I think it's the rapid adoption that's the problem, not the smartphone itself.
If in some alternate timeline smartphones had taken 20 years to become affordable enough for mass adoption, we probably would have merged them into our lives differently and more thoughtfully, better avoiding or adapting to some of the negatives associated with them.
But instead, they were adopted by nearly everyone simultaneously, along with a land-rush of novel social applications, and we're not necessarily done sorting out what are good uses and not so good uses, in addition to re-structuring our social habits to align with the capabilities of a smartphone.
It's kind of like liquor and indigenous populations that have never been exposed to it. Europeans and other alcohol-informed cultures had millennia to adapt to alcohol consumption, and for the most part have -- structuring social rituals and institutions to more or less train people on how to handle alcohol. Indigenous populations had none of these things and then their culture adopted alcohol all at once, and it was disastrous for them, as you might expect any addictive and toxic drug given to an uninformed population might be.
I think in some ways it's all true at the same time.
A lot of this is just vilifying your opponents supporters, both to discredit your opponent and to undermine their supporters' claim on resources.
But it's not like the claims are wholly baseless. How many generations of inner city poor have come out of out-of-wedlock parenting? How much crime in the inner city is the byproduct of gang participation and toxic cultural values that their own community leaders refuse to acknowledge or repudiate?
On the other hand, their defenders have points like generations of racial discrimination, unfair policing, inadequate schooling and lack of civic investment.
In rural communities you also have a lot of investment in low-rent "traditional values" which wind up being things like science denial and religious hucksterism both in the community and being enforced as "educational" policy. Nor are they free of the self-inflicted problems of alcoholism or drug use, either.
On the other hand, a lot of rural communities have seen their economic base go from thriving to crashing in time periods that really no one could have predicted or could have adapted to. If you suck some large plurality of the economic base out of a rural region, there often isn't a fix for it besides closing the towns and mass-relocating the population. If there's any "fault", its in the hands of local civic leaders for not purposefully diversifying the local economy, a difficult task when it needs to be done at the crest of economic prosperity (when the big plant was setting output records), when nobody understands it could all end and when diversification may have failed due to lack of labor or access to markets.
And there are weird dichotomies in cities, too. Islands of prosperity occupied by elites in good housing and with good jobs but which are closed to outsiders. I can think of a couple of areas in my city with a couple of square miles of million dollar homes with impoverished areas within 3 miles in nearly every direction. It's worse in some suburban areas which start to resemble dynastic clans, generations of elites whose children get high quality educations and use their parents influence to get good jobs, a closed loop cycle.
I don't miss the size constraint nature of floppies, but I do miss the portable environment nature of floppies.
It was awesome to have my own little box of 5.25 floppies that I could bring from home and then in computer class, boot the Apple ][ with my own disks and utilities.
I kind of wish it was more practical to do this with Windows. Of course there are close workalikes, (RDP, web based environments, Windows to go, etc) but nothing with the elegant simplicity of just booting the dumb thing from a 128 GB USB stick and using it as normal, and then carting it off.
It seems like when big-name companies build new office space the people at the top of the organization value HUGE open spaces for their dramatic value. I've walked into wholly owned office buildings where the main entry way is like walking into a cathedral, a giant mostly empty space meant to make a big statement to visitors (possibly even the same psychological impact cathedrals were meant to have to peasants).
At Apple the building is so large that they have to have the "main cathedral" for the really big impact, and then mini-cathedrals for various major departments and to provide a secondary impact for people having meetings with specific departments or who didn't use the main entrance.
The Pentagon comparison is interesting -- I got a tour inside last year, and there's like a ton of space used for what amounts to a freaking mall *and* a mall-sized food court, so that they fit even more people is surprising. Combine this with the huge amount of security, where lots of areas are extra-secured and hence totally walled off, which I'm sure results in a large amount of space inefficiency and Apple's space seems REALLY ostentatious.
