The current executive team at Apple didn't make them the Goliath they are either.
Yeah actually they did. It's mostly the same people. There has been some turnover of course but a lot of the same players are still there and have been there a long time. If you think Steve Jobs did it all by his lonesome then you don't know how actual companies work in the real world. Tim Cook has been a high level executive since 1998. Jon Ivey has been there since 1992 and has been head of design since 1997. Lots of the other senior management has been there similar lengths of time.
A lot of people (myself included) like to plug in if they are sitting at a desk, period.
Which is fine but I'm curious why wireless earphones isn't a viable option for this?
Why take the chance of running out of battery later in the day?
Multiple solutions to this if it is something you are genuinely worried about. And frankly I've never needed to charge my phone more than once mid-day even with near continuous usage unless the battery was dying. And bluetooth headphones last hours at a stretch and recharge in minutes.
Maybe you're going to go home and go for a run and you need almost a full charge to run the GPS.
That's a pretty darn long run! Though you do know that you do not need a GPS to go for a run, right?
Also, I listen to audio books at night.. So when to charge then?
During your commute. During meetings. During meals. With a battery pack while on the go. While you sleep. There are fast charge options available for the iPhone - for $ of course which can charge a phone roughly 50% in 30 minutes. Are you seriously going to claim that you use your device so much that you never have time to charge? If you want to use a wired set so you don't have to bother I don't buy claims that you can't find time to charge.
What's your bullshit excuse this time? iPad Pro customers were actually demanding a smaller bezel?
Henry Ford once said "If I asked my customers what they wanted they would say 'a faster horse' ". Apple hasn't become the Goliath they are by polling customers about what they think they want or by waiting for customers to tell them. Their job is to figure out what their customers need/want before we figure it out. If they fail in this task then Apple will struggle in future years but so far they've done ok. Honestly I think certain people's attachment to the current design (like bezel size) is more of an assumption than a real world requirement. But if I'm wrong then Apple's iPad sales will reflect that so I don't really see it as a problem. They removed most of the bezel from the iPhone X and after having used one for a year it has presented me precisely zero problems. It's reasonable that the same logic might hold for the iPad.
They asked to remove the headphone jack?
If the headphone jack is so precious to you there are plenty of options for you to get one on other devices or to add it to Apple devices. If you calm down for a moment it actually makes sense to remove it because not every user needs it. A far more sensible approach is to put the headphone jack on the cases that almost every user adds to their devices anyway. (Apple kind of missed this to be honest but the logic is still there) Think of it kind of like how unix is built. Make the core components as simple and elegant as possible and don't require features that only some will use on the core system.
Personally I'm fine with the headphone jack being removed since I really didn't use it anyway and clearly I'm not alone it this. When I do use headphones bluetooth ones serve me better anyway. Apple sells 50 million iPhones per quarter so obviously there is a huge customer segment that is good with what they are doing. If your needs are different that's totally fine but Apple has to do what is best for Apple and what they think is best for their customers.
I would not be buying something without a headphone jack.
Given that Apple is selling about 50 million iPhones every quarter I think it is safe to say that you are an outlier with this opinion. That's not to say your opinion is invalid but just that it obviously isn't widely shared. Good news for you is that there are plenty of options other than Apple for you.
Dropping the 3.5mm port didn't affect iPhones because everyone buys a case and a lot of those started including 3.5mm ports.
Which actually makes a lot more sense when you think about it. Not everyone actually needs/wants a 3.5mm port (I have no use for it) but almost everyone buys a case. Therefore it actually makes sense to move that functionality to the case for those who want it and to free those who don't need it from an unnecessary port. If you really want a 3.5mm port that's cool but in the unix philosophy I prefer to add complexity through add on modules rather than to bake it into the core product whether or not it is actually needed.
I don't know how popular iPad cases are, but I bet a number of people are going to start buying them.
What I wonder is why Apple doesn't take the cases more seriously. Their case offerings amount to little more than afterthoughts and badly designed ones at that for the most part. They introduce the Apple Pencil but provide no place to store it. Their screen protectors are clumsy sloppy afterthroughts. Their battery cases are terrible designs. It would make a lot of sense for Apple to make a phone to case interface so cases could be smarter and do more interesting things without the hack of hijacking the lightning port.
between my bluetooth headphones running out of battery
How much music are you listening to that you drain the batteries and can't take a few minutes to recharge? A pair of airpods charges for 3-5 hours of playback in 15 minutes. I'm sure the competitors are similar if you don't like Apple's offering. Heck you can listen with one in while the other charges if you really bear to stop listening for a few minutes. Plus there are bluetooth receivers if you prefer wired headphones for whatever reason.
and having to own 3 extra dongles
What are you doing that requires three different dongles on a routine basis? Not being snide, just genuinely curious. I have one for a headphone jack that I've used precisely once in the last year and a half and I have a lighting to USB for transferring pictures from my SLR camera that I use now and then. But really most things can be done wireless unless you are being obstinate about the method you connect with.
While end-users do not seem to have picked up on this yet, "biometric" authentication is a security failure, and face recognition makes it even worse.
