However I would be more sympathetic to the pot movement in general if they were at least demonstrably more honest than the people who want to keep it outlawed.
Agreed. My beef with them is the whole "medical marijuana" movement. I don't have a problem with people smoking pot as long as no one gets hurt. I think it is a stupid thing to do but it's clearly less harmful than lots of other perfectly legal activities. I also don't have a problem with people using pot to treat legitimate medical conditions provided there is actual scientific (not anecdotal) trials evidence of efficacy for the condition. There seems to be clear evidence that pot can be a useful treatment in some rare cases. Key word there is "rare".
What I have a problem with is people falsely claiming medical conditions in vast numbers in order to get legal cover to use pot when they clearly have no actual medical condition. This describes the VAST majority of pot users. I have a huge problem with making policy based on lies. That's how pot got illegal in the first place. It irritates me that pot proponents think I'm stupid enough to believe transparently false stories that only pot can cure whatever made up ailment they have. They want to get high and they should own that fact. I see it as no worse (and probably safer) than someone drinking beer to get a buzz. If someone wants to get high and can do so responsibly without hurting anyone else I don't see that as a problem. Just don't pretend I'm dumb enough to believe that most pot users happen to suffer from rare medical conditions that only pot can treat. Go ahead and get it legalized and drop the ridiculous "medical marijuana" nonsense.
Products ARE worth what people are willing to pay for them. That is a cold stone fact. It's not a "dangerous way to think" because it's simply the truth. You fail to acknowledge that truth at your peril. It's like saying gravity is a dangerous way to think. That argument makes no sense because it implies that a law of nature is somehow a point of view. It isn't. Products are worth what the market will bear is in economics as close to a fundamental law of nature as you will find. It's right up there with supply and demand effects on price.
It is that kind of thinking that leads to 500% increases in the cost of life saving drugs just for the heck of it
Which is why most sane countries regulate the price of drugs to avoid that exact circumstance because health care is needed by everyone. And even in the crazy US we regulate a lot of markets (electricity, telephone, water, etc) where there is a risk of a utility abusing its monopoly on a product. The value of a product is what people are willing to pay for it. When the consequences of not paying for it are possible death, the value of that product can be very high if there is no alternative source for it.
So no, the value of something isn't what the market will bear, otherwise you'd be paying millions for clean air.
You are conflating some very different things. First off we ARE paying millions (billions really) for clean air as a society. The price of it is rolled into the cost of the products you buy. Those environmental regulations aren't free. (and that's not a bad thing either) Second, we are perfectly capable of regulating monopolies to keep them from getting out of hand. We do this all the time. Third, the value of something in economic terms absolutely IS what people are willing to pay for it. Some things are public goods and we have to be careful about ensuring they remain so but the value of fresh water or breathable air is tremendously high - we've just organized our legal system to ensure they are available to all.
I'm skeptical of the idea in general, but I can imagine at least three things the billionaire *might* be thinking that isn't completely, demonstrably stupid:
Stop right there, Everything about this is stupid and pointless. "Researching" something that has zero chance of ever being proven is basically fraud on the part of the researcher. Even if this alleged billionaire was serious and earnest about paying people to research this idea, taking the money of someone that foolish is effectively fraud. Anyone smart enough to actually look seriously into the idea should immediately see it for the nonsense that it is. It's effectively the a technology age version of "researching" whether heaven exists.
That doesn't logically follow. Maybe they didn't fix or find all the bugs. Maybe they left a door open. Maybe one day we're stumble on the right particle interactions to cause a buffer overflow and the whole thing halts and catches fire.
What you are implying is basically identical to the idea that Donkey Kong could step into the real world if the folks at Nintendo wrote a buffer overflow. It's a nonsense idea made by people who haven't thought the idea through and/or who flunked Philosophy 101. Unless you can come up with some actual evidence or a logical means by which the whole idea can be disproven then it is a silly idea. "There might be a bug" is not evidence, it's blind faith.
Many believe that we live in a computer simulation. But it takes a billionaire and his money to ask scientists to help break us out of the simulation.
Somebody has spent WAY too much time watching The Matrix and has lost their grip on reality.
But let's take it at face value and presume we are part of a simulation. There would be no way to "break out" of the simulation (whatever that means) because we don't exist outside of it. It would be akin to trying to bring Pac-Man to life in the real world. It's a non-sequitur.
Never mind the fact that there is zero evidence whatsoever to support the notion that we live in a simulation any more than there is evidence of a divine creator. It's a hypothesis that isn't falsifiable as far as anyone can tell and therefore it is outside the realm of science and firmly in the realm of religion.
Earlier this year, at Code Conference, Elon Musk said there's "one in billions" chance we're not living in a computer simulation.
Elon is a smart and talented entrepreneur but he's out of his depth on this one. His argument is basically naive extrapolation run amok combined with an argument by analogy.
While Yahoo is on the coals right now we'd be foolish to assume that the other major tech companies providing emails are not doing something similar. I find it hard to believe that Yahoo is working with the feds on the down low and nobody else is. I have no evidence of it but it would be truly shocking if Yahoo was alone in this behavior.
Pretty much what I was thinking. Fewer complaints because they know they would be in the wrong....
Or MUCH more likely, the police behaved themselves better because they were being watched. The police know they have cameras. It's unlikely most people interacting with police were aware of the cameras. Most logical conclusion is that the police started minding their manners when on camera. Better behaved police = fewer complaints.
I am working as both researcher and developer in this field for almost two decades. There certainly isn't a "lack of a killer app" there.
A killer app is one that drives mass adoption of a technology. Something that makes people who previously never were interested in the technology to need to have it. VR has no killer app or at least no one has come up with one to date. Spreadsheets were what drove people to adopt personal computers in the workplace. That was a killer app. VR has nothing like that that is going to put it in the hands of the every day person.
However, there is one big difference - I am talking about professional market. Simulators & marketing are one thing
We've had those for years and they are the very definition of niche uses. Simulators are expensive and only make senses when damaging the real world object you are simulating is orders of magnitude more expensive. Most simulators don't in actuality require VR either nor would they be improved by having it.
Then you have training applications - machine operators, surgery training, maintenance training, safety procedures, dangerous materials handling, you name it. Of course, military training too, even though that is a complete different market.
