It's an even older concept if you expand your view to include video games. And in recent years games have really improved the choose your own adventure concept into compelling and moving stories (like Life is Strange or Telltale's The Walking Dead). If Netflix taps some of those game makers or simply ports those sort of games from other platforms they could have winner for themselves.
Because this is the first step taken in the direction of it becoming MANDATORY. How do you think the handicap accessibility laws were implemented?...People with handicaps need to just understand and accept that they cannot and will not be able to do everything that normal people do...
Comparing video games to handicap accessibility laws? Please... You're getting worked up over an imaginary slippery slope. Video games aren't even in the same ballpark of importance to make mandatory accessibility requirements. And besides, you act like it's a bad thing to have handicap accessibility laws, which gives citizens to access to government buildings, places of employment, public transportation, sidewalks, hospitals, stores, restaurants...The one-time cost savings of not constructing some ramps is insignificant compared to the cost of cutting people off from basic public services and the economy.
Another idea I had was trying to figure out how to partially automate the game to allow people to control it with just a mouse (currently requires either kb+mouse or gamepad). Essentially, I'd need to build a custom AI system to help interpret where the player wanted to navigate just with mouse aiming hints and in-game context. I'd also have to figure out what to do about some mini-games that are keyboard-only at the moment.... Anyone who whines about small efforts to help improve the lives of people who have it hard enough already can piss off. I'm doing this because it's the right thing to do, not because I'm trying to virtue signal something to someone. I'll advertise these features solely to inform people who require them that they're available. If generating some positive buzz for the game encourages other devs to do likewise, so much the better.
Good for you.
On kicking the kb controls...There's also crowd-sourcing... although I'm typically very wary of sites like Kickstarter, they can be useful to find niche markets for projects with clear and achievable goals. Maybe avoid delays and get your game launched, but do a Kickstarter soon after launch to see if there is a minimum market of people interested in supporting a customized keyboard-less or other enhanced version of the game for disabilities.
Have you considered that maybe this is being "politically correct," and maybe that just isn't what you think it is? Oftentimes when something gets politicized and turned into an insult, people lose track of its inoffensive origins.
Dutch Gun has the freedom to do whatever they want with their game. When the game is released the public will decide through the free market if the extra effort for accessibility was positive, negative, or inconsequential. That is the conservative path. If anyone believes they are conservative, but opposes Dutch Gun's right to do as they want with their game and letting the free market decide it's value, then they really need to reevaluate what they believe it.
As long as people/media pay attention the tweet creates the desired effect, regardless of people's opinion of the content or Trump. People don't like Kim Kardashian's tweets either, yet they keep coming because we keep listening one way or another.
Blue states should get together and promise internationally to try to keep the spirit of the agreement alive in their respective states. While it may not be constitutional to make formal agreements, at least token pledges can be given.
Why not just sit at the table? US states have a lot of leeway to enforce environmental laws and give incentives within their borders. There's a lot they can do shy of entering a international treaty. To put it in some perspective, if California was a nation it would have the 6th highest GDP in the world. Many US states are at least as qualified to sit at the table to reduce greenhouse emissions as signatory nations like Narau, Togo, St. Lucia, etc. The Earth doesn't care about your nation status or who the POTUS is.
He didn't lie about his qualifications. He is fully qualified as an engineer - with a degree from a top-notch university. He just isn't certified as one in Oregon because he has never worked as one there.
He did not present himself as one in any scenario where government has reasonable justification to restrict the usage of the title. He wasn't trying to sell a bridge design or anything. He was just publicly commenting on public infrastructure and stated the qualifications he has to form those opinions - he didn't try to get employment.
It is a much more complicated case than you let on.
He did not take the PE exam, passing that exam is a qualification he does not possess. It is no easy task to pass that test. He is also not an engineer in the technical field he is making an argument in.
Anyhow, the case has not been decided yet, this is just temporary until the case is tried.
The Professional Engineer (PE) certifications only apply to review and submission of official documents as required by the specific regulating agency (and there is a lot of variability), otherwise "engineer" is just a word that holds no special legal meaning. The PE test and certification is very generic too... all engineers get the same PE certification regardless of their specific field expertise, so having a PE license grants no de-facto credentials in other engineering fields and if anyone thinks it does they are lazy dolts. It's up to us to look into a person's credentials in the specific field, regardless of certifications, just like we would if someone says they are a scientist, doctor, pilot, financial advisor, etc. FWIW, I work for an engineering company, many of my colleagues and friends are state-certified Professional Engineers, and I personally hold state-certified licensure in a science-related field. I also know and work with many non-certified science/engineering professionals who are just as and sometimes more knowledgeable and experienced as those with certifications... you have to dig behind any titles to see who you can trust, to do otherwise is negligent.