That's a bit like claiming that door locks on the front of your house are a security failure because they can be defeated. Most people at most times don't actually need or want strong security - they are just keeping out the casual snoopers. You're quite right that if you are serious about security it isn't enough by itself but for most people they don't need more than this. The good news is that you can enable other features (like requiring pass codes) to make it more secure.
I warned about this long ago.
So did lots of others. We're aware.
If you think it's bad someone can get your fingerprint while you sleep, wait until it's your face.
Is this a big problem where you live? Are you a secret agent? If I have to be worried about someone being in my house while I sleep I'm worried about them BEING IN MY HOUSE, not using my iPad. Seriously, let's worry about actual problems before we worry about the ones from a James Bond film.
Can the NRO hand craft the needed observation systems at that rapid rate from bespoke 100% made in the USA parts?
If they have a brain in their skulls they already have backups sitting on the ground on standby in a launch ready (or nearly so) condition. If they are already building one it saves a lot of money to build a second (or more) at the same time. Heck even commercial companies like SiriusXM build backup satellites that are ready for launch should one of their orbiting satellites experience a problem. It would be almost criminally stupid for a government agency tasked with defense to not do the same thing.
Which is not inherent in the technology as I've pointed out in every post.
It most certainly is. Go ahead and try to make a useful neural network without any data to train it on. What you'll have without the training data is a good approximation of a boat anchor. And making sure you have an unbiased data set is FAR from trivial.
They actually are not buggy themselves as they are very simple;
Being simple does not equal being bug free. Even simple devices and simple programs can and do have bugs.
You put something in the black box and it classifies it in some desired way, the way the box works is all about the training data.
That is only true if there are no flaws in the design and implementation of the box.
Furthermore it's a bit odd to claim bugs are a kind of "bias" as usually they are more about failure than bias...
Bias is favoritism against one thing, person, or group compared with another. It does not have to be intentional nor does it have to reflect any negative attitudes. You can introduce a bias into a device (including a neural network) or a bit of software via a bug. This is not a question.
The "technology" behind this is neural networks. How do they reflect bias at al?
Several ways but the two most straightforward are Bad training data and Bugs. Bugs are an issue in ANY software and neural networks are no different and bugs can result in biases. And of course train it with bad data and you'll get biased results. We've seen examples of both cases.
The technology behind FaceID has no bias. It works really well - if given the right training data.
Given that clearly there isn't a set of "right training data" available that sounds like a hasty conclusion without evidence. Your argument is circular. You say the technology has no bias but proving that it has no bias requires feeding it an unbiased data set which hasn't happened. So neither of us knows if there is an inherent bias built into the system or not. Maybe there is and maybe there isn't but you don't have the data to say either way.
Furthermore it's more complicated than just the training data set. There is code that determines the logic used to analyze the data and that code is subject to biases from the person programming it. They do not have to be conscious biases either. That's not to say it is an irreducible problem but it has to be considered.
Now it could easily be that the training data you are feeding it is biased in some way, but that is why extensive testing of the resulting recognition engine you have built is key, so you can go back and correct training data...
Who is watching the watchmen? The ones checking the data, providing the data, and analyzing the data, and revising the data are people and people have biases. Guarding against and when necessary removing those biases can prove rather tricky especially when the training data sets used are by and large positively loaded with biased data.
Seriously, why would Google possibly care? In what way does it have any impact whatsoever on the Android Eco-system?
Several ways. 1) It makes Android less attractive as an ecosystem. (ruins battery life, performance, privacy, etc) 2) It provides marketing fodder for competitors to use against them 3) It impacts Google's revenue from their ad business 4) Many of these apps are obvious attempts at fraud 5) Liability due to the above issues
Who is it hurting to run this software?
Most of the people running it as well as Google and companies depending on the Android ecosystem.
If someone wants to use their phone to run cycles on mining or watching hard core Japanese porno, who's fucking business is it?
No one but nothing is preventing you from doing that. Doesn't mean Google is under any obligation to help you do it though. Go ahead and sideload the stuff if it is that important to you. None of us will care I assure you.
Here's a crazy notion. How about designing the system so it doesn't have to reboot? I know crazy right? Now like those unix folks have figured this out or... oh wait.
My operating system shouldn't have to reboot except on VERY rare occasions - typically major operating system upgrades. Microsoft has people trained to think this is somehow normal and/or necessary.
What exactly is the point in having a calendar that's not synchronized to the solstices?
There is no objectively important reason that a calendar that tracks rotations of the Earth has to have any relationship whatsoever to orbits around the Sun. There is some utility in doing so but it's not as if we would be unaware of and unable to plan for the fact that the Earth takes approximately 365.25 days to orbit the Sun. Heck for quite a long time we used the Julian calendar and it worked pretty well overall despite not quite so accurately reconciling the length of a year to the length of a day. The length of a year doesn't care how we bother to subdivide it.
Clocks measure time elapsed since an arbitrary epoch - calendars subdivide a year so that you can schedule seasonal activities.
You are conflating two unrelated things. Calendars measure time in relationship to arbitrarily chosen celestial cycles. A day measures the rotational time of Earth and a year measures the orbital time of Earth around the Sun. There is no reason we necessarily need a calendar to reconcile orbits around the Sun with rotations of the Earth. They are separate and arbitrarily chosen events with no causal relationship between their lengths. It is a useful exercise to do so but a useful calendar can just measure the passage of days with relation to a different cycle (the lunar cycle for example) and be just as valid. And having a calendar that has arbitrarily varying sub cycles (months over varying lengths) does not add to its practicality or make scheduling easier.
