Your preference for 24/96 audio as a listener is entirely due to the placebo effect.
Well, in all fairness, listeners may actually hear perceptible differences between 24/96 and 16/44.1 audio sources due to different mastering, but of course that says nothing about whether they can actually tell the difference between the two bitrates when everything else is equal.
This article is a pretty good explanation of why 16/44.1 is as good as anyone needs for playback.
There's plenty of articles from "experts" on why 16/44.1 is all you need, however these kind of opinions risk being being wrong: What about actual data? I see little solid data where the hypothesis has been put to the test.
I think the point is, some say 24/96 survives lossy compression better, it also produces less artifacts as the higher frequencies have less data points to describe their waveform. Perhaps some won't hear the difference in uncompressed audio, but I bet some can hear the difference in compressed.
Sony already makes and sells a SmartWatch. This seems to have gone completely unnoticed by the blogosphere, who keep using terms like "first to market" and "new category" and don't seem to be able to use a Google search to see whats already out there. Sony's Smartwatch also is the benchmark that Apple will copy pretty much everything from, including the way it syncs with your existing Android phone and bluetooth gadgets. (You can bet it will do less cost too much, just prettier, and sell millions more).
Apple seems to pick on poor Sony, they already stole Sony's idea with a one-brand retail outlet. (Sony Style stores opened in the 1980s - decades before Apple Stores). Apple's original iPhone was almost as similar to some of Sony's touch screen concept phone, that you you wonder. Now they'll copy the Smartwatch.
Samsung has some very cool display tech though, such as flexible screens - there's a damn good reason why they aren't in Sammy's new phones (S4 etc). I would put good money on Smartwatches being the first use of these screens and that's where production resources are being directed right now.
Unless Apple uses AMOLED for their watch, Samsungs going to be the winner.
You can't spend your way out of debt, it's ludicrous
Isn't this what every start-up company that accepts venture capital is trying to do?
This article isn't talking about spending on food stamps or fallacious broken windows. It's talking about spending on fundamental research - the kind chase-the-quarter capitalism doesn't do very well - so as to yield a return in new industries to create employment years and decades from now. This isn't that much different than what start-ups are trying to do, except the government can think on a much longer scale - something that I'm glad a government can take time to do.
I would have just said spending is the only way out of debt. (Where spending = investment)
Discredited does not equal falsified. He hasn't been discredited, in fact there's an absence of results showing the claims as falsified. This doesn't automatically mean it won't turn out to be crackpot science but there is not much to demonstrate that it is. In contrast Cold Fusion was fairly well falsified quite quickly.
This actually smacks of a recent cock-up by skeptics, I cite thus:
Many credentialed aerodynamicists (in chorus with most of the internet's "experts") swore black and blue that a wind powered land vehicle could not sail dead down wind faster than the wind (DDWFTTW). It would violate the laws of physics it said. So someone built the thing... http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blackbird_(land_yacht)... and it worked and went 2.8x windspeed even (!)... repeatedly. What's more the theory was sound all along, no change of the laws of physics was needed.
Indeed, boldly, emdrive are not claiming any physical laws are violated, that any new physics is required or that any well tested institution is being challenged. When was the last time you heard a antigravity/cold fusion/levitating sasquatch crystal skull claim do that kind of thing? It's a little encouraging no?
Ultimately I think skepticism not backed by proof is just as crazy and as the opposite with the same amount of proof. I wonder if it is just a different manifestation of the same underlying cognitive & personality problem. We'll have to wait and see for real-world results. They'll build it, and it will work or it wont!
I prefer Android, but it seems hard to find iPhone users who aren't enthusiastic about it. Whatever kind of phone you prefer, are there features you envy the users of some other variety?
I agree, most of my iPhone using friends love their gadgets, they are good, but then for every one of those I probably know someone who's switched to a Android now. Including myself going from a iPhone 4 to a Galaxy S2. The most surprising thing is they point out a better GUI, say it's just as easy to use, and absolutely love the ability to personalise your phone. Remember it wasn't even possible to set the iOS homescreen wallpaper until iOS 4 was released!