It seems obvious that "anonymizing data" and "targeting advertising" is a paradox. If it's effectively anonymized, it wouldn't be useful for targeting. That they're able to do targeting means that it's not really anonymous.
I think its basically going to follow the PC pricing trajectory, but more slowly, as the phone makers control the entire form factor and user interface because its a contained product in a single package, so they can tweak any element of it endlessly and string out the perception of difference longer.
But long term, I think phones are already hitting the point of maximum useful utility and that the past couple of years has been nothing more than nibbling at the margins to create the perception of change. Most people are judging their phones based on responsiveness to UI changes (app switches, etc) or other performance metrics and don't believe that it's slowed enough to warrant a change.
Phone makers may have even been kind of undermined by the adoption of LTE in some ways, as LTE is fast enough to make even bloated pages load reasonably well, making device performance step increases seem less worthwhile. Now that network performance has plateaued (until the widespread adoption of 5G), phone makers aren't able to claim network improvements as device performance improvements where they had overlapped in the past -- your new iPhone N+1 may have seemed faster less because of CPU improvement and more because it had a better radio capable of using the carrier's network better (channels, speed, whatever).
Technical attacks on the integrity of the voting system almost seem like acts of desperation when the usual strategies of misleading voters through coordinated disinformation campaigns stop working.
The last election seemed to be an example of coordinated propaganda campaigns failing, despite presenting relentless anti-Trump messages (and Trump's own hapless behavior) failing to produce the desired outcome.
Part of me thinks it wasn't a repudiation of media manipulation per se, but that its effect was too localized on the subset of voters likely to vote Clinton, leading to a collective overconfidence. I can't decide if it was simply not supplying swing voters with enough empty reassurances that their issues were important (guns, immigration, etc) or whether the overconfidence led them to believe they didn't need to sway those voters at all.
But maybe we're reaching the stage where the "political message" is so disconnected from the voters and the structured and coordinated nature of the messaging so obvious and transparent that technical attacks on the voting system are the next logical step in assuring control without completely destroying the apparent democratic nature of the system.
At the same time, I can't discount the effects of coordinated disinformation campaigns disrupting enough voters to destabilize public opinion enough to swing close elections. Unfortunately the only way to fight that is to restore neutral credibility to the media and its constellation of experts. Unfortunately, as a collective they seem to suffer from a long-term campaign of ideological capture, eroding the public's willingness to accept their traditional role as filters and credibility validators.
My guess is the East Bloc countries all had primitive telephone networks until the fall of communism, and cheap and fast data connections are mostly the result of a telecommunications networks re-built from the ground up post-communism.
I can't decide if TFA is just an example of people pining for what they've lost, like old people wishing it was the 1950s again, or if its just wishful thinking.
I think the new network they wanted was the pre-web internet and even with big bucks from government and universities and a handful of private companies who essentially weren't paying attention to the resources being given away, it was kind of barely held together. Its small and cohesive user base gave it the shared values that made it congenial.
Sadly you kind of have to face the fact that its the commercialization of the Internet is whats allowed it to grow, and interconnecting more users is both a blessing and a curse, as the loss of cohesion leads to the loss in shared values.
There's no way to rebuild it from the ground up with wifi and ad-hoc technology. You might be able to build a new network on top of the old one, but I'm skeptical it can be done.
The larger problem is that the signaling value of a degree has come to greatly outweigh the vocational value of the education it represents to the point that the education has become nearly irrelevant, rendering it merely a signaling device.
We're literally requiring many people to spend thousands of dollars learning irrelevant information just to show that they're willing to do it. It's almost like an introduction to corporate insanity, where they will take jobs that require relentless volumes of busy work (TPS reports, say) for no apparent purpose.
Marine VHF already has a lot of this built in in the newer models.
"Distress" buttons that send your GPS location and your MMSI ID which tells the Coasties who you are, your emergency contacts, and the name of your vessel.