An accurate clock can't even measure the passage of days correctly, since every day is, on average, slightly longer than the one before it thanks to a combination of solar and lunar tidal drag, along with other forces that are less well understood
That argument is self defeating. If an accurate clock couldn't measure the passage of days accurately then we wouldn't be able to tell that the length of a day changes. That said, it is not objectively necessary to change the definition of a day to match Earth's current rotational period. In fact if we are on a different planet it would be impractical to use Earth's rotational period as the basis for calendar scale time keeping. Furthermore the length of a year (an orbit around the Sun) is also changing because of the n-body problem and changes to Earth's orbit.
To change it would be monumentally expensive, disruptive, and really would replace it with something else just as arbitrary.
Certainly. That doesn't mean doing so isn't a worthwhile exercise. My whole point is that our current calendar is unarguably illogical, flawed, and occasionally problematic. We use it because of network effects, not because it is an optimal system.
In other words, at least until we start colonizing other worlds with other chronological cycles, it will persist.
Agreed and I said more or less exactly this in a different post in this thread. I think it would take something like us becoming a multi-planet species to be a big enough jolt to the system to make it worthwhile to change calendar systems. Maybe not even then but I'm not sure what else would be sufficient cause.
The Soviet Union is a rather large testing ground. They tried variations of 5 and 6 that worked poorly in an attempt to avoid using 7, which they viewed as a number that made it too easy for people to hold on to religion.
The Soviet Union tried a lot of things that didn't work very well. This is pretty far down the list among them. Plus like most standards it's the network effects of the existing standard that makes them hard to change once they are well established.
While there are certainly an infinite number of variations one could try, its not like France (in the reference I cited) or the Soviets were too small a sample size to pretend that we have no evidence of relevance that 7 isn't just an arbitrary number and any other would work fine.
Those are interesting case studies but one would have to dig a lot deeper into the reasons for those failures to determine if the length of the chosen week was the proximal cause of the failure. My guess is that it failed for other reasons similar to how the metric system has to date failed to take hold in the US. Just local political and economic and network effect realities that made changing problematic. There is no objectively obvious reason a 7 day week should be preferable to any other similar length week and what evidence we have in relation to it is relatively scant. Main problem is that it's hard to test alternatives in the real world on a large scale.
Meh, using multiple applications with a single screen is largely a matter of preference.
Not really. I've equipped my staff with multiple monitors and it really does make a substantial performance boost in most cases unless you have a fairly linear workflow that doesn't involve a lot of need to look at more than one thing at a time. It's been my experience that most office workers strongly benefit from having multiple screens.
I don't just work with multiple applications, I work in multiple virtual machine desktops.
That might be appropriate for your work flow but you cannot generalize that to everyone else's work flow. My day job is actually studying this sort of stuff (I'm an industrial engineer) including ergonomics and work flow and virtual desktops are a good thing but generally speaking multiple monitors (space permitting) is better for more people. That's not to say there aren't cases where a virtual desktop is a great choice - just that such use cases are less common in circumstances where multiple monitors are a realistic option. And you can use virtual desktops with multiple monitors as well - they aren't incompatible options even though doing so is uncommon.
There is a thing called 'virtual desktops' that mostly makes up for being on a single screen.
I've used them more than a little and in general having a larger or multiple screens is almost always preferable when it's a viable option. Virtual desktops is a workaround to capture some/much of the value of having multiple monitors on a single screen but in general it is clearly less efficient except in cases where you are restricted by other constraints to a single screen.
If it's your case that a rental car costs less than depreciation and wear and tear on an owned vehicle then there must be a lot of bankrupt car rental agencies out there.
For occasional use a rental car does cost less to YOU than a vehicle you own because you don't have to amortize the entire purchase price (and insurance and maintenance) of the car over those miles. It's a step function and you share the costs. If you own a car for 200,000km then owning the car is clearly cheaper on a per mile basis. If I drive for 200 miles renting the car is clearly cheaper on a per mile basis. If you rent a car a few times per year then it is cheaper to not own it because you are sharing the capital and maintenance costs with other people. Nobody is making the claim that rental car companies aren't recouping the cost of the car.
Regarding a non-7 day week, this has been tried before and didn't work.
Just because a small group tried something a long time ago doesn't have a lot of relevance to the discussion. Maybe it just wasn't the right system or the right time to do it. There is nothing magical about a 7 day week. It's fine but we could easily have a 6 or an 8 day week and there is no objective reason that couldn't work just as well. It's just something we continue to do because we've done it that way for a long time. The major benefit of it is that most of the world has standardized on it which probably outweighs most drawbacks but that doesn't mean that it is optimal or couldn't be improved upon. The real question is whether an improved calendar would result in benefits that outweigh the costs.
Sometimes a long-followed social construct has survived because it works well for us animals
Just because something worked reasonably well in the past is not a valid justification for continuing to do it that way in the face of a better alternative. "That's the way we've always done it" is one of the worst and most expensive arguments people routinely make. Tradition is a fine thing and standards are a good thing but only to a point. Now you could sensibly argue that any of the calendar improvements we could make are well into diminishing returns as far as improvements go and thus not worth the cost but one should not blindly assume that to be true.