So when you press the shift/caps key on an Android on-screen keyboard, the letters on the keys change - which is a delightful feature. iOS, they are always capitals.
Woz understates the problem. Apple has been copying features pioneered on Android for some time now, and anything Apple original is coming out a little half-baked. Note that Siri wasn't an Apple original but a company they bought. Copy and paste, multi-tasking, the notification drawer, it's all better on Android and has been for some time. You couldn't even set a homescreen wallpaper until iOS 4. iOS stopped being good when Apple chases ever more revenue and half-baked sidetracks like Siri and their own maps. They are pouring a lot of effort in to hardware too but perhaps not pushing iOS ahead.
iOS still has it's good points for some users, but generally speaking it's so far behind it's not funny.
If you're a vegetarian for that specific reason it would be quite hypocritical to eat "animal-free meat" that was developed from the suffering of all those poor cuddly cows, mice and rats...
Seems like an extension of the sunk cost fallacy - if the cost has already been paid, refusing to use the product doesn't really make sense.
TBH, this is something that really winds me up about vegitarians - If you want to reduce animal suffering by not eating meat, or reduce environmental impact, then fair enough. But refusing to eat anything that has been grilled on the same bars as meat makes no sense - no extra suffering is going to happen because someone didn't wash the grill pan between cooking their bacon and your vegi-burgers. Similarly, flatly refusing to eat some meat that is only going to be thrown away if no one eats it is completely nonsensical. The best way to reduce your environmental impact is to use as much of the produce as possible, rather than refusing to eat left over meat and grilling up some vegi-burgers instead!
Some people don't like the taste? I hate mushrooms, and I can taste them on my (sweet sweet) bacon if they are cooked on the same grill. I can therefore imagine for people who don't regularly eat meat the flavor contamination is highly noticeable.
The amount of grain and water it takes to raise the meat eaten by Americans alone could feed everyone in the entire world.
Most of the grains we feed to livestock aren't worth a shit to humans from a nutritional point of view. I wish every stupid hippie who propagates this bullshit would go out, pick up a couple bales of alfalfa, and try actually surviving on it. Doesn't work so fucking well, because you're a human and not a goddamn cow.
Look, out in your back yard all that grass? Goats can get fat eating that stuff. So do us all a favor and next time you feel like spreading this type of FUD, go cut your lawn and put the trimmings on your plate, and try living off that.
THIS was modded insightful? Where did you get humans eating grass from? He said "Grain and water"... which is the kind of staple that civilizations subsisted on for thousands of years before our rather meat-rich era. Hell some say there are grains are more nutritious and ideal for human consumption than meat (Quinoa, Chia).
Nevermind that humans can absolutely eat a totally a meat-free diet anyway, and millions do, which can indeed include lots of leafy matter, raw even. Heck, Broccolli is about 7% protein. Heard of Veganism or even the Paleo diet? Our guts are even adapted to this diet more then they are our modern western diet.
There cannot be any proof, it is obviously impossible to distinguish between "simulated" and "real" reality
Not that obvious to me. You're assuming the simulators have made a perfect simulation, which they may not have done. Or they could leave deliberate clues, if they so wished, which would help us distinguish simulation and reality. Of course, on a broader philisophical point, you could argue there would still be no difference - reality could be a simulation and still be real.
Hi there,
You can stop philosophizing, I just deleted that guy from the simulation, he was getting annoying. Incidentally, if you subscribe to the specific flavor of mass delusion you guys call 'Christianity' and are wondering when the rapture will happen, it'll come the day I finally slip up while combining wild-cards and the 'rm' command on my Simulatron 6000 (TM).
Sincerely,
Your lord and cereator.
I get it you created everything, but you running all your commands as root is really a huge risk!!
Your hands are full of very small bones. It's very easy to break your hand by punching something hard and dense (such as a skull or face for instance).
If you want to strike someone in the face, it's smarter to use other parts of the body such as your knee, elbow or to use an open hand strike (such as a palm strike). That way you have the edge of a very long bone delivering the blow.