The larger problem is that there's no requirement to have a radio that meets this spec or an MMSI number or have your MMSI and radio paired.
IMHO, the Coast Guard should start mandating this stuff and any vessel undergoing a boarding safety check should have this checked right after the check for life vests and fire extinguishers and before checking that the macerator discharge seacock is secure. The latter seems to be their most favorite "safety" item.
Violators could be given a "fix it" ticket where they have to prove compliance by updating to a modern VHF radio with GPS and MMSI registration.
Don't forget Marcus Licinius Crassus, whose estimated wealth in current money was something like $190 billion. So rich at the time he was able to use his own money to raise an army to fight Spartacus during the Servile Rebellion. Gates, Bezos, etc, are *rich*, but when they're able to personally fund the Afghanistan war they'd be Crassus rich.
One thing I've never seen is a measure of past era people's wealth as a ratio of their wealth to the economies of their era. I suspect that many of them would have been relatively richer than contemporary era barons. Bezos is super rich, but the economy compared to Rockefeller's era is vastly larger.
IMHO, USB 3.1 @ 10 Gbit/sec is already fast enough to do a lot of useful work that now "requires" more expensive interfaces. I honestly don't see why even LTO-6 tape drives or array shelves couldn't be connected via USB, at least from a pure performance perspective provided that you were willing to live with 10 Gbit/second as your throughput limit, which, honestly, shouldn't be that big of a limitation considering that it bests low-end SAS and gigabit Ethernet connectivity in many cases.
I think the biggest roadblocks to adoption of USB3 for higher performance applications is threefold:
One is simply the ingrained notion that USB is for mice and keyboards and syncing your phone, it's not for "high performance data", regardless of how much throughput it actually can deliver. So device makers continue to dedicate their products to more traditional and expensive interfaces like SAS or proprietary ports.
The other is shit software support. My guess is that many OSs really haven't audited their code to support very high data rate USB devices, which results in performance problems (slowdowns, random disconnects, etc). This feeds back into the first problem, that it's not a big boy interconnect.
The third is probably profit margin. Making the device more expensive probably results in a higher amount of profit.
I think there is relentless denial because "AI" is defined as HAL-9000 level sophistication.
IMHO, AI will develop from the "expert systems" we have now and it may not be completely apparent what the difference is between "AI" and "expert systems" when the largest deciding factor is how much or how little autonomy they have.
I think calling the risks from AI fantasy because we don't have HAL-9000 yet is a mistake because what is effectively AI may not look like HAL-9000.
I think it's useful to the extent that the WiFi "signal strength" meter is 3 bars of meaningless information, and I'm often in a location where I get "1 bar" WiFi. I *could* let the app time out, swipe around to turn off WiFi (and forget to turn it back on) and then just use cellular, but it seems to me that assist prevents most data timeouts and gets me the useful information I'm looking for without a bunch of manual intervention.
Of course, it's mostly when I'm doing something that requires a small amount of data so the "extra" cellular data is really insignificant. And in fact, the extra cellular data used by WiFi assist is probably less than the extra cellular data consumed by forgetting WiFi is off and being in an area of good coverage (like at home) and then consuming a bunch of data without realizing you're slurping cellular.
Of course, I'm not a huge consumer of video on the phone with primary access to WiFi on always-marginal networks. I could see where those people get burned, but for ordinary app-type data access, I think assist is a smart feature.
My wife is a great example -- she was majorly spiking data usage, and I figured out she had "auto join" enabled and was just smart enough to turn off WiFi to get data service, and never turned it back on. I disabled auto-join for her and her data usage actually went down as she stopped connecting to shitty hotspots and stopped turning WiFi off as often.
I think the researcher should have at minimum done some kind of geomapping of the IPs responding to his C&C domain to see if there was a geographic pattern to the infections.
This kind of sounds like the work of a skilled amateur who didn't intend for this to spread much, like they were targeting a narrow group or place, maybe even one person and it just happened to spread but was limited by only spreading through USB drives or something.