My suspicion is that the calendar won't be changed again (if it ever is) until after we become a multi-planetary species. It would take a major event to get everyone to agree to change calendars so everything I've said is purely conjecture.
Well, I've always thought the International Fixed Calendar [wikipedia.org] was a decent attempt at sanity, but if there's people in the world that can't adopt the metric system, there's no way in hell the calendar could change.
Maybe the best solution is to use a sane calendar system similar to that one as a base system (similar to Universal Coordinated Time) and then just calculate offsets into whatever crazy calendar system some group prefers to use.
Our current calendar system is pretty much bonkers anyway. We seem bizarrely attached to concepts like a 7 day week which is familiar but totally arbitrary. You could have a year with 73 weeks of 5 days each or a year with 5 months of 73 days and it would be equally valid and equally arbitrary. It's never been clear to me why we need to worry about keeping months coordinated with particular seasons. So what if Christmas in the northern hemisphere gradually drifts to summer over the course of a few hundred years?
the drug companies were trying to find a way to be exempt from law
And this surprises you somehow? Sounds like business as usual to me.
I find it appalling the length companies will go to undermine the rule of law.
It should be appalling. Yet we have an entire major political party which spends considerable energy towards eliminating regulations that prohibit companies from doing just that.
The US culture of profit at any cost and loss of morality is disheartening.
US culture is hardly alone in an over enthusiasm for profits and damn the consequences. And not everyone in the US is on board with profit at any cost. Just enough people to make it a real problem. That said, a profit motive is a useful thing, provided it is adequately constrained with rules to keep things reasonably fair and in the public interest. It's only a problem when we start pretending that free markets and profit motives will actually solve the problems caused by failed free markets and unchecked profit motives.
Yeah, I don't know anyone who uses a laptop solely at a desk.
I know an alarming number of people who do. Particularly in big companies. The former president of my company used to do that. Had a laptop but it basically never left his desk. I see it happen a lot. I also see a lot of people who use laptops in places where they really aren't geared to be especially productive. They work in a conference room when they would gain more efficiency by having a multiple screen system at a desk.
Please understand I'm not arguing against laptops. I'm just saying use the tool that actually fits how you work, what is most efficient, and be honest with yourself about what that is. Laptops have trade offs to gain portability particularly in speed and screen real estate as well as some other areas. For someone like me who does engineering work and typically has multiple documents open at once, a laptop is really limiting. I typically have our tooling database, MRP system, a web browser, some work instructions, a quote or two, our accounting software and several PDFs open at any given moment - and often more than that and I'm switching rapidly between them. To facilitate this I have three 4K 28" monitors and a fast graphics card. It would be really awkward to do what I do on a single 15" laptop screen and I'm not particularly unusual. Literally every office worker in my company has at least a dual monitor setup with a desktop because that maximizes productivity. I see a lot of companies and individuals reflexively going to laptops when they actually are giving up significant workflow efficiency for portability they only occasionally or never really need.
a desktop definitely locks you to your desk. If you dont need one why would you get one?
Most people work at the same desk anyway so why should it matter? And think for half a moment about what you give up to gain portability. Speed, screen real estate, GPU power, a decent keyboard+mouse, etc. If you really do move around then by all means get a laptop. They exist for good reason. But my point is that you should actually think about how you use the machine rather than how you imagine you use it. There are a LOT of people that would be better served with a desktop PC but have companies that reflexively give them laptops despite the productivity hit that entails. Plus laptops cost more for the same computing capability in virtually all cases.
Basically my point is if you don't actually need portability, why would you get a laptop?
Which pretty much is the exception that proves the rule. Sure, some people need actual portability but why do you undock it? Have you really thought about it and whether that is the ideal work flow for you? Maybe it is but maybe not. Sounds like you use your laptop as a desktop much of the time so what are you giving up to gain portability?
I just don't want to deal with all the cables, and the bulkiness and immobility, plus laptops have batteries so they don't mind that much if power goes out.
You just got done saying that you have a docking station with multiple monitors, etc and thos all have cables so your argument makes zero sense. And on a desk who cares about the cables? They aren't going to be in your way and you'll never move them. You effectively use a desktop most of the time. As for batteries, you can put a VERY large battery that will run any desktop PC (plus other equipment) for hours for less than $200. Far larger than the battery on any laptop.
I feel like it's not as much that someone doesn't need a laptop because they use the computer at their desk, and moreso that they always use the computer at their desk because they don't have a laptop.
Look around you. Most people in most companies work in a defined space - usually at their desk and they rarely need a computer elsewhere. There are exceptions of course but there are a LOT of people using a laptop which they essentially never use anywhere except their office. I see it all the time. Heck I used to do it. Then I realized I was using a slower weaker computer with a ton of compromises for portability that I almost never used. You might be someone who really does need the portability (though given your other comments I doubt it) but an awful lot of people use laptops for their job when a desktop with a lot more screen real estate would serve them better.
Slashdot Mirror
The current executive team at Apple didn't make them the Goliath they are either.