Pick up a stick or a rock. If the article had read, we evolved tool use from weapons then yes. By that benchmark we are the most violent species.
The scientists speculate that the little red star harbors a more remote planet whose gravity stirs up the belt's small objects, causing them to collide and spew the dust that Herschel has discerned.
This seems plausible if the frost line hypothesis is correct. In that case you would always expect to have gas giants stirring up matter on the edge of a solar system. The problem is that many gas giants have been found very close to stars and inside the frost line (the Hot Jupiters). Until there is a good explanation for the Hot Jupiters, I don't think we can just blindly expect to find gas giants beyond the frost lines stirring up asteroids.
This skewing of the stats is because "hot jupiters" are particularly easy to detect since they have such a strong influence on parent stars. It's just the limitations of our current ability to spot planets around other stars. There isn't enough data to suggest Hot Jupiters are unusually common. I'd guess they are more likely the result of a rogue body messing up a star system than any big mistake we've made in modelling planetary system formation.
Can your iPad run Eclipse or Visual Studio? Or the real Photoshop and not the super crippled lite version? Or the real Matlab?
Does it have a full USB 3.0 port? Can you connect a Nexus to it and debug your Android app that you're developing in Eclipse on it?
Can you run two applications side by side on it? Like a chat or twitter client beside your browser?
Does it have a proper digitizer to take accurate notes on? Does it have a SDXC slot to add or swap 64 or 128GB microsd cards?
My emphasis. Oh shit: I hadn't thought of that. As an Android nerd that's reason enough for me to get one of these as my next tablet. Ironically this is a tablet you could develop for other tablets on.
Surface Pro will also support SATA and will likely have a full-blown SSD. Storage I/O on tablets and right there you have 20-30x the throughput of the shitty cheap NAND controllers that tablets universally have. That halved battery life is because the Surface Pro's real-computer spec will wipe the floor with anything ARM based.
I've bult my own PCs for 20+ years, and I can't remeber ever really caring about moving the CPU from one motherboard to another. I shop for them as a matched pair, and assuming they work when I get them, I've alays replace both if problems developed later down the road (because a few years later, when you're on the far side of the failure "bathtub curve", you might as well replace both).
I don't see having to buy the CPU soldered to the motherboard as an impediment really - as long as I can swap out the heatsink and other components.
If your a PC guy over those years you must have had motherboards fail or become flaky, but the CPU to be perfectly fine when you swapped it in to one of your spares? Or even the other way around. You'd probably have a spare board of any socket kicking around right? Soldering down the CPU means loss of this troubleshooting you'd be RMAing the whole board, not just dropping in a spare with the same CPU. If it's out of warranty you'll be stuck with a bigger cost.
It's not just about upgrading and overclockers nervous about bricking a whole board when they roast a CPU, you'd lose that convenience of this kind of troubleshooting.
Of course, the practical reason is sockets suck - impedance matching problems, bad connections (your PC depends on the working of nearly 1200 pieces of metal pressing against 1200 other pieces of metal. If one of those is slightly oxidized or doesn't exert enough pressure, your PC can crash), and plenty more other things. Solder joints are far more reliable.
Try 2011 pins in Intel's latest and greatest overpriced high end socket. You're right. Mainboard manufactuers might solder Broadwell CPUs to their own package or some sort of daughterboards even. They could agree on a standard or they could even have their own proprietary socket and sell upgrade kits to enthusiasts (ASUS, Gigabyte might do this).
Besides, Intel changes the sockets of their chips every generation anyway.
Intentionally preparing us for the day of soldered down CPUs? I think their attitude has been clear for a while. They've already changed socket on a whim, and now have a confusing range of several different sockets... compared to AMD which has been much more friendly to both enthusiasts and motherboard manufacturers. AMD has backwards and even limited forwards (!) compatibility with their AM2/2+ and AM3 CPUs.