For all we know, it could have just been a proof of concept somebody wrote and then forgot about.
The role of the Constitution's free speech rights is to limit the ability of the government to infringe on speech. It doesn't have any influence on speech not involving the government. So private parties are free to negotiate contracts limiting what they will say and to whom, and thus you have NDAs and non-disparagement clauses and even civil settlements where the parties agree not to disclose the settlement terms.
I think there's a more general civil rights argument to be made that there should be limits on corporations ability to limit free speech in some circumstances.
Employer-employee relationships are inherently unbalanced and somewhat coercive, so I would bar non-disparagement agreements. You're not required by force of law to sign them, but for most people not signing them has substantial economic and career penalties which reduces most people's freedom to act.
I would also require that large public spaces that are privately owned (like malls) should be required to accommodate public protest. We're rapidly losing truly public spaces ("the town square") and replacing them with privately owned versions of them. More nefariously, these large developments are often underwritten by local government in some way (bonds, TIF, paying for infrastructure upgrades like roads and sewers).
And not only will you have the CPU overhead of a routing protocol to manage the mesh, now you also need a security structure to handle joining the mesh, validating routing updates, validating the inevitable certificate hierarchy involve in securing everything and so on.
Mesh networking seems to run counter to the trend towards very low power when you simultaneously need a sophisticated routing algorithm to keep your mesh up and forwarding traffic.
If anything, the loss of the home button will be a bummer:
They've reached the point where they're just making "courageous" changes which benefit their own assembly & engineering but lack significant user value and don't solve obvious consumer problems with the device. Case in point, the headphone jack.
My guess is they are on the cusp of a "Windows 8 Start Menu" kind of change where the fuck up the design enough to seriously damage their user base.
If Apple is releasing both a 7S model in incremental fashion and a higher-end model, how does scarcity of parts become a problem for Apple?
They can probably already jack up the price of the 7S and get away with it, and presumably the 8 (or whatever it will be called) can be priced wherever their economists/MBAs/wonks think it needs to be priced to limit demand to what their suppliers can provide.
IMHO, their larger challenge is create an "8" that has enough appeal to attract enough buyers at this price point without creating "Apple iPhone 8 FAIL" headlines through weak demand. Haven't upgrade purchases already slowed, as even 2-3 revision behind models are still good performers? It's hard to see too many people thinking they need a $1500 phone when the $900 one is already a marginal upgrade.
It makes you wonder just what the business model was to begin with and whether it was ever anything more than a feint to goad incumbent ISPs to enhance their service offerings, especially in light of all the public speculation they around "who's city is next?"
"Focusing" on wireless may be just another attempt to re-create the same situation with wireless, although this seems harder as anyone can lay fiber, but not everyone has spectrum and arbitrarily building out wireless networks is more difficult because of this.
I wonder if Google fiber had other service tiers or was more friendly to business use/small-scale hosting if it would have had more uptake, but this still asks where's the business in providing the service and it tends to run counter to Google's general mission of getting everything in one of their cloud offerings.
One problem with the energy balance argument is the balance part. 10 kcal per day surplus over 10 years is 36,500 kcal -- does that result in someone morbidly obese? Would the same amount as a deficit result in famine-like thinness?
If it did, then maintaining any body weight would be extremely difficult and diets would either be extremely trivial (a 100 kcal deficit over 2 years should result in extreme weight loss) *and* extremely difficult, since we would need extremely accurate measures of energy consumption to regulate energy intake correctly.
The more likely explanation is that the body has a regulation mechanism where both deficits and surpluses are regulated in a way that requires either sustained, major energy consumption, major energy intake reductions, or both, to affect weight. And experience suggests that the regulation system works so well that even doing this seldom results in significant weight reduction (or results in side effects of lack of vigor that it is abandoned).
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I think it's the rapid adoption that's the problem, not the smartphone itself.