A different and less flamey way to say this is what people say they will do and what they actually do are often very different. You can't trust people to be honest about themselves in a poll and many polls are essentially useless to predict actual behavior. This is well know to any researcher studying behavior (e.g. psychology, sociology, marketing, politics, economics, etc.) where they often purposely avoid direct polls, will trick study participants, and/or find other data sets that better indicate what people actually do and think.
At this moment in time, you're right of course. But, the companies making VR now are investing for the future. Today's VR is like open beta testing for the enthusiast niche. In a few years VR capable video cards will be much cheaper, such that "normal" PCs and consoles will be VR-ready taking away most of the Catch-22 you described. Then VR is only a matter of a peripheral for one's existing system. With a VR-version of a popular flagship franchise (e.g. Call of Duty, Halo, Half-Life, etc.) you have a market.
That may be but many still need to drive outside of the city or otherwise drive far beyond the current daily limits of electric vehicles. Until that is resolved I don't foresee electric vehicles replacing gas/diesel vehicles. That said I do expect more hybrids to become common.
Regarding your comment about the the daily limits of EVs specifically, [setting all other factors aside] for a typical two-car household, even short-ranged (100 mile) EVs can work really well if the drivers in the household can swap cars when one or another needs the longer range of a gas vehicle. For single-car households one car should fulfill all needs and EVs aren't quite there yet... EV tech might be ready in 8-10 years, but I'm very skeptical people will move to EVs as quickly as the author in the article predicts.
I agree that hybrids and plug-in hybrids will be more common....particularly for single-car households who need the versatility. My only problem with hybrids is they still have the long-term cost of maintaining a gas engine. A big advantage of EVs over gas is the long-term maintenance of the systems is much lower. In my opinion, a hybrid car is similar to the old combo DVD/VCR players where the versatility is great until one of the systems breaks, and you lose both.
Jokes aside, I kind of think big tech companies are leaving money on the table by not producing "VR adult entertainment." For better or worse, throughout history pornographers have always been at the forefront of new communication technologies, from the printing press to photography to the internet. VR will be no different.
FWIW, The Lowes employee wearing the exoskeleton harness photographed in the article does not appear to be using proper lifting technique. His back is rounded, not straight, but maybe the harness still enforces proper side-to-side posture. I question how much this harness is enforcing posture vs transferring load stress off the back, but the article is mostly fluff. I would appreciate a better explanation of the mechanics of this harness, because people in this discussion [so far] seem to be stabbing in the dark at explanations [when they aren't cracking Aliens jokes, of course].
Or the less dystopian scenario that workers do roughly the same amount of day-to-day work, but are less prone to acute and chronic injuries, which saves the company money on less workman's comp claims, fewer incidents to report to OSHA, lower health insurance rates, etc.
Hospitals should be testing this out with nursing staff in hospitals, which have some of the highest rates of on the job lifting related injuries (from lifting/supporting patients). http://www.npr.org/2015/02/04/...
...there's considerable latency with a geosynchronous orbit....The way some web pages are made those half seconds are going to stack up.... geosynch satellites will never have widespread usage for internet.
Yes, but their commercial and military customers probably do not allow users surf the web like normal folks.
The Inmarsat-5 Flight 4 satellite... focused on delivering high-speed broadband data to mobile customers, including commercial aircraft and ships and the U.S. military.
And for those customers half second delays are probably really fast compared to the alternatives.
I think the contribution of Halo was atmosphere and storytelling, not so much game mechanics. What FPS did a better job of world building at the time? Half life was good at this but I think Halo was better. But yeah HL should also definitely be on the list.
There's no shortage of games with atmosphere and stories in PC gaming history if that's the main criteria for greatness. For story-driven FPS games specifically, you already mentioned Half-Life, but System Shock (1994) and System Shock 2 (1999) would also be contenders (and have been mentioned by others in this discussion). Halo was very good at porting existing game concepts and mechanics to consoles at a very fortuitous time.