Yeah actually they did. It's mostly the same people. There has been some turnover of course but a lot of the same players are still there and have been there a long time. If you think Steve Jobs did it all by his lonesome then you don't know how actual companies work in the real world. Tim Cook has been a high level executive since 1998. Jon Ivey has been there since 1992 and has been head of design since 1997. Lots of the other senior management has been there similar lengths of time.
A lot of people (myself included) like to plug in if they are sitting at a desk, period.
Which is fine but I'm curious why wireless earphones isn't a viable option for this?
Why take the chance of running out of battery later in the day?
Multiple solutions to this if it is something you are genuinely worried about. And frankly I've never needed to charge my phone more than once mid-day even with near continuous usage unless the battery was dying. And bluetooth headphones last hours at a stretch and recharge in minutes.
Maybe you're going to go home and go for a run and you need almost a full charge to run the GPS.
That's a pretty darn long run! Though you do know that you do not need a GPS to go for a run, right?
Also, I listen to audio books at night.. So when to charge then?
During your commute. During meetings. During meals. With a battery pack while on the go. While you sleep. There are fast charge options available for the iPhone - for $ of course which can charge a phone roughly 50% in 30 minutes. Are you seriously going to claim that you use your device so much that you never have time to charge? If you want to use a wired set so you don't have to bother I don't buy claims that you can't find time to charge.
What's your bullshit excuse this time? iPad Pro customers were actually demanding a smaller bezel?
Henry Ford once said "If I asked my customers what they wanted they would say 'a faster horse' ". Apple hasn't become the Goliath they are by polling customers about what they think they want or by waiting for customers to tell them. Their job is to figure out what their customers need/want before we figure it out. If they fail in this task then Apple will struggle in future years but so far they've done ok. Honestly I think certain people's attachment to the current design (like bezel size) is more of an assumption than a real world requirement. But if I'm wrong then Apple's iPad sales will reflect that so I don't really see it as a problem. They removed most of the bezel from the iPhone X and after having used one for a year it has presented me precisely zero problems. It's reasonable that the same logic might hold for the iPad.
They asked to remove the headphone jack?
If the headphone jack is so precious to you there are plenty of options for you to get one on other devices or to add it to Apple devices. If you calm down for a moment it actually makes sense to remove it because not every user needs it. A far more sensible approach is to put the headphone jack on the cases that almost every user adds to their devices anyway. (Apple kind of missed this to be honest but the logic is still there) Think of it kind of like how unix is built. Make the core components as simple and elegant as possible and don't require features that only some will use on the core system.
Personally I'm fine with the headphone jack being removed since I really didn't use it anyway and clearly I'm not alone it this. When I do use headphones bluetooth ones serve me better anyway. Apple sells 50 million iPhones per quarter so obviously there is a huge customer segment that is good with what they are doing. If your needs are different that's totally fine but Apple has to do what is best for Apple and what they think is best for their customers.
I would not be buying something without a headphone jack.
Given that Apple is selling about 50 million iPhones every quarter I think it is safe to say that you are an outlier with this opinion. That's not to say your opinion is invalid but just that it obviously isn't widely shared. Good news for you is that there are plenty of options other than Apple for you.
Dropping the 3.5mm port didn't affect iPhones because everyone buys a case and a lot of those started including 3.5mm ports.
Which actually makes a lot more sense when you think about it. Not everyone actually needs/wants a 3.5mm port (I have no use for it) but almost everyone buys a case. Therefore it actually makes sense to move that functionality to the case for those who want it and to free those who don't need it from an unnecessary port. If you really want a 3.5mm port that's cool but in the unix philosophy I prefer to add complexity through add on modules rather than to bake it into the core product whether or not it is actually needed.
I don't know how popular iPad cases are, but I bet a number of people are going to start buying them.
What I wonder is why Apple doesn't take the cases more seriously. Their case offerings amount to little more than afterthoughts and badly designed ones at that for the most part. They introduce the Apple Pencil but provide no place to store it. Their screen protectors are clumsy sloppy afterthroughts. Their battery cases are terrible designs. It would make a lot of sense for Apple to make a phone to case interface so cases could be smarter and do more interesting things without the hack of hijacking the lightning port.
between my bluetooth headphones running out of battery
How much music are you listening to that you drain the batteries and can't take a few minutes to recharge? A pair of airpods charges for 3-5 hours of playback in 15 minutes. I'm sure the competitors are similar if you don't like Apple's offering. Heck you can listen with one in while the other charges if you really bear to stop listening for a few minutes. Plus there are bluetooth receivers if you prefer wired headphones for whatever reason.
and having to own 3 extra dongles
What are you doing that requires three different dongles on a routine basis? Not being snide, just genuinely curious. I have one for a headphone jack that I've used precisely once in the last year and a half and I have a lighting to USB for transferring pictures from my SLR camera that I use now and then. But really most things can be done wireless unless you are being obstinate about the method you connect with.
While end-users do not seem to have picked up on this yet, "biometric" authentication is a security failure, and face recognition makes it even worse.
That's a bit like claiming that door locks on the front of your house are a security failure because they can be defeated. Most people at most times don't actually need or want strong security - they are just keeping out the casual snoopers. You're quite right that if you are serious about security it isn't enough by itself but for most people they don't need more than this. The good news is that you can enable other features (like requiring pass codes) to make it more secure.