If in some alternate timeline smartphones had taken 20 years to become affordable enough for mass adoption, we probably would have merged them into our lives differently and more thoughtfully, better avoiding or adapting to some of the negatives associated with them.
But instead, they were adopted by nearly everyone simultaneously, along with a land-rush of novel social applications, and we're not necessarily done sorting out what are good uses and not so good uses, in addition to re-structuring our social habits to align with the capabilities of a smartphone.
It's kind of like liquor and indigenous populations that have never been exposed to it. Europeans and other alcohol-informed cultures had millennia to adapt to alcohol consumption, and for the most part have -- structuring social rituals and institutions to more or less train people on how to handle alcohol. Indigenous populations had none of these things and then their culture adopted alcohol all at once, and it was disastrous for them, as you might expect any addictive and toxic drug given to an uninformed population might be.
I think in some ways it's all true at the same time.
A lot of this is just vilifying your opponents supporters, both to discredit your opponent and to undermine their supporters' claim on resources.
But it's not like the claims are wholly baseless. How many generations of inner city poor have come out of out-of-wedlock parenting? How much crime in the inner city is the byproduct of gang participation and toxic cultural values that their own community leaders refuse to acknowledge or repudiate?
On the other hand, their defenders have points like generations of racial discrimination, unfair policing, inadequate schooling and lack of civic investment.
In rural communities you also have a lot of investment in low-rent "traditional values" which wind up being things like science denial and religious hucksterism both in the community and being enforced as "educational" policy. Nor are they free of the self-inflicted problems of alcoholism or drug use, either.
On the other hand, a lot of rural communities have seen their economic base go from thriving to crashing in time periods that really no one could have predicted or could have adapted to. If you suck some large plurality of the economic base out of a rural region, there often isn't a fix for it besides closing the towns and mass-relocating the population. If there's any "fault", its in the hands of local civic leaders for not purposefully diversifying the local economy, a difficult task when it needs to be done at the crest of economic prosperity (when the big plant was setting output records), when nobody understands it could all end and when diversification may have failed due to lack of labor or access to markets.
And there are weird dichotomies in cities, too. Islands of prosperity occupied by elites in good housing and with good jobs but which are closed to outsiders. I can think of a couple of areas in my city with a couple of square miles of million dollar homes with impoverished areas within 3 miles in nearly every direction. It's worse in some suburban areas which start to resemble dynastic clans, generations of elites whose children get high quality educations and use their parents influence to get good jobs, a closed loop cycle.
I figure both of these revolutionary technologies will hit the market at the same time.
I don't miss the size constraint nature of floppies, but I do miss the portable environment nature of floppies.
It was awesome to have my own little box of 5.25 floppies that I could bring from home and then in computer class, boot the Apple ][ with my own disks and utilities.
I kind of wish it was more practical to do this with Windows. Of course there are close workalikes, (RDP, web based environments, Windows to go, etc) but nothing with the elegant simplicity of just booting the dumb thing from a 128 GB USB stick and using it as normal, and then carting it off.
It seems like when big-name companies build new office space the people at the top of the organization value HUGE open spaces for their dramatic value. I've walked into wholly owned office buildings where the main entry way is like walking into a cathedral, a giant mostly empty space meant to make a big statement to visitors (possibly even the same psychological impact cathedrals were meant to have to peasants).
At Apple the building is so large that they have to have the "main cathedral" for the really big impact, and then mini-cathedrals for various major departments and to provide a secondary impact for people having meetings with specific departments or who didn't use the main entrance.
The Pentagon comparison is interesting -- I got a tour inside last year, and there's like a ton of space used for what amounts to a freaking mall *and* a mall-sized food court, so that they fit even more people is surprising. Combine this with the huge amount of security, where lots of areas are extra-secured and hence totally walled off, which I'm sure results in a large amount of space inefficiency and Apple's space seems REALLY ostentatious.