Have you actually tried to train people using VR? I have. With a few rare exceptions there almost always is a more cost effective and practical way to train people than with VR. It's really hard and expensive to make adequately realistic and more importantly adequately useful VR training environments. Probably the best use case is for high risk surgeries and I've seen doctors using it for that exact purpose. For stuff like machine operators VR is in general a terrible way to train them outside of some rare corner cases.
Concerning AR - I am not that sure. For one, AR is very overrated.
You think AR is overrated but VR isn't? I think you aren't seeing the forest for the trees. The use cases for AR are incredibly obvious and plentiful. Far more so than for VR. You discuss a host of practical obstacles to AR headsets which are all very real engineering challenges but you seem to be limiting yourself to a version of AR that requires some sort of portable head set. No head set is required. AR for example could be integrated into a car. Imagine your car projecting your intended route as an overlay on your windshield with annotations. That is AR and none of your engineering concerns (fragility, tracking, battery life...) apply because the environment is the car around you. You can do very practical versions of AR in a smartphone. For a simple example Pokemon Go is a crude form of AR. This notion that you have to engineer some ridiculously complicated version of a portable headset to make practical use of AR technology is misguided. The mass market applications of it will start with smartphones and automobiles and go from there.
* There is AR and "AR". Google Glass was not AR but a personal HUD - if there is no registration between the image overlay and the real world, *it is not AR*. Glass was incapable of that.
I didn't bring up Google Glass nor did I describe it as AR. I could see AR applications for something like Google Glass but the device isn't AR any more than an immersive headset is VR. AR and VR are systems of technology.
I disagree. VR lets you view objects and visit places whether they exist or don't. It lets you meet people there, allows you to create your own environments and play.
I'm well aware of what it does. I'm also (unlike many) well aware of what it does not do. What it does not do is actually put people in the location as if they were actually there. VR is in reality a form of a fancy monitor. It allows you to look around rather than having a fixed viewpoint. Useful at times but not nearly as often as VR enthusiasts imagine.
You know what else lets you view objects and visit places whether they exist or don't? A television. Sure you cannot look around but it does a good enough job for most practical use cases. Picture something like Google Streetmaps. I can look around in the monitor to get the information I need. Strapping into an immersive headset would provide minimal additional information but considerably add to the cost and complexity. The ability to look a different direction just by moving my head versus pushing a few buttons does not add a lot of value for most use cases.
The ONLY people who are going to "create their own environment and play" will be the same people who find making 3D shooter game levels fun. You know, the sort people who spend ludicrous amounts of time building something outrageously impractical in Minecraft. The rest of us won't bother.
You can preview your hotel room, visit Mars, sit in a car with custom configuration or walk in your restyled home. You can draw and animate intuitively or meet a friend for a round of Ping Pong, wherever he lives.
You are making the same mistake most enthusiasts do when musing on the potential of VR. You think about all these cool ideas without considering the the reality of how to apply VR to the actual task and whether people would find any actual real world benefit in doing so. VR will be used for things like what you describe but what you are missing is that it won't be used much for any of them. The marginal benefit of the ability to look around versus having a fixed view point in most cases is incredibly small. You could make the headset and computer running it darn near free and the use cases STILL won't make much economic or practical sense for all but a hand full of rare and usually expensive corner cases.
The amount of added benefit from looking at some well rendered drawings versus doing a VR walkthrough is smaller than you imagine. I know because I've done that exact thing in an industrial setting. My department at a former job used to do 3D mockups of proposed factories and offices and allow people to walk through them using VR headsets and 3D projections. I built the models and the 3D environments. At the end of the day it cost a substantial amount of money for something that, while impressive, didn't have any real world benefit over just some 2D paper drawings and a few renderings. It simply added cost and ended up being nothing more than an overly expensive gee-wiz marketing toy.
Nobody is going to bother looking at a hotel room with a VR headset because it's just not that important of a decision. The number of people who buy heavily customized cars where a VR headset would actually provide added utility is a vanishingly small number. Most people buy standardized cars with a few options that they don't need a virtual environment to visualize and that isn't going to change. Visit "Mars"? Sure, at the museum but most people are going to get bored by "walking" around a desert planet faster than you will believe. Think about walking around an empty online multiplayer game and picture how long that will hold the attention of most people. "Meet a friend for a round of ping pong"? This isn't a holodeck my friend. It doesn't work like that.
I'm not saying VR has no utility but rather that the promise of VR has been overblown literally for decades now. It's not going to change the world. It will be a very useful and relatively cool niche technology. Augmented Reality however WILL change the world and has immediate and widespread applications in almost everyone's lives.
VR... I'm leaning towards this being a non-sustainable flop for now, but it's got more chance of succeeding than 3D TV ever did.
VR will always be something of a niche. There are some genuine use cases for it but they are rather narrow in scope. Primarily they will be in the entertainment industry but even there there are some rather severe limitations. There will be some people who like VR games. Some will perhaps watch sporting events via VR. And there is a market for training simulators. But all these use cases are pretty narrow vertical industries without widespread mass market appeal most likely. I've worked with VR for a living in years past and the reaction was and is always that it is neat stuff but people have a hard time finding space for it in their everyday lives.
A much more important industry will be Augmented Reality (AR) which has orders of magnitude more utility for most people's lives. People use AR already today in many cases albeit in relatively crude forms.
You'd have to do some math comparing lifespans of paper and flash, CD, HDD, etc...
No you don't. Reason being that the lifespan of the data will not be dependent in most cases on the specific media it is initially saved to. It is dependent on the ease with which it can be transferred to new media with reasonable fidelity to the original. Modern computers make doing this easier than it has ever been. I can transmit every digital record I control around the globe in a matter of minutes. At long as we can avoid extinction level catastrophes a good portion of that is likely to survive for a substantial time. Plus much of it has been printed to paper and to other media and some portion of that will last a good while too based on our long experience with paper records. No I suspect quite a bit will survive, probably more than has in the past baring biblical catastrophes.