I warned about this long ago.
So did lots of others. We're aware.
If you think it's bad someone can get your fingerprint while you sleep, wait until it's your face.
Is this a big problem where you live? Are you a secret agent? If I have to be worried about someone being in my house while I sleep I'm worried about them BEING IN MY HOUSE, not using my iPad. Seriously, let's worry about actual problems before we worry about the ones from a James Bond film.
Can the NRO hand craft the needed observation systems at that rapid rate from bespoke 100% made in the USA parts?
If they have a brain in their skulls they already have backups sitting on the ground on standby in a launch ready (or nearly so) condition. If they are already building one it saves a lot of money to build a second (or more) at the same time. Heck even commercial companies like SiriusXM build backup satellites that are ready for launch should one of their orbiting satellites experience a problem. It would be almost criminally stupid for a government agency tasked with defense to not do the same thing.
Which is not inherent in the technology as I've pointed out in every post.
It most certainly is. Go ahead and try to make a useful neural network without any data to train it on. What you'll have without the training data is a good approximation of a boat anchor. And making sure you have an unbiased data set is FAR from trivial.
They actually are not buggy themselves as they are very simple;
Being simple does not equal being bug free. Even simple devices and simple programs can and do have bugs.
You put something in the black box and it classifies it in some desired way, the way the box works is all about the training data.
That is only true if there are no flaws in the design and implementation of the box.
Furthermore it's a bit odd to claim bugs are a kind of "bias" as usually they are more about failure than bias...
Bias is favoritism against one thing, person, or group compared with another. It does not have to be intentional nor does it have to reflect any negative attitudes. You can introduce a bias into a device (including a neural network) or a bit of software via a bug. This is not a question.
The "technology" behind this is neural networks. How do they reflect bias at al?
Several ways but the two most straightforward are Bad training data and Bugs. Bugs are an issue in ANY software and neural networks are no different and bugs can result in biases. And of course train it with bad data and you'll get biased results. We've seen examples of both cases.
The technology behind FaceID has no bias. It works really well - if given the right training data.
Given that clearly there isn't a set of "right training data" available that sounds like a hasty conclusion without evidence. Your argument is circular. You say the technology has no bias but proving that it has no bias requires feeding it an unbiased data set which hasn't happened. So neither of us knows if there is an inherent bias built into the system or not. Maybe there is and maybe there isn't but you don't have the data to say either way.
Furthermore it's more complicated than just the training data set. There is code that determines the logic used to analyze the data and that code is subject to biases from the person programming it. They do not have to be conscious biases either. That's not to say it is an irreducible problem but it has to be considered.
Now it could easily be that the training data you are feeding it is biased in some way, but that is why extensive testing of the resulting recognition engine you have built is key, so you can go back and correct training data...
Who is watching the watchmen? The ones checking the data, providing the data, and analyzing the data, and revising the data are people and people have biases. Guarding against and when necessary removing those biases can prove rather tricky especially when the training data sets used are by and large positively loaded with biased data.
Seriously, why would Google possibly care? In what way does it have any impact whatsoever on the Android Eco-system?
Several ways.
1) It makes Android less attractive as an ecosystem. (ruins battery life, performance, privacy, etc)
2) It provides marketing fodder for competitors to use against them
3) It impacts Google's revenue from their ad business
4) Many of these apps are obvious attempts at fraud
5) Liability due to the above issues
Who is it hurting to run this software?
Most of the people running it as well as Google and companies depending on the Android ecosystem.
If someone wants to use their phone to run cycles on mining or watching hard core Japanese porno, who's fucking business is it?
No one but nothing is preventing you from doing that. Doesn't mean Google is under any obligation to help you do it though. Go ahead and sideload the stuff if it is that important to you. None of us will care I assure you.
Here's a crazy notion. How about designing the system so it doesn't have to reboot? I know crazy right? Now like those unix folks have figured this out or... oh wait.
My operating system shouldn't have to reboot except on VERY rare occasions - typically major operating system upgrades. Microsoft has people trained to think this is somehow normal and/or necessary.
What exactly is the point in having a calendar that's not synchronized to the solstices?
There is no objectively important reason that a calendar that tracks rotations of the Earth has to have any relationship whatsoever to orbits around the Sun. There is some utility in doing so but it's not as if we would be unaware of and unable to plan for the fact that the Earth takes approximately 365.25 days to orbit the Sun. Heck for quite a long time we used the Julian calendar and it worked pretty well overall despite not quite so accurately reconciling the length of a year to the length of a day. The length of a year doesn't care how we bother to subdivide it.
Clocks measure time elapsed since an arbitrary epoch - calendars subdivide a year so that you can schedule seasonal activities.
You are conflating two unrelated things. Calendars measure time in relationship to arbitrarily chosen celestial cycles. A day measures the rotational time of Earth and a year measures the orbital time of Earth around the Sun. There is no reason we necessarily need a calendar to reconcile orbits around the Sun with rotations of the Earth. They are separate and arbitrarily chosen events with no causal relationship between their lengths. It is a useful exercise to do so but a useful calendar can just measure the passage of days with relation to a different cycle (the lunar cycle for example) and be just as valid. And having a calendar that has arbitrarily varying sub cycles (months over varying lengths) does not add to its practicality or make scheduling easier.