It seems obvious that "anonymizing data" and "targeting advertising" is a paradox. If it's effectively anonymized, it wouldn't be useful for targeting. That they're able to do targeting means that it's not really anonymous.
I think its basically going to follow the PC pricing trajectory, but more slowly, as the phone makers control the entire form factor and user interface because its a contained product in a single package, so they can tweak any element of it endlessly and string out the perception of difference longer.
But long term, I think phones are already hitting the point of maximum useful utility and that the past couple of years has been nothing more than nibbling at the margins to create the perception of change. Most people are judging their phones based on responsiveness to UI changes (app switches, etc) or other performance metrics and don't believe that it's slowed enough to warrant a change.
Phone makers may have even been kind of undermined by the adoption of LTE in some ways, as LTE is fast enough to make even bloated pages load reasonably well, making device performance step increases seem less worthwhile. Now that network performance has plateaued (until the widespread adoption of 5G), phone makers aren't able to claim network improvements as device performance improvements where they had overlapped in the past -- your new iPhone N+1 may have seemed faster less because of CPU improvement and more because it had a better radio capable of using the carrier's network better (channels, speed, whatever).
Technical attacks on the integrity of the voting system almost seem like acts of desperation when the usual strategies of misleading voters through coordinated disinformation campaigns stop working.
The last election seemed to be an example of coordinated propaganda campaigns failing, despite presenting relentless anti-Trump messages (and Trump's own hapless behavior) failing to produce the desired outcome.
Part of me thinks it wasn't a repudiation of media manipulation per se, but that its effect was too localized on the subset of voters likely to vote Clinton, leading to a collective overconfidence. I can't decide if it was simply not supplying swing voters with enough empty reassurances that their issues were important (guns, immigration, etc) or whether the overconfidence led them to believe they didn't need to sway those voters at all.
But maybe we're reaching the stage where the "political message" is so disconnected from the voters and the structured and coordinated nature of the messaging so obvious and transparent that technical attacks on the voting system are the next logical step in assuring control without completely destroying the apparent democratic nature of the system.
At the same time, I can't discount the effects of coordinated disinformation campaigns disrupting enough voters to destabilize public opinion enough to swing close elections. Unfortunately the only way to fight that is to restore neutral credibility to the media and its constellation of experts. Unfortunately, as a collective they seem to suffer from a long-term campaign of ideological capture, eroding the public's willingness to accept their traditional role as filters and credibility validators.
My guess is the East Bloc countries all had primitive telephone networks until the fall of communism, and cheap and fast data connections are mostly the result of a telecommunications networks re-built from the ground up post-communism.
I can't decide if TFA is just an example of people pining for what they've lost, like old people wishing it was the 1950s again, or if its just wishful thinking.
I think the new network they wanted was the pre-web internet and even with big bucks from government and universities and a handful of private companies who essentially weren't paying attention to the resources being given away, it was kind of barely held together. Its small and cohesive user base gave it the shared values that made it congenial.
Sadly you kind of have to face the fact that its the commercialization of the Internet is whats allowed it to grow, and interconnecting more users is both a blessing and a curse, as the loss of cohesion leads to the loss in shared values.
There's no way to rebuild it from the ground up with wifi and ad-hoc technology. You might be able to build a new network on top of the old one, but I'm skeptical it can be done.
The larger problem is that the signaling value of a degree has come to greatly outweigh the vocational value of the education it represents to the point that the education has become nearly irrelevant, rendering it merely a signaling device.
We're literally requiring many people to spend thousands of dollars learning irrelevant information just to show that they're willing to do it. It's almost like an introduction to corporate insanity, where they will take jobs that require relentless volumes of busy work (TPS reports, say) for no apparent purpose.
Marine VHF already has a lot of this built in in the newer models.
"Distress" buttons that send your GPS location and your MMSI ID which tells the Coasties who you are, your emergency contacts, and the name of your vessel.