Much will be lost but that's no different than it has ever been. Not everything is worth saving anyway. It's a funny thought experiment to consider how generations 1000 years from now will regard our current behavior as most likely crude and they will be missing vast amounts of information and context to make sense of what little has survived. The way we describe civilizations from long ago is kind of like how we describe a pack of wild apes. I imagine future generations will do the same to use.
Disclosure: My day job some years ago used to be working with VR technologies. 3D environments, headsets, caves, 3D glasses, the works... I'm more familiar than most with the benefits and limitations of VR tech from first hand experience. While the technology has progressed since I worked with it daily, the basic structural limitations of it haven't changed at all.
The problem with VR is that it lacks a killer app or even much in the way of practical use cases. The practical applications of it are rather narrow in scope and scale. Vehicle simulators, some marketing, some entertainment, a limited subset of games, and a few other things. There just isn't that much you can really do with it. Plus it has some physical usability restrictions that further limit its utility given the reasonably foreseeable state of the art for the next 10-20 years. The biggest market for it will probably be certain types of games. Simulators tend towards the expensive end of the spectrum and there will definitely be some utility there. Useful stuff but nothing that is going to be life altering for most of us. Lots of people have visions of a holodeck but VR is something quite different than that.
A much, much, much larger market will be the market for Augmented Reality technology. The applications of AR are too numerous to mention and crude versions of it are already in widespread use. AR is going to be enormous though there is some overlap in the technology between AR and VR so developing for VR isn't necessarily a waste of time as long as one's market expectations for it are rational.
The fact is that we're producing now a lot of digital data that is in a really perishable form, so you could have a lot of difficult to read media where maybe there's some interesting information to save.
Of course you will have interesting data that we are going to lose. We've always had that and probably always will. Some of the losses are going to be tragic.
I'm not saying it isn't a real problem but I dispute the notion that our ability to preserve the historical record is any more fragile that it ever has been. If anything I'd argue that it's better today in many ways because we have the ability to easily and quickly transfer data to new formats in many cases. Plus we can generate hard copies of a lot of it FAR more efficiently than we ever could in days of yore.
Vint Cerf "worries about the decreasing longevity of our media, and, thus, about our ability as a civilization to self-document -- to have a historical record that one day far in the future might be remarked upon and learned from."
I find it curious how often people forget how little of the knowledge of previous generations ever made it into written form. The vast majority of all human knowledge was never written down for most of human history and much of what was written has been long since lost. Today is no different. Furthermore people seem to forget that a tremendous amount of documents get printed so there are hard copy records of very substantial portions of the historical record. Thanks to modern printers FAR more than was ever available in previous generations and that will remain so. We should expect to lost substantial swaths of data over time. We're not going to be likely to be able to keep everything.
He points out that much of this century's digital documents can't be viewed without software.
Umm, I'd say 100% of digital documents cannot be viewed without software. If they could be viewed without software they wouldn't be digital documents.
Apple doesn't make and sell most of those accessories so they are giving any profits from them to others. Apple could charge a (bigger) premium for the bigger battery and increased durability. Apple could sell to market segments they currently are ignoring. It creates more means to market their product beyond "thinnest ever" (which is reaching it's limits) and denies a means of differentiation to their competitors. The business case and possible value added by doing it is a fairly straightforward case to make.
The market segment exists for smartphones with bigger batteries and/or more rugged construction. That's not really a debate. Whether that market segment is big enough for Apple to give a shit is a separate issue but there is ample evidence that it might very well be big enough.
It's very unlikely Apple would make enough profit by having an additional phone model for these people to justify the expenses involved (engineering, inventory, etc.). It's costly for companies to have more versions of a product, so it's only worth it if it brings them more customers.
You are correct about the cost considerations but that is EXACTLY why Apple over time has had to create additional versions of their products as they mature. That's why they ended up with numerous different iPod versions. It's why they have several different iPad versions. It's why they don't just have one model of Macintosh. If they fail to address these market segments then their competitors will sooner or later. People will not stick endlessly with Apple products if they can get better options elsewhere. We've already seen that when Apple almost died prior to the return of Steve Jobs. They may not have to do it today but sooner or later they probably will in some form or fashion.
Apple & Samsung & everyone else have performed market studies that show that other than a nostalgic vocal few, not enough people would actually buy thicker phones to justify their development.
"Nostalgic"? Nobody wants thicker phones for nostalgia reasons. They want a thicker phone because it comes with a bigger battery and be less likely to break. Believe it or not, not everyone who buys a smartphone gives a shit about showing off how thin it is. Virtually EVERYONE who buys a phone immediately puts it in a protective case. So why not offer a version that doesn't need the case for those who want it? If they genuinely think they wouldn't sell then their market research people are bloody clueless. The evidence is right out there for everyone to see.
The proof of this is that If the market for thick phones was as underserved as you pretend, sales of thicker phones and these thick, reinforced battery pack cases for todays thinner phones would be a significant percentage of all smartphone buyers.
Battery pack cases and larger cases like Otter cases sell in HUGE numbers. They are exactly what you are describing and they are on literally millions of phones. I don't see any credible argument that there isn't a substantial market for smartphones with more durable construction and/or larger batteries.
This new case design looks really sweet I think. Makes the phone look just about right. Maybe they should offer a version without the headphone adapter for those that don't care about that and just want extra battery life and a little thickness.
My preference if Apple was going to offer more models would be for them to make a "rugged" version with a bigger battery. Something that basically can take being dropped and handle more abuse without the need for an add on case and has 2-3X the battery life. Obviously being bulkier doesn't bother a lot of folks since they put it in a case anyway and obviously battery life has been a recurring complaint. The market CLEARLY exists and I think Apple is leaving money on the table by ignoring it.
I would think corporations would buy tons of them and I think a lot of end consumers would too. From a manufacturing standpoint the only real difference would be the battery size and the backshell to the case. Everything else would be identical so the extra cost due to complexity to the supply chain would be comparatively modest even if Apple didn't have tons of margin to burn.
This race to the bottom as far as thinness goes is such a strange fad. My phone is about 1cm thick and that's as thin as I want it to be. Sure super thin looks sleek but that's as far as it goes.
I've been wondering when smartphones are going to reach "peak thinness". They can't keep making them thinner for much longer unless they find some way around the laws of physics.
You do realize if you have a port you do not use it is not a problem, but if you want one you have to _buy_ a case for sweet money and it also makes the phone bulkier.