Halo was popular. It was a xbox system seller and something pc/mac fans were waiting for until microsoft did the dirty and turned it xbox only. But this game wasn't revolutionary in terms of gaming as a whole. When this game came out PC gamers had Unreal, Quake, Call Of Duty, Battlefield 1942, Thief, Return to Castle Wolfenstein, Soldier of Fortune etc
Yeah, Halo seems like the weakest of the inductees and looks like a reach to please younger and/or console gamers. There was nothing unique in Halo that PC games hadn't done years prior. Even on consoles there was Goldeneye long before Halo. Halo was good game, that just happened to hit the market at the right time to spawn a huge franchise.
I feel like Quake was far more important than Halo, ushering in the era of true 3D, the starting point for internet based online gaming and so forth. It was also the first FPS that explicitly designed for user extensibility from the outset...
Agreed, and I'm not just being a fanboy, because I didn't really like the original Quake game on it's own.* I also give Quake credit ushering in true 3D, but the Quake engine's flexibly for modding is in my opinion deserving of greater praise. The mechanics of Quake Deathmatch, Capture the Flag, and Team Fortress keep echoing through games today. Heck, Team Fortress by itself could be "Hall of Fame" material, but it owes everything to Quake.
* - I personally found the original Quake out-of-the-box game to be uninteresting and drab. At the time (and still) I thought Duke Nukem was a much better game. [I might be a fanboy, but] I think Duke Nukem could also be Hall of Fame material as the pinnacle of sprite-based shooters and for introducing many unique mechanics, but the downfall of Duke Nukem Forever is likely too big of a stain.
If you can be 200 lbs overweight and play it with competitive success, it's a game, not a sport.
We ave an established term for these: "video games". There's nothing wrong with them. But they are not "sports".
They are e-sports not sports that "e-" is critical, but pedantics aside.... There is a low bar for what people call "sport" that I think video gaming can clear. ESPN thinks professional poker, eating competitions, billiards, and trick-shot pool are sport enough to air on TV...many of those people don't look too healthy. One can win an Olympic medal in eight different categories of target shooting. Although it is more active than video games, the Olympic event of "race walking" [20KM and 50KM] seems incredibly silly when one could run. Last but certainly not least, the multi-billion dollar infinite left-turn sport of NASCAR, where competitors sit for long periods of times making slight movements to control a piece of technology while talking to their team on a microphone... sound familiar? I think pro video gamers can fit right in "sports."
They need some serious economies of scale for this to work.
Musk specifically mentioned rural US, but they could probably service other countries too, like nearby Canada, Mexico, Caribbean, maybe Central America.
And once the satellites are in orbit, why couldn't they offer the service to the entire world (similar to how GPS is world-wide)? Seems like 7.5 billion potential customers could probably make that economy of scale work. Maybe my understanding of communication satellites is flawed?
Nothing because based on the article the caterpillars are natural and very common. Researchers are studying the natural bio-chemical process in the caterpillar's gut with the hope it can be applied elsewhere, but that doesn't mean they need caterpillars to apply it.
Come on, Nintendo, give us a real NES/SNES/N64 combo box.
Don't bet on it. A combo console would be very hard, maybe impossible, to design the look that would trigger nostalgic feelings, which drive these sales, because it physically won't look like any of the original consoles. Also, Nintendo can also sell more units by splitting the systems up.
If the look of the console doesn't matter and you just want to play the old games, then Nintendo happily resells them to you through their virtual console digital store. http://www.nintendo.com/games/...
IIRC, the Verge claims that the battery life is just meh, but that the overall power design is supposed to allow it to hold 95(?)% of it's original charge (at full cap) after two years.
I think they're all just lying about everything at this point, because nobody can really test them properly.
...and if 2 years later you discover they were lying about the battery life it's far too late to do anything about it.
But, FWIW, my wife and I both bought Samsung S5's about 2 years ago and the batteries are still holding up well. So, maybe they aren't lying...if you trust them to keep consistent battery/power management design 3 generations later [and not explode].
Agreed... and I want to know how those batteries hold up 1-2 years from now. A battery that is constantly drained and recharged to the max will lose long-term effectiveness. Cell phone manufacturers use their OS to create "minimum" and "maximum" battery charges that will conserve the battery's life time, but these out-of-the-box battery life comparisons don't reflect long-term battery life.
Lint build-up in dryer vents is a common source of home fires, so maybe a dryer that creates less lint would reduce the chance of a fire, and in turn public safety? Of course dryer vent/lint fires typically occur because homeowners are negligent in cleaning vents out, BUT if this could remove or reduce long-term dryer vent cleaning effort/cost that would be another benefit. I'm just speculating, of course...