The larger problem is that there's no requirement to have a radio that meets this spec or an MMSI number or have your MMSI and radio paired.
IMHO, the Coast Guard should start mandating this stuff and any vessel undergoing a boarding safety check should have this checked right after the check for life vests and fire extinguishers and before checking that the macerator discharge seacock is secure. The latter seems to be their most favorite "safety" item.
Violators could be given a "fix it" ticket where they have to prove compliance by updating to a modern VHF radio with GPS and MMSI registration.
Don't forget Marcus Licinius Crassus, whose estimated wealth in current money was something like $190 billion. So rich at the time he was able to use his own money to raise an army to fight Spartacus during the Servile Rebellion. Gates, Bezos, etc, are *rich*, but when they're able to personally fund the Afghanistan war they'd be Crassus rich.
One thing I've never seen is a measure of past era people's wealth as a ratio of their wealth to the economies of their era. I suspect that many of them would have been relatively richer than contemporary era barons. Bezos is super rich, but the economy compared to Rockefeller's era is vastly larger.
Isn't that why they formed the WAACs and the other all-female auxiliary units of other branches during the war?
IMHO, USB 3.1 @ 10 Gbit/sec is already fast enough to do a lot of useful work that now "requires" more expensive interfaces. I honestly don't see why even LTO-6 tape drives or array shelves couldn't be connected via USB, at least from a pure performance perspective provided that you were willing to live with 10 Gbit/second as your throughput limit, which, honestly, shouldn't be that big of a limitation considering that it bests low-end SAS and gigabit Ethernet connectivity in many cases.
I think the biggest roadblocks to adoption of USB3 for higher performance applications is threefold:
One is simply the ingrained notion that USB is for mice and keyboards and syncing your phone, it's not for "high performance data", regardless of how much throughput it actually can deliver. So device makers continue to dedicate their products to more traditional and expensive interfaces like SAS or proprietary ports.
The other is shit software support. My guess is that many OSs really haven't audited their code to support very high data rate USB devices, which results in performance problems (slowdowns, random disconnects, etc). This feeds back into the first problem, that it's not a big boy interconnect.
The third is probably profit margin. Making the device more expensive probably results in a higher amount of profit.
I think there is relentless denial because "AI" is defined as HAL-9000 level sophistication.
IMHO, AI will develop from the "expert systems" we have now and it may not be completely apparent what the difference is between "AI" and "expert systems" when the largest deciding factor is how much or how little autonomy they have.
I think calling the risks from AI fantasy because we don't have HAL-9000 yet is a mistake because what is effectively AI may not look like HAL-9000.
I think it's useful to the extent that the WiFi "signal strength" meter is 3 bars of meaningless information, and I'm often in a location where I get "1 bar" WiFi. I *could* let the app time out, swipe around to turn off WiFi (and forget to turn it back on) and then just use cellular, but it seems to me that assist prevents most data timeouts and gets me the useful information I'm looking for without a bunch of manual intervention.
Of course, it's mostly when I'm doing something that requires a small amount of data so the "extra" cellular data is really insignificant. And in fact, the extra cellular data used by WiFi assist is probably less than the extra cellular data consumed by forgetting WiFi is off and being in an area of good coverage (like at home) and then consuming a bunch of data without realizing you're slurping cellular.
Of course, I'm not a huge consumer of video on the phone with primary access to WiFi on always-marginal networks. I could see where those people get burned, but for ordinary app-type data access, I think assist is a smart feature.
My wife is a great example -- she was majorly spiking data usage, and I figured out she had "auto join" enabled and was just smart enough to turn off WiFi to get data service, and never turned it back on. I disabled auto-join for her and her data usage actually went down as she stopped connecting to shitty hotspots and stopped turning WiFi off as often.
I think the researcher should have at minimum done some kind of geomapping of the IPs responding to his C&C domain to see if there was a geographic pattern to the infections.