Disagree that it isn't a problem. On a mobile device that is space that could be put to a better purpose. For me I'd rather have the space devoted to extra battery because that is more useful to me. Your mileage may vary. If you prefer a built in headphone jack I won't call you crazy because it's genuinely useful to some. But there are a LOT of people who rarely use the headphone jack in their phone so it is logical to make it an option on a case instead of built in. Plus there are plenty of smartphones that have the headphone jack built in so unless you "have" to have an Apple product you won't suffer for options.
I'd gladly pay the same price or slightly more for a slightly thicker/tougher, longer lasting phone.
Agreed. I don't really see the downside to offering a "rugged" version with extra battery life. I would think corporations would buy them by the bushel. I would probably buy one too.
As it is now, I have to get Otter cases for my phones for fear of them snapping or shattering.
I've always thought that the Otter cases were overkill for anyone who isn't suffering from parkinson's or has a terminal case of clumsy. I use a very minimal case make by Spigen and it's managed to keep my phone intact despite an occasional drop for over a year. If you want to be able to dribble your phone like a basketball then by all means get an Otter case but I don't think they are necessary for most and are WAY too bulky to be practical for the bigger phones like the iPhone 7plus.
The old nokia-style dumb bricks lasted forever. Sure, I couldn't browse the web but at the time I didn't care to.
That's a rationalization if I've ever heard one. You "didn't care to" because it wasn't an option. Even the early "smartphones" like the offerings from Nokia were absolutely terrible at browsing. I know because I owned several of them. They sucked.
Now with the iPhone 6, I'm able to go a couple days between charges... Less if I'm looking at the thing a lot or streaming music. It's not great, but its acceptable.
That means you don't use your iPhone a lot. If you use it heavily it will last 1 day max. I routinely wind mine down to near empty because I'm using it constantly. It's a rare day I don't dip below 50% charge at some point and I typically get to 20-30% with at least one mid-day recharge. I actually keep a charge cable in my car while driving. And in case you were wondering my battery works fine - I just use the phone a LOT.
Apple removed the headphone jack in the iPhone 7 and iPhone 7 Plus, forcing users to use either Bluetooth, the Lightning port or included Lightning to 3.5mm headphone jack adaptor in order to listen to music through headphones. However, one company took it upon themselves to create an iPhone 7 case with a built-in 3.5mm headphone jack.
This is exactly what I predicted would happen prior to the iPhone's release. Those who want a headphone jack will get a case with a headphone jack built in. Those of us who don't really need one (myself included) won't be burdened by having a port they don't use though admittedly most of us (myself included) didn't mind it being there. Given that most people put their phones in a case anyway it is to some degree a win all around albeit an imperfect one.
Now if someone would just make a decent waterproof battery case that doesn't use micro-usb (either lighting or USB-C would be fine) I would be a happy guy. None of the current options are very good. If the battery case had a headphone jack built in, so much the better.
As I said, I believe in and support vaccination. However, I cannot in good conscience support forcing people who don't believe in it to be vaccinated.
I would support their choice to not be vaccinated as long under the condition that if they decide not to be vaccinated after receiving education about the consequences of not vacinnating that they remain in some form of quarantine. Is this stance coercive? Yes it is. But when you present a clear and present danger to those around you by your irrational unwillingness to submit to a treatment that is demonstrably safe because of your ignorance I don't see any credible alternative. I would have no problem forcing them to go through an education class about the consequences of their decision. If they still make the choice to not vaccinate then quarantine it is. It might be a mild form of quarantine but if it is important enough to vaccinate for a disease then clearly the public interest is in stopping the disease completely.
If you do not grant that right of self-determination to others, on what basis can you argue that others should grant it to you?
Let's have a little perspective here. Vaccines are about as safe as any medication gets. Any risks are INCREDIBLY small and well documented. The dangers presented by people opting out of vaccines are real, consequential, and measurable. While I would agree that people should have the civil right to opt out of vaccination under normal circumstances, the evidence is clear that they are making an irrational choice and endangering others by that choice. I see no reason why we shouldn't assign cultural consequences to making that choice just like we do so many others.
The way I see it, the anti-vaxxer problem needs to be solved by educating people so they will make the correct decision on their own. Not by subjugating refusers and forcing them to do something against their will.
A common tactic in good parenting is to frame a decision. You don't ask a child who doesn't understand that veggies are good for them if they want to eat veggies because they will opt out every time. You ask them "do you want peas or carrots"? No veggies is not among the options available to them. This gives them the power to make a decision on their own but narrows the choices to a group of good decisions. If someone wants to decline to be vaccinated after being educated about the consequences of their decision then the decision tree should only involve options that are beneficial to society.
Your right to be protected against disease does not override my right to decide what to put into my body.
Yes you have that right. HOWEVER that does not mean the rest of us have to accommodate you and the threat you present in society consequence free since you have chosen of your own free will (and delusions) to be a potential disease vector. Your unvaccinated children should not be allowed to attend school. You should not be allowed to have a job where you interact with people. Go ahead and stay unvaccinated and I'll defend your right to do so. But I also will insist that you remain in quarantine until it is safe to be around you.
Calling people you disagree with "crazy" shuts down any reasonable conversation.
You are presuming the conversation was reasonable to begin with. The anti-vax crowd is not spouting off reasonable viewpoints based on considered evidence. There is nothing reasonable about their viewpoint or what they are saying. They are loudly proclaiming harmful falsehood and putting people in harms way by doing so.. No matter how polite on is, ANY discussion with them is basically an instance of pointing out that they are crazy and dangerous. These are fearful people who are either unwilling or unable to listen to reason and evidence. It never was a reasonable conversation in any meaningful sense.
And there goes entire periods of history with no permanent record, of technology or data.
You do realize that ALL of human history has huge gaps in the historical record right? Both for technology and for everything else. It's not as if our ancestors were busy dutifully scribbling down a carefully maintained record of everything they did. Our historical record has always had big swaths of information that nobody bothered to save for posterity. If anything with the internet we are actually recording more than we ever did in days of yore.
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However I would be more sympathetic to the pot movement in general if they were at least demonstrably more honest than the people who want to keep it outlawed.