Slashdot Mirror
It's an even older concept if you expand your view to include video games. And in recent years games have really improved the choose your own adventure concept into compelling and moving stories (like Life is Strange or Telltale's The Walking Dead). If Netflix taps some of those game makers or simply ports those sort of games from other platforms they could have winner for themselves.
Because this is the first step taken in the direction of it becoming MANDATORY. How do you think the handicap accessibility laws were implemented? ...People with handicaps need to just understand and accept that they cannot and will not be able to do everything that normal people do...
Comparing video games to handicap accessibility laws? Please... You're getting worked up over an imaginary slippery slope. Video games aren't even in the same ballpark of importance to make mandatory accessibility requirements. And besides, you act like it's a bad thing to have handicap accessibility laws, which gives citizens to access to government buildings, places of employment, public transportation, sidewalks, hospitals, stores, restaurants...The one-time cost savings of not constructing some ramps is insignificant compared to the cost of cutting people off from basic public services and the economy.
Another idea I had was trying to figure out how to partially automate the game to allow people to control it with just a mouse (currently requires either kb+mouse or gamepad). Essentially, I'd need to build a custom AI system to help interpret where the player wanted to navigate just with mouse aiming hints and in-game context. I'd also have to figure out what to do about some mini-games that are keyboard-only at the moment.... Anyone who whines about small efforts to help improve the lives of people who have it hard enough already can piss off. I'm doing this because it's the right thing to do, not because I'm trying to virtue signal something to someone. I'll advertise these features solely to inform people who require them that they're available. If generating some positive buzz for the game encourages other devs to do likewise, so much the better.
Good for you.
On kicking the kb controls...There's also crowd-sourcing... although I'm typically very wary of sites like Kickstarter, they can be useful to find niche markets for projects with clear and achievable goals. Maybe avoid delays and get your game launched, but do a Kickstarter soon after launch to see if there is a minimum market of people interested in supporting a customized keyboard-less or other enhanced version of the game for disabilities.
Have you considered that maybe this is being "politically correct," and maybe that just isn't what you think it is? Oftentimes when something gets politicized and turned into an insult, people lose track of its inoffensive origins.
Dutch Gun has the freedom to do whatever they want with their game. When the game is released the public will decide through the free market if the extra effort for accessibility was positive, negative, or inconsequential. That is the conservative path. If anyone believes they are conservative, but opposes Dutch Gun's right to do as they want with their game and letting the free market decide it's value, then they really need to reevaluate what they believe it.
As long as people/media pay attention the tweet creates the desired effect, regardless of people's opinion of the content or Trump. People don't like Kim Kardashian's tweets either, yet they keep coming because we keep listening one way or another.
Blue states should get together and promise internationally to try to keep the spirit of the agreement alive in their respective states. While it may not be constitutional to make formal agreements, at least token pledges can be given.
Why not just sit at the table? US states have a lot of leeway to enforce environmental laws and give incentives within their borders. There's a lot they can do shy of entering a international treaty. To put it in some perspective, if California was a nation it would have the 6th highest GDP in the world. Many US states are at least as qualified to sit at the table to reduce greenhouse emissions as signatory nations like Narau, Togo, St. Lucia, etc. The Earth doesn't care about your nation status or who the POTUS is.
He didn't lie about his qualifications. He is fully qualified as an engineer - with a degree from a top-notch university.
He just isn't certified as one in Oregon because he has never worked as one there.
He did not present himself as one in any scenario where government has reasonable justification to restrict the usage of the title. He wasn't trying to sell a bridge design or anything. He was just publicly commenting on public infrastructure and stated the qualifications he has to form those opinions - he didn't try to get employment.
It is a much more complicated case than you let on.
He did not take the PE exam, passing that exam is a qualification he does not possess. It is no easy task to pass that test. He is also not an engineer in the technical field he is making an argument in.
Anyhow, the case has not been decided yet, this is just temporary until the case is tried.
The Professional Engineer (PE) certifications only apply to review and submission of official documents as required by the specific regulating agency (and there is a lot of variability), otherwise "engineer" is just a word that holds no special legal meaning. The PE test and certification is very generic too... all engineers get the same PE certification regardless of their specific field expertise, so having a PE license grants no de-facto credentials in other engineering fields and if anyone thinks it does they are lazy dolts. It's up to us to look into a person's credentials in the specific field, regardless of certifications, just like we would if someone says they are a scientist, doctor, pilot, financial advisor, etc. FWIW, I work for an engineering company, many of my colleagues and friends are state-certified Professional Engineers, and I personally hold state-certified licensure in a science-related field. I also know and work with many non-certified science/engineering professionals who are just as and sometimes more knowledgeable and experienced as those with certifications... you have to dig behind any titles to see who you can trust, to do otherwise is negligent.