Your logic is pretty absurd. If I had patents for using mouse and keyboard combination for desktop computers and then sued the hell out of everyone who dared using it, would you also just shrug and tell them to be innovative? If Microsoft sued everyone for using right-click context menus and double-click, would you agree with them and again propose linux, Apple etc to be innovative and come up with something else?
Some ideas cannot be easily circumvented because their alternatives are just too impractical. (Like typing a word document without a keyboard.)
Sony stores opened long before Apple Stores. First Sony Style store opened in the early 1980s even. There were many Sony retail stores worldwide before the first Apple store in 2001.
Apple directly took the idea of opening it's own one-brand direct retail store from Sony.
Erm no, it's contemporary interior design language, common shop fittings, and there are only so many ways to lay out shop floor for maximum wallet-lightening effect. It's just conventional looking. The interior has to be minimal to draw eyes to the small gadgets on display and emphasis any other product messages in store. Etc. You converge on stores of certain kinds looking similar and having similar floor layouts. It's not just the way it's done, it's what you need to do to have your store appeal to customers - has to look like other stores of the same kind. The Sony Style store in my local area looks like this too, along with some of the mobile phone retailers.
Apple's designs and layout is so minimal, bare and generic it's difficult not to copy it to some extent. It also means they have no claim over something too simple.
If you try to justify the space you rented with the few products you sell in your one-brand store you also converge on similar looks different only in what, some colour choices, floor tile pattern.
Slashdot Mirror
Rainforests make 20% of our oxygen. And we let people cut that shit down?
Your preference for 24/96 audio as a listener is entirely due to the placebo effect.
Well, in all fairness, listeners may actually hear perceptible differences between 24/96 and 16/44.1 audio sources due to different mastering, but of course that says nothing about whether they can actually tell the difference between the two bitrates when everything else is equal.
This article is a pretty good explanation of why 16/44.1 is as good as anyone needs for playback.
There's plenty of articles from "experts" on why 16/44.1 is all you need, however these kind of opinions risk being being wrong: What about actual data? I see little solid data where the hypothesis has been put to the test.
I think the point is, some say 24/96 survives lossy compression better, it also produces less artifacts as the higher frequencies have less data points to describe their waveform. Perhaps some won't hear the difference in uncompressed audio, but I bet some can hear the difference in compressed.
Sony already makes and sells a SmartWatch. This seems to have gone completely unnoticed by the blogosphere, who keep using terms like "first to market" and "new category" and don't seem to be able to use a Google search to see whats already out there. Sony's Smartwatch also is the benchmark that Apple will copy pretty much everything from, including the way it syncs with your existing Android phone and bluetooth gadgets. (You can bet it will do less cost too much, just prettier, and sell millions more).
Apple seems to pick on poor Sony, they already stole Sony's idea with a one-brand retail outlet. (Sony Style stores opened in the 1980s - decades before Apple Stores). Apple's original iPhone was almost as similar to some of Sony's touch screen concept phone, that you you wonder. Now they'll copy the Smartwatch.
Samsung has some very cool display tech though, such as flexible screens - there's a damn good reason why they aren't in Sammy's new phones (S4 etc). I would put good money on Smartwatches being the first use of these screens and that's where production resources are being directed right now.
Unless Apple uses AMOLED for their watch, Samsungs going to be the winner.
All that asside, the author of TFA seems to be under a very specific individually targeted attack, rather than some kind of automated attack.
My tip: LONG passwords. make them really really long.
Many people think they are clever with symbols and numbers by doing something like P@55w0rd.
I can't think how many times I've seen something like that for some kind of critical system.
Avoid using guessable common $ubs!tutions for l3tt3rs and numbers, along with 123, 666, 69 etc etc.
You can't spend your way out of debt, it's ludicrous
Isn't this what every start-up company that accepts venture capital is trying to do?
This article isn't talking about spending on food stamps or fallacious broken windows. It's talking about spending on fundamental research - the kind chase-the-quarter capitalism doesn't do very well - so as to yield a return in new industries to create employment years and decades from now. This isn't that much different than what start-ups are trying to do, except the government can think on a much longer scale - something that I'm glad a government can take time to do.