Agreed. My beef with them is the whole "medical marijuana" movement. I don't have a problem with people smoking pot as long as no one gets hurt. I think it is a stupid thing to do but it's clearly less harmful than lots of other perfectly legal activities. I also don't have a problem with people using pot to treat legitimate medical conditions provided there is actual scientific (not anecdotal) trials evidence of efficacy for the condition. There seems to be clear evidence that pot can be a useful treatment in some rare cases. Key word there is "rare".
What I have a problem with is people falsely claiming medical conditions in vast numbers in order to get legal cover to use pot when they clearly have no actual medical condition. This describes the VAST majority of pot users. I have a huge problem with making policy based on lies. That's how pot got illegal in the first place. It irritates me that pot proponents think I'm stupid enough to believe transparently false stories that only pot can cure whatever made up ailment they have. They want to get high and they should own that fact. I see it as no worse (and probably safer) than someone drinking beer to get a buzz. If someone wants to get high and can do so responsibly without hurting anyone else I don't see that as a problem. Just don't pretend I'm dumb enough to believe that most pot users happen to suffer from rare medical conditions that only pot can treat. Go ahead and get it legalized and drop the ridiculous "medical marijuana" nonsense.
That's a dangerous way to think.
Products ARE worth what people are willing to pay for them. That is a cold stone fact. It's not a "dangerous way to think" because it's simply the truth. You fail to acknowledge that truth at your peril. It's like saying gravity is a dangerous way to think. That argument makes no sense because it implies that a law of nature is somehow a point of view. It isn't. Products are worth what the market will bear is in economics as close to a fundamental law of nature as you will find. It's right up there with supply and demand effects on price.
It is that kind of thinking that leads to 500% increases in the cost of life saving drugs just for the heck of it
Which is why most sane countries regulate the price of drugs to avoid that exact circumstance because health care is needed by everyone. And even in the crazy US we regulate a lot of markets (electricity, telephone, water, etc) where there is a risk of a utility abusing its monopoly on a product. The value of a product is what people are willing to pay for it. When the consequences of not paying for it are possible death, the value of that product can be very high if there is no alternative source for it.
So no, the value of something isn't what the market will bear, otherwise you'd be paying millions for clean air.
You are conflating some very different things. First off we ARE paying millions (billions really) for clean air as a society. The price of it is rolled into the cost of the products you buy. Those environmental regulations aren't free. (and that's not a bad thing either) Second, we are perfectly capable of regulating monopolies to keep them from getting out of hand. We do this all the time. Third, the value of something in economic terms absolutely IS what people are willing to pay for it. Some things are public goods and we have to be careful about ensuring they remain so but the value of fresh water or breathable air is tremendously high - we've just organized our legal system to ensure they are available to all.
I'm skeptical of the idea in general, but I can imagine at least three things the billionaire *might* be thinking that isn't completely, demonstrably stupid:
Stop right there, Everything about this is stupid and pointless. "Researching" something that has zero chance of ever being proven is basically fraud on the part of the researcher. Even if this alleged billionaire was serious and earnest about paying people to research this idea, taking the money of someone that foolish is effectively fraud. Anyone smart enough to actually look seriously into the idea should immediately see it for the nonsense that it is. It's effectively the a technology age version of "researching" whether heaven exists.
That doesn't logically follow. Maybe they didn't fix or find all the bugs. Maybe they left a door open. Maybe one day we're stumble on the right particle interactions to cause a buffer overflow and the whole thing halts and catches fire.
What you are implying is basically identical to the idea that Donkey Kong could step into the real world if the folks at Nintendo wrote a buffer overflow. It's a nonsense idea made by people who haven't thought the idea through and/or who flunked Philosophy 101. Unless you can come up with some actual evidence or a logical means by which the whole idea can be disproven then it is a silly idea. "There might be a bug" is not evidence, it's blind faith.
Many believe that we live in a computer simulation. But it takes a billionaire and his money to ask scientists to help break us out of the simulation.
Somebody has spent WAY too much time watching The Matrix and has lost their grip on reality.
But let's take it at face value and presume we are part of a simulation. There would be no way to "break out" of the simulation (whatever that means) because we don't exist outside of it. It would be akin to trying to bring Pac-Man to life in the real world. It's a non-sequitur.
Never mind the fact that there is zero evidence whatsoever to support the notion that we live in a simulation any more than there is evidence of a divine creator. It's a hypothesis that isn't falsifiable as far as anyone can tell and therefore it is outside the realm of science and firmly in the realm of religion.
Earlier this year, at Code Conference, Elon Musk said there's "one in billions" chance we're not living in a computer simulation.
Elon is a smart and talented entrepreneur but he's out of his depth on this one. His argument is basically naive extrapolation run amok combined with an argument by analogy.
While Yahoo is on the coals right now we'd be foolish to assume that the other major tech companies providing emails are not doing something similar. I find it hard to believe that Yahoo is working with the feds on the down low and nobody else is. I have no evidence of it but it would be truly shocking if Yahoo was alone in this behavior.
Pretty much what I was thinking. Fewer complaints because they know they would be in the wrong....
Or MUCH more likely, the police behaved themselves better because they were being watched. The police know they have cameras. It's unlikely most people interacting with police were aware of the cameras. Most logical conclusion is that the police started minding their manners when on camera. Better behaved police = fewer complaints.
I am working as both researcher and developer in this field for almost two decades. There certainly isn't a "lack of a killer app" there.
A killer app is one that drives mass adoption of a technology. Something that makes people who previously never were interested in the technology to need to have it. VR has no killer app or at least no one has come up with one to date. Spreadsheets were what drove people to adopt personal computers in the workplace. That was a killer app. VR has nothing like that that is going to put it in the hands of the every day person.
However, there is one big difference - I am talking about professional market. Simulators & marketing are one thing
We've had those for years and they are the very definition of niche uses. Simulators are expensive and only make senses when damaging the real world object you are simulating is orders of magnitude more expensive. Most simulators don't in actuality require VR either nor would they be improved by having it.
Then you have training applications - machine operators, surgery training, maintenance training, safety procedures, dangerous materials handling, you name it. Of course, military training too, even though that is a complete different market.