An accurate clock can't even measure the passage of days correctly, since every day is, on average, slightly longer than the one before it thanks to a combination of solar and lunar tidal drag, along with other forces that are less well understood
That argument is self defeating. If an accurate clock couldn't measure the passage of days accurately then we wouldn't be able to tell that the length of a day changes. That said, it is not objectively necessary to change the definition of a day to match Earth's current rotational period. In fact if we are on a different planet it would be impractical to use Earth's rotational period as the basis for calendar scale time keeping. Furthermore the length of a year (an orbit around the Sun) is also changing because of the n-body problem and changes to Earth's orbit.
To change it would be monumentally expensive, disruptive, and really would replace it with something else just as arbitrary.
Certainly. That doesn't mean doing so isn't a worthwhile exercise. My whole point is that our current calendar is unarguably illogical, flawed, and occasionally problematic. We use it because of network effects, not because it is an optimal system.
In other words, at least until we start colonizing other worlds with other chronological cycles, it will persist.
Agreed and I said more or less exactly this in a different post in this thread. I think it would take something like us becoming a multi-planet species to be a big enough jolt to the system to make it worthwhile to change calendar systems. Maybe not even then but I'm not sure what else would be sufficient cause.
The Soviet Union is a rather large testing ground. They tried variations of 5 and 6 that worked poorly in an attempt to avoid using 7, which they viewed as a number that made it too easy for people to hold on to religion.
The Soviet Union tried a lot of things that didn't work very well. This is pretty far down the list among them. Plus like most standards it's the network effects of the existing standard that makes them hard to change once they are well established.
While there are certainly an infinite number of variations one could try, its not like France (in the reference I cited) or the Soviets were too small a sample size to pretend that we have no evidence of relevance that 7 isn't just an arbitrary number and any other would work fine.
Those are interesting case studies but one would have to dig a lot deeper into the reasons for those failures to determine if the length of the chosen week was the proximal cause of the failure. My guess is that it failed for other reasons similar to how the metric system has to date failed to take hold in the US. Just local political and economic and network effect realities that made changing problematic. There is no objectively obvious reason a 7 day week should be preferable to any other similar length week and what evidence we have in relation to it is relatively scant. Main problem is that it's hard to test alternatives in the real world on a large scale.
Meh, using multiple applications with a single screen is largely a matter of preference.
Not really. I've equipped my staff with multiple monitors and it really does make a substantial performance boost in most cases unless you have a fairly linear workflow that doesn't involve a lot of need to look at more than one thing at a time. It's been my experience that most office workers strongly benefit from having multiple screens.
I don't just work with multiple applications, I work in multiple virtual machine desktops.
That might be appropriate for your work flow but you cannot generalize that to everyone else's work flow. My day job is actually studying this sort of stuff (I'm an industrial engineer) including ergonomics and work flow and virtual desktops are a good thing but generally speaking multiple monitors (space permitting) is better for more people. That's not to say there aren't cases where a virtual desktop is a great choice - just that such use cases are less common in circumstances where multiple monitors are a realistic option. And you can use virtual desktops with multiple monitors as well - they aren't incompatible options even though doing so is uncommon.
There is a thing called 'virtual desktops' that mostly makes up for being on a single screen.
I've used them more than a little and in general having a larger or multiple screens is almost always preferable when it's a viable option. Virtual desktops is a workaround to capture some/much of the value of having multiple monitors on a single screen but in general it is clearly less efficient except in cases where you are restricted by other constraints to a single screen.
If it's your case that a rental car costs less than depreciation and wear and tear on an owned vehicle then there must be a lot of bankrupt car rental agencies out there.
For occasional use a rental car does cost less to YOU than a vehicle you own because you don't have to amortize the entire purchase price (and insurance and maintenance) of the car over those miles. It's a step function and you share the costs. If you own a car for 200,000km then owning the car is clearly cheaper on a per mile basis. If I drive for 200 miles renting the car is clearly cheaper on a per mile basis. If you rent a car a few times per year then it is cheaper to not own it because you are sharing the capital and maintenance costs with other people. Nobody is making the claim that rental car companies aren't recouping the cost of the car.
Regarding a non-7 day week, this has been tried before and didn't work.
Just because a small group tried something a long time ago doesn't have a lot of relevance to the discussion. Maybe it just wasn't the right system or the right time to do it. There is nothing magical about a 7 day week. It's fine but we could easily have a 6 or an 8 day week and there is no objective reason that couldn't work just as well. It's just something we continue to do because we've done it that way for a long time. The major benefit of it is that most of the world has standardized on it which probably outweighs most drawbacks but that doesn't mean that it is optimal or couldn't be improved upon. The real question is whether an improved calendar would result in benefits that outweigh the costs.
Sometimes a long-followed social construct has survived because it works well for us animals
Just because something worked reasonably well in the past is not a valid justification for continuing to do it that way in the face of a better alternative. "That's the way we've always done it" is one of the worst and most expensive arguments people routinely make. Tradition is a fine thing and standards are a good thing but only to a point. Now you could sensibly argue that any of the calendar improvements we could make are well into diminishing returns as far as improvements go and thus not worth the cost but one should not blindly assume that to be true.