I would have just said spending is the only way out of debt. (Where spending = investment)
Discredited does not equal falsified. He hasn't been discredited, in fact there's an absence of results showing the claims as falsified. This doesn't automatically mean it won't turn out to be crackpot science but there is not much to demonstrate that it is. In contrast Cold Fusion was fairly well falsified quite quickly.
... http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blackbird_(land_yacht) ... and it worked and went 2.8x windspeed even (!) ... repeatedly. What's more the theory was sound all along, no change of the laws of physics was needed.
This actually smacks of a recent cock-up by skeptics, I cite thus:
Many credentialed aerodynamicists (in chorus with most of the internet's "experts") swore black and blue that a wind powered land vehicle could not sail dead down wind faster than the wind (DDWFTTW). It would violate the laws of physics it said. So someone built the thing
Indeed, boldly, emdrive are not claiming any physical laws are violated, that any new physics is required or that any well tested institution is being challenged. When was the last time you heard a antigravity/cold fusion/levitating sasquatch crystal skull claim do that kind of thing? It's a little encouraging no?
Ultimately I think skepticism not backed by proof is just as crazy and as the opposite with the same amount of proof. I wonder if it is just a different manifestation of the same underlying cognitive & personality problem. We'll have to wait and see for real-world results. They'll build it, and it will work or it wont!
I agree, most of my iPhone using friends love their gadgets, they are good, but then for every one of those I probably know someone who's switched to a Android now. Including myself going from a iPhone 4 to a Galaxy S2. The most surprising thing is they point out a better GUI, say it's just as easy to use, and absolutely love the ability to personalise your phone. Remember it wasn't even possible to set the iOS homescreen wallpaper until iOS 4 was released!
So when you press the shift/caps key on an Android on-screen keyboard, the letters on the keys change - which is a delightful feature. iOS, they are always capitals.
Woz understates the problem. Apple has been copying features pioneered on Android for some time now, and anything Apple original is coming out a little half-baked. Note that Siri wasn't an Apple original but a company they bought. Copy and paste, multi-tasking, the notification drawer, it's all better on Android and has been for some time. You couldn't even set a homescreen wallpaper until iOS 4. iOS stopped being good when Apple chases ever more revenue and half-baked sidetracks like Siri and their own maps. They are pouring a lot of effort in to hardware too but perhaps not pushing iOS ahead.
iOS still has it's good points for some users, but generally speaking it's so far behind it's not funny.
If you're a vegetarian for that specific reason it would be quite hypocritical to eat "animal-free meat" that was developed from the suffering of all those poor cuddly cows, mice and rats...
Seems like an extension of the sunk cost fallacy - if the cost has already been paid, refusing to use the product doesn't really make sense.
TBH, this is something that really winds me up about vegitarians - If you want to reduce animal suffering by not eating meat, or reduce environmental impact, then fair enough. But refusing to eat anything that has been grilled on the same bars as meat makes no sense - no extra suffering is going to happen because someone didn't wash the grill pan between cooking their bacon and your vegi-burgers. Similarly, flatly refusing to eat some meat that is only going to be thrown away if no one eats it is completely nonsensical. The best way to reduce your environmental impact is to use as much of the produce as possible, rather than refusing to eat left over meat and grilling up some vegi-burgers instead!
Some people don't like the taste? I hate mushrooms, and I can taste them on my (sweet sweet) bacon if they are cooked on the same grill. I can therefore imagine for people who don't regularly eat meat the flavor contamination is highly noticeable.
The amount of grain and water it takes to raise the meat eaten by Americans alone could feed everyone in the entire world.
Most of the grains we feed to livestock aren't worth a shit to humans from a nutritional point of view. I wish every stupid hippie who propagates this bullshit would go out, pick up a couple bales of alfalfa, and try actually surviving on it. Doesn't work so fucking well, because you're a human and not a goddamn cow.
Look, out in your back yard all that grass? Goats can get fat eating that stuff. So do us all a favor and next time you feel like spreading this type of FUD, go cut your lawn and put the trimmings on your plate, and try living off that.