Have you actually tried to train people using VR? I have. With a few rare exceptions there almost always is a more cost effective and practical way to train people than with VR. It's really hard and expensive to make adequately realistic and more importantly adequately useful VR training environments. Probably the best use case is for high risk surgeries and I've seen doctors using it for that exact purpose. For stuff like machine operators VR is in general a terrible way to train them outside of some rare corner cases.
Concerning AR - I am not that sure. For one, AR is very overrated.
You think AR is overrated but VR isn't? I think you aren't seeing the forest for the trees. The use cases for AR are incredibly obvious and plentiful. Far more so than for VR. You discuss a host of practical obstacles to AR headsets which are all very real engineering challenges but you seem to be limiting yourself to a version of AR that requires some sort of portable head set. No head set is required. AR for example could be integrated into a car. Imagine your car projecting your intended route as an overlay on your windshield with annotations. That is AR and none of your engineering concerns (fragility, tracking, battery life...) apply because the environment is the car around you. You can do very practical versions of AR in a smartphone. For a simple example Pokemon Go is a crude form of AR. This notion that you have to engineer some ridiculously complicated version of a portable headset to make practical use of AR technology is misguided. The mass market applications of it will start with smartphones and automobiles and go from there.
* There is AR and "AR". Google Glass was not AR but a personal HUD - if there is no registration between the image overlay and the real world, *it is not AR*. Glass was incapable of that.
I didn't bring up Google Glass nor did I describe it as AR. I could see AR applications for something like Google Glass but the device isn't AR any more than an immersive headset is VR. AR and VR are systems of technology.
I disagree. VR lets you view objects and visit places whether they exist or don't. It lets you meet people there, allows you to create your own environments and play.
I'm well aware of what it does. I'm also (unlike many) well aware of what it does not do. What it does not do is actually put people in the location as if they were actually there. VR is in reality a form of a fancy monitor. It allows you to look around rather than having a fixed viewpoint. Useful at times but not nearly as often as VR enthusiasts imagine.
You know what else lets you view objects and visit places whether they exist or don't? A television. Sure you cannot look around but it does a good enough job for most practical use cases. Picture something like Google Streetmaps. I can look around in the monitor to get the information I need. Strapping into an immersive headset would provide minimal additional information but considerably add to the cost and complexity. The ability to look a different direction just by moving my head versus pushing a few buttons does not add a lot of value for most use cases.
The ONLY people who are going to "create their own environment and play" will be the same people who find making 3D shooter game levels fun. You know, the sort people who spend ludicrous amounts of time building something outrageously impractical in Minecraft. The rest of us won't bother.
You can preview your hotel room, visit Mars, sit in a car with custom configuration or walk in your restyled home. You can draw and animate intuitively or meet a friend for a round of Ping Pong, wherever he lives.
You are making the same mistake most enthusiasts do when musing on the potential of VR. You think about all these cool ideas without considering the the reality of how to apply VR to the actual task and whether people would find any actual real world benefit in doing so. VR will be used for things like what you describe but what you are missing is that it won't be used much for any of them. The marginal benefit of the ability to look around versus having a fixed view point in most cases is incredibly small. You could make the headset and computer running it darn near free and the use cases STILL won't make much economic or practical sense for all but a hand full of rare and usually expensive corner cases.
The amount of added benefit from looking at some well rendered drawings versus doing a VR walkthrough is smaller than you imagine. I know because I've done that exact thing in an industrial setting. My department at a former job used to do 3D mockups of proposed factories and offices and allow people to walk through them using VR headsets and 3D projections. I built the models and the 3D environments. At the end of the day it cost a substantial amount of money for something that, while impressive, didn't have any real world benefit over just some 2D paper drawings and a few renderings. It simply added cost and ended up being nothing more than an overly expensive gee-wiz marketing toy.
Nobody is going to bother looking at a hotel room with a VR headset because it's just not that important of a decision. The number of people who buy heavily customized cars where a VR headset would actually provide added utility is a vanishingly small number. Most people buy standardized cars with a few options that they don't need a virtual environment to visualize and that isn't going to change. Visit "Mars"? Sure, at the museum but most people are going to get bored by "walking" around a desert planet faster than you will believe. Think about walking around an empty online multiplayer game and picture how long that will hold the attention of most people. "Meet a friend for a round of ping pong"? This isn't a holodeck my friend. It doesn't work like that.
I'm not saying VR has no utility but rather that the promise of VR has been overblown literally for decades now. It's not going to change the world. It will be a very useful and relatively cool niche technology. Augmented Reality however WILL change the world and has immediate and widespread applications in almost everyone's lives.
VR... I'm leaning towards this being a non-sustainable flop for now, but it's got more chance of succeeding than 3D TV ever did.
VR will always be something of a niche. There are some genuine use cases for it but they are rather narrow in scope. Primarily they will be in the entertainment industry but even there there are some rather severe limitations. There will be some people who like VR games. Some will perhaps watch sporting events via VR. And there is a market for training simulators. But all these use cases are pretty narrow vertical industries without widespread mass market appeal most likely. I've worked with VR for a living in years past and the reaction was and is always that it is neat stuff but people have a hard time finding space for it in their everyday lives.
A much more important industry will be Augmented Reality (AR) which has orders of magnitude more utility for most people's lives. People use AR already today in many cases albeit in relatively crude forms.
You'd have to do some math comparing lifespans of paper and flash, CD, HDD, etc...
No you don't. Reason being that the lifespan of the data will not be dependent in most cases on the specific media it is initially saved to. It is dependent on the ease with which it can be transferred to new media with reasonable fidelity to the original. Modern computers make doing this easier than it has ever been. I can transmit every digital record I control around the globe in a matter of minutes. At long as we can avoid extinction level catastrophes a good portion of that is likely to survive for a substantial time. Plus much of it has been printed to paper and to other media and some portion of that will last a good while too based on our long experience with paper records. No I suspect quite a bit will survive, probably more than has in the past baring biblical catastrophes.
Much will be lost but that's no different than it has ever been. Not everything is worth saving anyway. It's a funny thought experiment to consider how generations 1000 years from now will regard our current behavior as most likely crude and they will be missing vast amounts of information and context to make sense of what little has survived. The way we describe civilizations from long ago is kind of like how we describe a pack of wild apes. I imagine future generations will do the same to use.