This kind of sounds like the work of a skilled amateur who didn't intend for this to spread much, like they were targeting a narrow group or place, maybe even one person and it just happened to spread but was limited by only spreading through USB drives or something.
For all we know, it could have just been a proof of concept somebody wrote and then forgot about.
The role of the Constitution's free speech rights is to limit the ability of the government to infringe on speech. It doesn't have any influence on speech not involving the government. So private parties are free to negotiate contracts limiting what they will say and to whom, and thus you have NDAs and non-disparagement clauses and even civil settlements where the parties agree not to disclose the settlement terms.
I think there's a more general civil rights argument to be made that there should be limits on corporations ability to limit free speech in some circumstances.
Employer-employee relationships are inherently unbalanced and somewhat coercive, so I would bar non-disparagement agreements. You're not required by force of law to sign them, but for most people not signing them has substantial economic and career penalties which reduces most people's freedom to act.
I would also require that large public spaces that are privately owned (like malls) should be required to accommodate public protest. We're rapidly losing truly public spaces ("the town square") and replacing them with privately owned versions of them. More nefariously, these large developments are often underwritten by local government in some way (bonds, TIF, paying for infrastructure upgrades like roads and sewers).
And not only will you have the CPU overhead of a routing protocol to manage the mesh, now you also need a security structure to handle joining the mesh, validating routing updates, validating the inevitable certificate hierarchy involve in securing everything and so on.
Mesh networking seems to run counter to the trend towards very low power when you simultaneously need a sophisticated routing algorithm to keep your mesh up and forwarding traffic.
If anything, the loss of the home button will be a bummer:
They've reached the point where they're just making "courageous" changes which benefit their own assembly & engineering but lack significant user value and don't solve obvious consumer problems with the device. Case in point, the headphone jack.
My guess is they are on the cusp of a "Windows 8 Start Menu" kind of change where the fuck up the design enough to seriously damage their user base.
If Apple is releasing both a 7S model in incremental fashion and a higher-end model, how does scarcity of parts become a problem for Apple?
They can probably already jack up the price of the 7S and get away with it, and presumably the 8 (or whatever it will be called) can be priced wherever their economists/MBAs/wonks think it needs to be priced to limit demand to what their suppliers can provide.
IMHO, their larger challenge is create an "8" that has enough appeal to attract enough buyers at this price point without creating "Apple iPhone 8 FAIL" headlines through weak demand. Haven't upgrade purchases already slowed, as even 2-3 revision behind models are still good performers? It's hard to see too many people thinking they need a $1500 phone when the $900 one is already a marginal upgrade.
It makes you wonder just what the business model was to begin with and whether it was ever anything more than a feint to goad incumbent ISPs to enhance their service offerings, especially in light of all the public speculation they around "who's city is next?"
"Focusing" on wireless may be just another attempt to re-create the same situation with wireless, although this seems harder as anyone can lay fiber, but not everyone has spectrum and arbitrarily building out wireless networks is more difficult because of this.
I wonder if Google fiber had other service tiers or was more friendly to business use/small-scale hosting if it would have had more uptake, but this still asks where's the business in providing the service and it tends to run counter to Google's general mission of getting everything in one of their cloud offerings.
One problem with the energy balance argument is the balance part. 10 kcal per day surplus over 10 years is 36,500 kcal -- does that result in someone morbidly obese? Would the same amount as a deficit result in famine-like thinness?
If it did, then maintaining any body weight would be extremely difficult and diets would either be extremely trivial (a 100 kcal deficit over 2 years should result in extreme weight loss) *and* extremely difficult, since we would need extremely accurate measures of energy consumption to regulate energy intake correctly.
The more likely explanation is that the body has a regulation mechanism where both deficits and surpluses are regulated in a way that requires either sustained, major energy consumption, major energy intake reductions, or both, to affect weight. And experience suggests that the regulation system works so well that even doing this seldom results in significant weight reduction (or results in side effects of lack of vigor that it is abandoned).