My suspicion is that the calendar won't be changed again (if it ever is) until after we become a multi-planetary species. It would take a major event to get everyone to agree to change calendars so everything I've said is purely conjecture.
7 day weeks are speculated to have been based on the lunar cycle from the ancient Babylonians.
Assuming that is true for argument's sake, what relevance does it have to modern life?
Well, I've always thought the International Fixed Calendar [wikipedia.org] was a decent attempt at sanity, but if there's people in the world that can't adopt the metric system, there's no way in hell the calendar could change.
Maybe the best solution is to use a sane calendar system similar to that one as a base system (similar to Universal Coordinated Time) and then just calculate offsets into whatever crazy calendar system some group prefers to use.
Our current calendar system is pretty much bonkers anyway. We seem bizarrely attached to concepts like a 7 day week which is familiar but totally arbitrary. You could have a year with 73 weeks of 5 days each or a year with 5 months of 73 days and it would be equally valid and equally arbitrary. It's never been clear to me why we need to worry about keeping months coordinated with particular seasons. So what if Christmas in the northern hemisphere gradually drifts to summer over the course of a few hundred years?
I've always liked the concept of metric time too.
the drug companies were trying to find a way to be exempt from law
And this surprises you somehow? Sounds like business as usual to me.
I find it appalling the length companies will go to undermine the rule of law.
It should be appalling. Yet we have an entire major political party which spends considerable energy towards eliminating regulations that prohibit companies from doing just that.
The US culture of profit at any cost and loss of morality is disheartening.
US culture is hardly alone in an over enthusiasm for profits and damn the consequences. And not everyone in the US is on board with profit at any cost. Just enough people to make it a real problem. That said, a profit motive is a useful thing, provided it is adequately constrained with rules to keep things reasonably fair and in the public interest. It's only a problem when we start pretending that free markets and profit motives will actually solve the problems caused by failed free markets and unchecked profit motives.
Yeah, I don't know anyone who uses a laptop solely at a desk.
I know an alarming number of people who do. Particularly in big companies. The former president of my company used to do that. Had a laptop but it basically never left his desk. I see it happen a lot. I also see a lot of people who use laptops in places where they really aren't geared to be especially productive. They work in a conference room when they would gain more efficiency by having a multiple screen system at a desk.
Please understand I'm not arguing against laptops. I'm just saying use the tool that actually fits how you work, what is most efficient, and be honest with yourself about what that is. Laptops have trade offs to gain portability particularly in speed and screen real estate as well as some other areas. For someone like me who does engineering work and typically has multiple documents open at once, a laptop is really limiting. I typically have our tooling database, MRP system, a web browser, some work instructions, a quote or two, our accounting software and several PDFs open at any given moment - and often more than that and I'm switching rapidly between them. To facilitate this I have three 4K 28" monitors and a fast graphics card. It would be really awkward to do what I do on a single 15" laptop screen and I'm not particularly unusual. Literally every office worker in my company has at least a dual monitor setup with a desktop because that maximizes productivity. I see a lot of companies and individuals reflexively going to laptops when they actually are giving up significant workflow efficiency for portability they only occasionally or never really need.
a desktop definitely locks you to your desk. If you dont need one why would you get one?
Most people work at the same desk anyway so why should it matter? And think for half a moment about what you give up to gain portability. Speed, screen real estate, GPU power, a decent keyboard+mouse, etc. If you really do move around then by all means get a laptop. They exist for good reason. But my point is that you should actually think about how you use the machine rather than how you imagine you use it. There are a LOT of people that would be better served with a desktop PC but have companies that reflexively give them laptops despite the productivity hit that entails. Plus laptops cost more for the same computing capability in virtually all cases.
Basically my point is if you don't actually need portability, why would you get a laptop?
Which pretty much is the exception that proves the rule. Sure, some people need actual portability but why do you undock it? Have you really thought about it and whether that is the ideal work flow for you? Maybe it is but maybe not. Sounds like you use your laptop as a desktop much of the time so what are you giving up to gain portability?
I just don't want to deal with all the cables, and the bulkiness and immobility, plus laptops have batteries so they don't mind that much if power goes out.
You just got done saying that you have a docking station with multiple monitors, etc and thos all have cables so your argument makes zero sense. And on a desk who cares about the cables? They aren't going to be in your way and you'll never move them. You effectively use a desktop most of the time. As for batteries, you can put a VERY large battery that will run any desktop PC (plus other equipment) for hours for less than $200. Far larger than the battery on any laptop.
I feel like it's not as much that someone doesn't need a laptop because they use the computer at their desk, and moreso that they always use the computer at their desk because they don't have a laptop.
Look around you. Most people in most companies work in a defined space - usually at their desk and they rarely need a computer elsewhere. There are exceptions of course but there are a LOT of people using a laptop which they essentially never use anywhere except their office. I see it all the time. Heck I used to do it. Then I realized I was using a slower weaker computer with a ton of compromises for portability that I almost never used. You might be someone who really does need the portability (though given your other comments I doubt it) but an awful lot of people use laptops for their job when a desktop with a lot more screen real estate would serve them better.