Disclosure: My day job some years ago used to be working with VR technologies. 3D environments, headsets, caves, 3D glasses, the works... I'm more familiar than most with the benefits and limitations of VR tech from first hand experience. While the technology has progressed since I worked with it daily, the basic structural limitations of it haven't changed at all.
The problem with VR is that it lacks a killer app or even much in the way of practical use cases. The practical applications of it are rather narrow in scope and scale. Vehicle simulators, some marketing, some entertainment, a limited subset of games, and a few other things. There just isn't that much you can really do with it. Plus it has some physical usability restrictions that further limit its utility given the reasonably foreseeable state of the art for the next 10-20 years. The biggest market for it will probably be certain types of games. Simulators tend towards the expensive end of the spectrum and there will definitely be some utility there. Useful stuff but nothing that is going to be life altering for most of us. Lots of people have visions of a holodeck but VR is something quite different than that.
A much, much, much larger market will be the market for Augmented Reality technology. The applications of AR are too numerous to mention and crude versions of it are already in widespread use. AR is going to be enormous though there is some overlap in the technology between AR and VR so developing for VR isn't necessarily a waste of time as long as one's market expectations for it are rational.
The fact is that we're producing now a lot of digital data that is in a really perishable form, so you could have a lot of difficult to read media where maybe there's some interesting information to save.
Of course you will have interesting data that we are going to lose. We've always had that and probably always will. Some of the losses are going to be tragic.
I'm not saying it isn't a real problem but I dispute the notion that our ability to preserve the historical record is any more fragile that it ever has been. If anything I'd argue that it's better today in many ways because we have the ability to easily and quickly transfer data to new formats in many cases. Plus we can generate hard copies of a lot of it FAR more efficiently than we ever could in days of yore.
Vint Cerf "worries about the decreasing longevity of our media, and, thus, about our ability as a civilization to self-document -- to have a historical record that one day far in the future might be remarked upon and learned from."
I find it curious how often people forget how little of the knowledge of previous generations ever made it into written form. The vast majority of all human knowledge was never written down for most of human history and much of what was written has been long since lost. Today is no different. Furthermore people seem to forget that a tremendous amount of documents get printed so there are hard copy records of very substantial portions of the historical record. Thanks to modern printers FAR more than was ever available in previous generations and that will remain so. We should expect to lost substantial swaths of data over time. We're not going to be likely to be able to keep everything.
He points out that much of this century's digital documents can't be viewed without software.
Umm, I'd say 100% of digital documents cannot be viewed without software. If they could be viewed without software they wouldn't be digital documents.
So how is Apple "leaving money on the table"?
Apple doesn't make and sell most of those accessories so they are giving any profits from them to others. Apple could charge a (bigger) premium for the bigger battery and increased durability. Apple could sell to market segments they currently are ignoring. It creates more means to market their product beyond "thinnest ever" (which is reaching it's limits) and denies a means of differentiation to their competitors. The business case and possible value added by doing it is a fairly straightforward case to make.
The market segment exists for smartphones with bigger batteries and/or more rugged construction. That's not really a debate. Whether that market segment is big enough for Apple to give a shit is a separate issue but there is ample evidence that it might very well be big enough.
It's very unlikely Apple would make enough profit by having an additional phone model for these people to justify the expenses involved (engineering, inventory, etc.). It's costly for companies to have more versions of a product, so it's only worth it if it brings them more customers.
You are correct about the cost considerations but that is EXACTLY why Apple over time has had to create additional versions of their products as they mature. That's why they ended up with numerous different iPod versions. It's why they have several different iPad versions. It's why they don't just have one model of Macintosh. If they fail to address these market segments then their competitors will sooner or later. People will not stick endlessly with Apple products if they can get better options elsewhere. We've already seen that when Apple almost died prior to the return of Steve Jobs. They may not have to do it today but sooner or later they probably will in some form or fashion.
Apple & Samsung & everyone else have performed market studies that show that other than a nostalgic vocal few, not enough people would actually buy thicker phones to justify their development.
"Nostalgic"? Nobody wants thicker phones for nostalgia reasons. They want a thicker phone because it comes with a bigger battery and be less likely to break. Believe it or not, not everyone who buys a smartphone gives a shit about showing off how thin it is. Virtually EVERYONE who buys a phone immediately puts it in a protective case. So why not offer a version that doesn't need the case for those who want it? If they genuinely think they wouldn't sell then their market research people are bloody clueless. The evidence is right out there for everyone to see.
The proof of this is that If the market for thick phones was as underserved as you pretend, sales of thicker phones and these thick, reinforced battery pack cases for todays thinner phones would be a significant percentage of all smartphone buyers.
Battery pack cases and larger cases like Otter cases sell in HUGE numbers. They are exactly what you are describing and they are on literally millions of phones. I don't see any credible argument that there isn't a substantial market for smartphones with more durable construction and/or larger batteries.
This new case design looks really sweet I think. Makes the phone look just about right. Maybe they should offer a version without the headphone adapter for those that don't care about that and just want extra battery life and a little thickness.
My preference if Apple was going to offer more models would be for them to make a "rugged" version with a bigger battery. Something that basically can take being dropped and handle more abuse without the need for an add on case and has 2-3X the battery life. Obviously being bulkier doesn't bother a lot of folks since they put it in a case anyway and obviously battery life has been a recurring complaint. The market CLEARLY exists and I think Apple is leaving money on the table by ignoring it.
I would think corporations would buy tons of them and I think a lot of end consumers would too. From a manufacturing standpoint the only real difference would be the battery size and the backshell to the case. Everything else would be identical so the extra cost due to complexity to the supply chain would be comparatively modest even if Apple didn't have tons of margin to burn.
This race to the bottom as far as thinness goes is such a strange fad. My phone is about 1cm thick and that's as thin as I want it to be. Sure super thin looks sleek but that's as far as it goes.
I've been wondering when smartphones are going to reach "peak thinness". They can't keep making them thinner for much longer unless they find some way around the laws of physics.
You do realize if you have a port you do not use it is not a problem, but if you want one you have to _buy_ a case for sweet money and it also makes the phone bulkier.