THIS was modded insightful? Where did you get humans eating grass from? He said "Grain and water" ... which is the kind of staple that civilizations subsisted on for thousands of years before our rather meat-rich era. Hell some say there are grains are more nutritious and ideal for human consumption than meat (Quinoa, Chia).
Nevermind that humans can absolutely eat a totally a meat-free diet anyway, and millions do, which can indeed include lots of leafy matter, raw even. Heck, Broccolli is about 7% protein. Heard of Veganism or even the Paleo diet? Our guts are even adapted to this diet more then they are our modern western diet.
There cannot be any proof, it is obviously impossible to distinguish between "simulated" and "real" reality
Not that obvious to me. You're assuming the simulators have made a perfect simulation, which they may not have done. Or they could leave deliberate clues, if they so wished, which would help us distinguish simulation and reality. Of course, on a broader philisophical point, you could argue there would still be no difference - reality could be a simulation and still be real.
http://www.technologyreview.com/view/429561/the-measurement-that-would-reveal-the-universe-as-a-computer-simulation/
Hi there, You can stop philosophizing, I just deleted that guy from the simulation, he was getting annoying. Incidentally, if you subscribe to the specific flavor of mass delusion you guys call 'Christianity' and are wondering when the rapture will happen, it'll come the day I finally slip up while combining wild-cards and the 'rm' command on my Simulatron 6000 (TM).
Sincerely, Your lord and cereator.
I get it you created everything, but you running all your commands as root is really a huge risk!!
Is this proof of a simulated universe?
At least we can establish the universe wasn't written in C
Your hands are full of very small bones. It's very easy to break your hand by punching something hard and dense (such as a skull or face for instance).
If you want to strike someone in the face, it's smarter to use other parts of the body such as your knee, elbow or to use an open hand strike (such as a palm strike). That way you have the edge of a very long bone delivering the blow.
Pick up a stick or a rock. If the article had read, we evolved tool use from weapons then yes. By that benchmark we are the most violent species.
Not for jacking off?
No, that's the current stage of evolution.
I don't see speculation anywhere in the scientific method.
You don't? Perhaps you should reflect on the meaning of the word "hypothesis."
A scientific hypothesis quite a different thing to the usual definition of speculation. Conjecture is a better fit to what you mean.
The scientists speculate that the little red star harbors a more remote planet whose gravity stirs up the belt's small objects, causing them to collide and spew the dust that Herschel has discerned.
This seems plausible if the frost line hypothesis is correct. In that case you would always expect to have gas giants stirring up matter on the edge of a solar system. The problem is that many gas giants have been found very close to stars and inside the frost line (the Hot Jupiters). Until there is a good explanation for the Hot Jupiters, I don't think we can just blindly expect to find gas giants beyond the frost lines stirring up asteroids.
This skewing of the stats is because "hot jupiters" are particularly easy to detect since they have such a strong influence on parent stars. It's just the limitations of our current ability to spot planets around other stars. There isn't enough data to suggest Hot Jupiters are unusually common. I'd guess they are more likely the result of a rogue body messing up a star system than any big mistake we've made in modelling planetary system formation.
Maybe he's trolling to see who will admit that they know BASIC.
Pretty much every programmer I know's first taste of programming was BASIC.
Can your iPad run Eclipse or Visual Studio? Or the real Photoshop and not the super crippled lite version? Or the real Matlab?
Does it have a full USB 3.0 port? Can you connect a Nexus to it and debug your Android app that you're developing in Eclipse on it?
Can you run two applications side by side on it? Like a chat or twitter client beside your browser?
Does it have a proper digitizer to take accurate notes on? Does it have a SDXC slot to add or swap 64 or 128GB microsd cards?
