending that the First Amendment means there are no consequences to the things we say.
Could this mean that those "trolls" may eventually be marginalized and/or cut off from access to businesses that the rest of us take for granted? Absolutely! But that's how things are supposed to work. While there may not be legal consequences to (most of) the things we say, there still are consequences, both good and bad. Whether that's a YouTube celebrity like PewDiePie losing financial sponsors because he used racial slurs, Target being boycotted over their bathroom stance regarding transexuals, or talking heads landing high-paying jobs at partisan news organizations because of their willingness to say sensationalist things, there are consequences to the things we say.
Again, we need to stop pretending the First Amendment protects us from all consequences.
Or don't, in which case you'll have to deal with some massive cognitive dissonance as you have to reconcile that you keep getting kicked off of sites with your false belief that you're entitled to use them.
Contrary to what you seem to think, iPhones sold under contract from Apple ARE covered under warranty for the length of the contract. AppleCare+ (i.e. an extended warranty) has been a part of those contracts from the very start.
The people in this suit were sold iPhones under contract from their carriers, not Apple. I'm not opposed to warranties lasting the length of a contract's term, but shouldn't that burden be on the one offering the contract, rather than on the manufacturer?
While there was a gaffe with that demo, it actually wasn't a problem with Face ID. Rather, whoever was prepping those iPhones didn't do something they should have done, which resulted in the presenter triggering a standard security mechanism that everyone who uses Touch ID probably recognized immediately.
As a security precaution, iPhones are currently designed to require that the user enter their passcode instead of using Touch ID:
1) Every time the iPhone is restarted.
2) If it's been more than a week since the last time the passcode was entered and more than 8 hours since the last time it was unlocked.
3) After too many failed attempts to unlock the iPhone via Touch ID.
Based on the message displayed on the demo iPhone X, it looks like Face ID has those same precautions and that they happened to run into #2, which was an entirely avoidable blunder. All they needed to do was have someone go through and made sure that each of those devices was unlocked via passcode sometime in the prior week. The fact that they didn't meant that they got egg all over their face right as they were trying to introduce a marquee feature.
You can bet someone got a chewing out over that mistake.
So, a few things:
1) Their demonstration suggests it relies on accelerometer readings to know when to activate the sensor, since they had to raise the device before it started looking for faces. You can probably also click the power button to activate it, but either way, it doesn't appear to be always-on.
2) From what we understand, it isn't using the camera to detect faces. Rather, it's using something more akin to the Kinect, since it's projecting 30,000 IR dots and then sensing them via a basic IR sensor to create a 3D mesh.
3) Even if raising it isn't necessary to trigger the sensors, if the accelerometer is telling it it's stationary, it can stay off 99.9% of the time and just do a quick IR pulse every fraction of a second to see if anything's moved. Likewise, if the proximity sensor is telling it it's in a pocket or pressed to your ear it can stay off 100% of the time.
4) Even if it is always-on (which, again, it doesn't appear to be), they're claiming it gets 2 hours better battery life than the iPhone 7, so they must have figured out some way to optimize things.
I was trying to remember the name of that company yesterday when I heard the announcement, since I knew Apple had been in the bidding for them, but I couldn't remember if it was Apple or Microsoft who ended up buying them out. Thanks!
No one is forcing you to use Touch ID now. It's always been optional. Plenty of people simply use a password while disabling the biometrics, and I'd expect that the same will be true here.
Okay. That's nice. Why are you telling me?
By that logic, wouldn't Apple be considered underpriced?
After all, they don't pay commissions, so the products have to sell themselves, but they have also had the highest retail sales in the world for the last several years running (the second place retailer has been Tiffany's, but at last I heard, Apple had annual sales around $6000/sqft to Tiffany's $3000/sqft, with the margin growing each year). As such, the only reasonable conclusion we can reach from what you've said is that Apple is pricing their wares too cheap, which may mean that you're the first person ever on Slashdot to suggest that Apple is pricing their stuff for cheap.
Of course, the summary is bunk as well. After all, it would suggest that Apple's retail sales are failing outright because they don't pay commissions, despite the evidence to the contrary.
You're assuming Face ID relies on photos (like most other smartphone facial recognition systems), but so far as we know, it doesn't. Rather, it works a lot more like the Kinect.
Basically, it uses an infrared dot projector and infrared sensor in the new "TrueDepth Camera System" to create a three-dimensional mesh of the user's face by projecting 30,000 IR dots onto your face, then detecting how they relate to each other. Based on the distances between the dots the phone is able to generate a 3D mapping of your face which is then mathematically represented, hashed, and stored in the Secure Enclave, in much the same way that fingerprints are handled with Touch ID. All of that is done without necessarily needing a photo to be taken. And, just to conjecture a bit, I wouldn't be surprised to find out that they apply filtering to the IR sensor when it's used for Face ID so that it doesn't capture the wavelengths associated with body heat emitted from faces (since filtering in that way would make it easier to track the dots), meaning that they may not even capture an image of your face in the infrared spectrum at all, let alone in the visible spectrum.
But, going back to the OP's question, Apple has explicitly confirmed to various news outlets that all information collected via Face ID stays on their user's devices, so even if they captured a photo, they've confirmed they won't get it.