Disagree that it isn't a problem. On a mobile device that is space that could be put to a better purpose. For me I'd rather have the space devoted to extra battery because that is more useful to me. Your mileage may vary. If you prefer a built in headphone jack I won't call you crazy because it's genuinely useful to some. But there are a LOT of people who rarely use the headphone jack in their phone so it is logical to make it an option on a case instead of built in. Plus there are plenty of smartphones that have the headphone jack built in so unless you "have" to have an Apple product you won't suffer for options.
I'd gladly pay the same price or slightly more for a slightly thicker/tougher, longer lasting phone.
Agreed. I don't really see the downside to offering a "rugged" version with extra battery life. I would think corporations would buy them by the bushel. I would probably buy one too.
As it is now, I have to get Otter cases for my phones for fear of them snapping or shattering.
I've always thought that the Otter cases were overkill for anyone who isn't suffering from parkinson's or has a terminal case of clumsy. I use a very minimal case make by Spigen and it's managed to keep my phone intact despite an occasional drop for over a year. If you want to be able to dribble your phone like a basketball then by all means get an Otter case but I don't think they are necessary for most and are WAY too bulky to be practical for the bigger phones like the iPhone 7plus.
The old nokia-style dumb bricks lasted forever. Sure, I couldn't browse the web but at the time I didn't care to.
That's a rationalization if I've ever heard one. You "didn't care to" because it wasn't an option. Even the early "smartphones" like the offerings from Nokia were absolutely terrible at browsing. I know because I owned several of them. They sucked.
Now with the iPhone 6, I'm able to go a couple days between charges... Less if I'm looking at the thing a lot or streaming music. It's not great, but its acceptable.
That means you don't use your iPhone a lot. If you use it heavily it will last 1 day max. I routinely wind mine down to near empty because I'm using it constantly. It's a rare day I don't dip below 50% charge at some point and I typically get to 20-30% with at least one mid-day recharge. I actually keep a charge cable in my car while driving. And in case you were wondering my battery works fine - I just use the phone a LOT.
Apple removed the headphone jack in the iPhone 7 and iPhone 7 Plus, forcing users to use either Bluetooth, the Lightning port or included Lightning to 3.5mm headphone jack adaptor in order to listen to music through headphones. However, one company took it upon themselves to create an iPhone 7 case with a built-in 3.5mm headphone jack.
This is exactly what I predicted would happen prior to the iPhone's release. Those who want a headphone jack will get a case with a headphone jack built in. Those of us who don't really need one (myself included) won't be burdened by having a port they don't use though admittedly most of us (myself included) didn't mind it being there. Given that most people put their phones in a case anyway it is to some degree a win all around albeit an imperfect one.
Now if someone would just make a decent waterproof battery case that doesn't use micro-usb (either lighting or USB-C would be fine) I would be a happy guy. None of the current options are very good. If the battery case had a headphone jack built in, so much the better.
As I said, I believe in and support vaccination. However, I cannot in good conscience support forcing people who don't believe in it to be vaccinated.
I would support their choice to not be vaccinated as long under the condition that if they decide not to be vaccinated after receiving education about the consequences of not vacinnating that they remain in some form of quarantine. Is this stance coercive? Yes it is. But when you present a clear and present danger to those around you by your irrational unwillingness to submit to a treatment that is demonstrably safe because of your ignorance I don't see any credible alternative. I would have no problem forcing them to go through an education class about the consequences of their decision. If they still make the choice to not vaccinate then quarantine it is. It might be a mild form of quarantine but if it is important enough to vaccinate for a disease then clearly the public interest is in stopping the disease completely.
If you do not grant that right of self-determination to others, on what basis can you argue that others should grant it to you?
Let's have a little perspective here. Vaccines are about as safe as any medication gets. Any risks are INCREDIBLY small and well documented. The dangers presented by people opting out of vaccines are real, consequential, and measurable. While I would agree that people should have the civil right to opt out of vaccination under normal circumstances, the evidence is clear that they are making an irrational choice and endangering others by that choice. I see no reason why we shouldn't assign cultural consequences to making that choice just like we do so many others.
The way I see it, the anti-vaxxer problem needs to be solved by educating people so they will make the correct decision on their own. Not by subjugating refusers and forcing them to do something against their will.
A common tactic in good parenting is to frame a decision. You don't ask a child who doesn't understand that veggies are good for them if they want to eat veggies because they will opt out every time. You ask them "do you want peas or carrots"? No veggies is not among the options available to them. This gives them the power to make a decision on their own but narrows the choices to a group of good decisions. If someone wants to decline to be vaccinated after being educated about the consequences of their decision then the decision tree should only involve options that are beneficial to society.
Your right to be protected against disease does not override my right to decide what to put into my body.
Yes you have that right. HOWEVER that does not mean the rest of us have to accommodate you and the threat you present in society consequence free since you have chosen of your own free will (and delusions) to be a potential disease vector. Your unvaccinated children should not be allowed to attend school. You should not be allowed to have a job where you interact with people. Go ahead and stay unvaccinated and I'll defend your right to do so. But I also will insist that you remain in quarantine until it is safe to be around you.
Calling people you disagree with "crazy" shuts down any reasonable conversation.
You are presuming the conversation was reasonable to begin with. The anti-vax crowd is not spouting off reasonable viewpoints based on considered evidence. There is nothing reasonable about their viewpoint or what they are saying. They are loudly proclaiming harmful falsehood and putting people in harms way by doing so.. No matter how polite on is, ANY discussion with them is basically an instance of pointing out that they are crazy and dangerous. These are fearful people who are either unwilling or unable to listen to reason and evidence. It never was a reasonable conversation in any meaningful sense.
And there goes entire periods of history with no permanent record, of technology or data.
You do realize that ALL of human history has huge gaps in the historical record right? Both for technology and for everything else. It's not as if our ancestors were busy dutifully scribbling down a carefully maintained record of everything they did. Our historical record has always had big swaths of information that nobody bothered to save for posterity. If anything with the internet we are actually recording more than we ever did in days of yore.
well it only have to be used once per boot and who sais that this machine has ever been turned off?
How probable do you think it is that they haven't had a power outage in 25 years?