My emphasis. Oh shit: I hadn't thought of that. As an Android nerd that's reason enough for me to get one of these as my next tablet. Ironically this is a tablet you could develop for other tablets on. Surface Pro will also support SATA and will likely have a full-blown SSD. Storage I/O on tablets and right there you have 20-30x the throughput of the shitty cheap NAND controllers that tablets universally have. That halved battery life is because the Surface Pro's real-computer spec will wipe the floor with anything ARM based.
I've bult my own PCs for 20+ years, and I can't remeber ever really caring about moving the CPU from one motherboard to another. I shop for them as a matched pair, and assuming they work when I get them, I've alays replace both if problems developed later down the road (because a few years later, when you're on the far side of the failure "bathtub curve", you might as well replace both).
I don't see having to buy the CPU soldered to the motherboard as an impediment really - as long as I can swap out the heatsink and other components.
If your a PC guy over those years you must have had motherboards fail or become flaky, but the CPU to be perfectly fine when you swapped it in to one of your spares? Or even the other way around. You'd probably have a spare board of any socket kicking around right? Soldering down the CPU means loss of this troubleshooting you'd be RMAing the whole board, not just dropping in a spare with the same CPU. If it's out of warranty you'll be stuck with a bigger cost. It's not just about upgrading and overclockers nervous about bricking a whole board when they roast a CPU, you'd lose that convenience of this kind of troubleshooting.
Of course, the practical reason is sockets suck - impedance matching problems, bad connections (your PC depends on the working of nearly 1200 pieces of metal pressing against 1200 other pieces of metal. If one of those is slightly oxidized or doesn't exert enough pressure, your PC can crash), and plenty more other things. Solder joints are far more reliable.
Try 2011 pins in Intel's latest and greatest overpriced high end socket. You're right. Mainboard manufactuers might solder Broadwell CPUs to their own package or some sort of daughterboards even. They could agree on a standard or they could even have their own proprietary socket and sell upgrade kits to enthusiasts (ASUS, Gigabyte might do this).
Besides, Intel changes the sockets of their chips every generation anyway.
Intentionally preparing us for the day of soldered down CPUs? I think their attitude has been clear for a while. They've already changed socket on a whim, and now have a confusing range of several different sockets... compared to AMD which has been much more friendly to both enthusiasts and motherboard manufacturers. AMD has backwards and even limited forwards (!) compatibility with their AM2/2+ and AM3 CPUs.
Soylent batteries?
It's people. Soylent-ion is made out of people! Tell everybody! Soylent-ion is people!
Your logic is pretty absurd. If I had patents for using mouse and keyboard combination for desktop computers and then sued the hell out of everyone who dared using it, would you also just shrug and tell them to be innovative? If Microsoft sued everyone for using right-click context menus and double-click, would you agree with them and again propose linux, Apple etc to be innovative and come up with something else?
Some ideas cannot be easily circumvented because their alternatives are just too impractical. (Like typing a word document without a keyboard.)
Exactly, that shit should not be patent-able.
Sony stores opened long before Apple Stores. First Sony Style store opened in the early 1980s even. There were many Sony retail stores worldwide before the first Apple store in 2001.
Apple directly took the idea of opening it's own one-brand direct retail store from Sony.
Now get off lawn etc etc
Erm no, it's contemporary interior design language, common shop fittings, and there are only so many ways to lay out shop floor for maximum wallet-lightening effect. It's just conventional looking. The interior has to be minimal to draw eyes to the small gadgets on display and emphasis any other product messages in store. Etc. You converge on stores of certain kinds looking similar and having similar floor layouts. It's not just the way it's done, it's what you need to do to have your store appeal to customers - has to look like other stores of the same kind. The Sony Style store in my local area looks like this too, along with some of the mobile phone retailers.
Apple's designs and layout is so minimal, bare and generic it's difficult not to copy it to some extent. It also means they have no claim over something too simple.
If you try to justify the space you rented with the few products you sell in your one-brand store you also converge on similar looks different only in what, some colour choices, floor tile pattern.
You know your technological civilization has reached a certain level when you send a robot to another planet to shoot shit with fricken lasers.
Early days yet, can only sizzle a bit of rock. Today, some scientific samples, tomorrow the galaxy!