A different and less flamey way to say this is what people say they will do and what they actually do are often very different. You can't trust people to be honest about themselves in a poll and many polls are essentially useless to predict actual behavior. This is well know to any researcher studying behavior (e.g. psychology, sociology, marketing, politics, economics, etc.) where they often purposely avoid direct polls, will trick study participants, and/or find other data sets that better indicate what people actually do and think.
At this moment in time, you're right of course. But, the companies making VR now are investing for the future. Today's VR is like open beta testing for the enthusiast niche. In a few years VR capable video cards will be much cheaper, such that "normal" PCs and consoles will be VR-ready taking away most of the Catch-22 you described. Then VR is only a matter of a peripheral for one's existing system. With a VR-version of a popular flagship franchise (e.g. Call of Duty, Halo, Half-Life, etc.) you have a market.
That may be but many still need to drive outside of the city or otherwise drive far beyond the current daily limits of electric vehicles. Until that is resolved I don't foresee electric vehicles replacing gas/diesel vehicles. That said I do expect more hybrids to become common.
Regarding your comment about the the daily limits of EVs specifically, [setting all other factors aside] for a typical two-car household, even short-ranged (100 mile) EVs can work really well if the drivers in the household can swap cars when one or another needs the longer range of a gas vehicle. For single-car households one car should fulfill all needs and EVs aren't quite there yet... EV tech might be ready in 8-10 years, but I'm very skeptical people will move to EVs as quickly as the author in the article predicts.
I agree that hybrids and plug-in hybrids will be more common....particularly for single-car households who need the versatility. My only problem with hybrids is they still have the long-term cost of maintaining a gas engine. A big advantage of EVs over gas is the long-term maintenance of the systems is much lower. In my opinion, a hybrid car is similar to the old combo DVD/VCR players where the versatility is great until one of the systems breaks, and you lose both.
Jokes aside, I kind of think big tech companies are leaving money on the table by not producing "VR adult entertainment." For better or worse, throughout history pornographers have always been at the forefront of new communication technologies, from the printing press to photography to the internet. VR will be no different.
FWIW, The Lowes employee wearing the exoskeleton harness photographed in the article does not appear to be using proper lifting technique. His back is rounded, not straight, but maybe the harness still enforces proper side-to-side posture. I question how much this harness is enforcing posture vs transferring load stress off the back, but the article is mostly fluff. I would appreciate a better explanation of the mechanics of this harness, because people in this discussion [so far] seem to be stabbing in the dark at explanations [when they aren't cracking Aliens jokes, of course].
Or the less dystopian scenario that workers do roughly the same amount of day-to-day work, but are less prone to acute and chronic injuries, which saves the company money on less workman's comp claims, fewer incidents to report to OSHA, lower health insurance rates, etc.
Hospitals should be testing this out with nursing staff in hospitals, which have some of the highest rates of on the job lifting related injuries (from lifting/supporting patients). http://www.npr.org/2015/02/04/...
...there's considerable latency with a geosynchronous orbit. ...The way some web pages are made those half seconds are going to stack up.... geosynch satellites will never have widespread usage for internet.
Yes, but their commercial and military customers probably do not allow users surf the web like normal folks.
The Inmarsat-5 Flight 4 satellite... focused on delivering high-speed broadband data to mobile customers, including commercial aircraft and ships and the U.S. military.
And for those customers half second delays are probably really fast compared to the alternatives.
I think the contribution of Halo was atmosphere and storytelling, not so much game mechanics. What FPS did a better job of world building at the time? Half life was good at this but I think Halo was better. But yeah HL should also definitely be on the list.
There's no shortage of games with atmosphere and stories in PC gaming history if that's the main criteria for greatness. For story-driven FPS games specifically, you already mentioned Half-Life, but System Shock (1994) and System Shock 2 (1999) would also be contenders (and have been mentioned by others in this discussion). Halo was very good at porting existing game concepts and mechanics to consoles at a very fortuitous time.
Halo was popular. It was a xbox system seller and something pc/mac fans were waiting for until microsoft did the dirty and turned it xbox only. But this game wasn't revolutionary in terms of gaming as a whole. When this game came out PC gamers had Unreal, Quake, Call Of Duty, Battlefield 1942, Thief, Return to Castle Wolfenstein, Soldier of Fortune etc
Yeah, Halo seems like the weakest of the inductees and looks like a reach to please younger and/or console gamers. There was nothing unique in Halo that PC games hadn't done years prior. Even on consoles there was Goldeneye long before Halo. Halo was good game, that just happened to hit the market at the right time to spawn a huge franchise.
I feel like Quake was far more important than Halo, ushering in the era of true 3D, the starting point for internet based online gaming and so forth. It was also the first FPS that explicitly designed for user extensibility from the outset...
Agreed, and I'm not just being a fanboy, because I didn't really like the original Quake game on it's own.* I also give Quake credit ushering in true 3D, but the Quake engine's flexibly for modding is in my opinion deserving of greater praise. The mechanics of Quake Deathmatch, Capture the Flag, and Team Fortress keep echoing through games today. Heck, Team Fortress by itself could be "Hall of Fame" material, but it owes everything to Quake.
* - I personally found the original Quake out-of-the-box game to be uninteresting and drab. At the time (and still) I thought Duke Nukem was a much better game. [I might be a fanboy, but] I think Duke Nukem could also be Hall of Fame material as the pinnacle of sprite-based shooters and for introducing many unique mechanics, but the downfall of Duke Nukem Forever is likely too big of a stain.
If you can be 200 lbs overweight and play it with competitive success, it's a game, not a sport.
We ave an established term for these: "video games". There's nothing wrong with them. But they are not "sports".
They are e-sports not sports that "e-" is critical, but pedantics aside.... There is a low bar for what people call "sport" that I think video gaming can clear. ESPN thinks professional poker, eating competitions, billiards, and trick-shot pool are sport enough to air on TV...many of those people don't look too healthy. One can win an Olympic medal in eight different categories of target shooting. Although it is more active than video games, the Olympic event of "race walking" [20KM and 50KM] seems incredibly silly when one could run. Last but certainly not least, the multi-billion dollar infinite left-turn sport of NASCAR, where competitors sit for long periods of times making slight movements to control a piece of technology while talking to their team on a microphone... sound familiar? I think pro video gamers can fit right in "sports."
They need some serious economies of scale for this to work.
Musk specifically mentioned rural US, but they could probably service other countries too, like nearby Canada, Mexico, Caribbean, maybe Central America.
And once the satellites are in orbit, why couldn't they offer the service to the entire world (similar to how GPS is world-wide)? Seems like 7.5 billion potential customers could probably make that economy of scale work. Maybe my understanding of communication satellites is flawed?
Nothing because based on the article the caterpillars are natural and very common. Researchers are studying the natural bio-chemical process in the caterpillar's gut with the hope it can be applied elsewhere, but that doesn't mean they need caterpillars to apply it.
Come on, Nintendo, give us a real NES/SNES/N64 combo box.
Don't bet on it. A combo console would be very hard, maybe impossible, to design the look that would trigger nostalgic feelings, which drive these sales, because it physically won't look like any of the original consoles. Also, Nintendo can also sell more units by splitting the systems up.
If the look of the console doesn't matter and you just want to play the old games, then Nintendo happily resells them to you through their virtual console digital store. http://www.nintendo.com/games/...
IIRC, the Verge claims that the battery life is just meh, but that the overall power design is supposed to allow it to hold 95(?)% of it's original charge (at full cap) after two years.
I think they're all just lying about everything at this point, because nobody can really test them properly.
...and if 2 years later you discover they were lying about the battery life it's far too late to do anything about it.
But, FWIW, my wife and I both bought Samsung S5's about 2 years ago and the batteries are still holding up well. So, maybe they aren't lying...if you trust them to keep consistent battery/power management design 3 generations later [and not explode].
Agreed... and I want to know how those batteries hold up 1-2 years from now. A battery that is constantly drained and recharged to the max will lose long-term effectiveness. Cell phone manufacturers use their OS to create "minimum" and "maximum" battery charges that will conserve the battery's life time, but these out-of-the-box battery life comparisons don't reflect long-term battery life.
oops, I missed an important word "...reduce the chance of fire, and in turn IMPROVE public safety..."
Lint build-up in dryer vents is a common source of home fires, so maybe a dryer that creates less lint would reduce the chance of a fire, and in turn public safety? Of course dryer vent/lint fires typically occur because homeowners are negligent in cleaning vents out, BUT if this could remove or reduce long-term dryer vent cleaning effort/cost that would be another benefit. I'm just speculating, of course...