When they have put that dick in their mouth, they might as well swallow.
What fucking asshats occupying these committee seats thinks that just because you can find a word in the dictionary, should it be allowed as one of the core road signs on the internet.
Let ICANN eat a bowl of dicks for breakfast until eternity. And guess what ICANNS Irish Oat meal might not be what you think it is, I never though I could ever write such a post and be 100% on topic....
Well, you cannot really trust any review or rating system without doing a lot of sanity checking and your own home work. Look at the pattern in terms of reviews with similar language. Distribution of stars. Amount of gushing reviews. Competency of the reviewers. For this it helps to have some competency yourself.
And your own subject matter expertise. If a product is aimed at beginners of anything, they will tend to write overly positive or negative reviews. Too positive, because they don't know how to assess the quality of an item. Too negative, colored by them not understanding the item.
If there is an abundance of a varieties of a particular product, I might go with just average stars to thin the herd before digging into the reviews. I don't thin I have ever been surprised by the quality of a product, If it is an important or expensive item, I will also seek reviews outside of amazon, or user groups.
I never ignore the reviews, That would be stupid. I have steered away from many lemons by heeding warnings. Especially if a seller has poor customer service and the item is NOT fulfilled by amazon. I take a chance on a dubious item only if it has the amazon return policy.
Was car mechanics ever core subjects, or dentistry? CS is a pretty small field, and while there are a lot of "IT workers", there is nothing special with computer science that should elevate it to a core subject.
I'm not an astronomer, but again, big numbers will play tricks with us. A quick google search states:. "As of October 2005, astronomers have been able to detect the presence of planets around only 28 G-type stars (including Sol) -- or around 5.5 percent -- of those 511 stars located within 100 light-years of Earth." Lets double it to 50, to be on safe side.
I'm thinking that chance of life being created is very small even if the favorable conditions for it exist for millions of years. I'm thinking maybe 1 in a million or less. But let's say it is 1 in 20, and that we get 2 stars with life within 100 parsecs.
I'm also thinking that the chance of evolving into sentient life is also very small, and also that the reign of any species at the top of the food chain might be similar to what we have at earth, very short. Humans have been at the top for some 50k years. We have only recently (100 years) been able to reach a level of technology where space faring and space colonization is feasible or at at least thinkable. At this level of technology, we have also become a very serious threat to our own ecosystem, and endangering the future for the species, and a real risk that it might devolve in to a less technologically savvy species.
If an advanced civilization in relative proximity could keep the reign for millions of years before falling into civil wars or destroying their own habitats, and continually sending colonization ships in all directions, yes we might see some traces of life. But the chance of such civilization ever existing I find extremely unlikely. Such a civilization would need to have extreme aversion to conflict and govern itself very well, being able to plan projects that last not 100's but 1000's of years, be no danger to its ecosystem, and maintain a stable population, and those traits is also the reason such a civilization would be unlikely to ever need or want to colonize the neighboring stars. It will be a civilization of cows that have no wish for space travel, or humanoids, who would love to space travel if they could just avoid killing each other first.
OK, and even if we win the lottery, what are the chances that we would ever see real aliens in a UFO? Well, let's say it's 2 instances of life, and 1 millionth chance that this life becomes space travelling, almost 1/1 chance that they would be able to identify Sol as a potential life form hosting system, and maybe 1 millionth chance that the civilization's would overlap with the time that we have humans on earth. No matter how I turn it, it is still likelier to win the lottery (which happens every day for someone, somewhere) than humans ever finding remnants of alien life. The difference between someone winning the lottery every day and this chance of meeting UFO is that we only have 1 ticket. Maybe if there were billions or trillions of earth-like civilizations, there might be a decent chance that one of them would get to meet one of the other, or find traces of each other.
would you be willing to bet against these guys not being paid lobbyists for Comcast? NON-PROFIT NON-PARTISAN think tanks don't earn their money for salt on the bread by submitting stories to Reason. They depend on generous sugar daddies to fund their thinktankery. Comcast has a vast network of lobbyists. Thyey clearlyt hate net neutrality, and you can bet your sweet ass that it has nothing to do with th e"fear of breaking the internet", and everything to do with not wanting government at all to regulate thewir business, just as Wall street don't want SEC to regulate them, or the oil companies not wanting the EPA to regulate them. Corporations since the dawn of industry ALWAYS claimed that they don't want regulations, that they are good guys that can self-regulate, and that the invisible hand of the market will make everything OK.
We KNOW that if Comcast was to control the internet, it would very soon look like someone invented broadcast TV anno 1955. Comcast would want to block skype, netflix, pandora etc. They want the option to start cutting off or hamnstringing third party services in order to better place their own service. They would love to play highway robbers or "toll gate" bandits extracting a toll for users. They want the content providers to share ad or royalties revenue with them. And they want more flexibility to charge for "premium" content, under the giuse of quality of service. And who know what else they want around the corner. Maybe we wont really know what they want until they have a near monopoly so that they can start gouging folks with no alternative provider to escape to.
Let us make a few assumptions first, and maybe throw in some facts as well.
1. What are the odds that there exist or has existed life beyond earth?
Well, even if the chance of a given solar system or any of its planets has life, we are talking about an infitesimal number of galaxies with their solar systems and planets So I'd say the odds are pretty good, almost so good that I would not bet a penny against it for a dollar.
2. What are the odds that evidence of such life or remnants of such life could be found within a few decades in human time scale? Almost impossible, if not flat out impossible.
Why do I say that? Well, I learnt when I was a kid watching a Sagan program that the universe was sort of like a giant dough with raisins i it, that is ever expanding. The odds that one raisin will ever meet another raisin is pretty slim , and the raisins will get further and further apart over time. So whatever crap they find digging in mars rocks is likely stuff from our solar system, and if they find any stuff from outside the solar system, due to the nature of the big bang, you would only find stuff from the very birth of the universe.
Since it takes up to a few billions of years to get all the conditions right for the nurture of life, I'd think it very unlikely that any such primordial space debris would have any remaining evidence of life.
Aliens here, what utter nonsense. Assume that time travel and travel beyond velocity of light is impossible. Given the distances at play, an alien could not target earth, or even our solar system for a trip. What they observed from our solar system would have been millions of years old when they saw it, and given the expanding nature of the universe, they might even need to break the laws of physics to travel in that direction fast enough for millions of years to catch earth.
If life was achieved in the very few birthing moments of the universe, and if intelligent species managed to come up with space travel and colonized a fair amount of of the primordial matter, we still would have only infinitesimally small chances of ever finding any evidence of this.
I find it distasteful that NASA, which should be founded on science is engaging is such claptrap gallopping charlatanism. The universe is plenty interesting enough as it is, no need to add hobgoblins and other hocus pocus.
Someone who has signed such a contract would be forced to stay and work in same shitty job with same shitty pay forever if he wants to put food on the table. He has in fact been removed from the competitive part of the workforce unless he is retrained to do something completely different such as teacher or nurse,
It's worse than that. In practice, you can't invest in foreign mutual funds. Foreign institutions are required by US authorities to withold 30% of all gains if the client is an american citizen. That's a major PITA for them, so what they do instead is just deny american citizens from opening an account.
Well, I imagine a religious zealot would want his Robot indoctrinated with the exact same doctrines as himself.
So this is just a way to make robots less perfect.
If you want to create a good AI, as in one similar to a human, you have to give him human imperfections. It woulde more like a beer burping neighbor than a Jeopardy Winner. Such as lying, bad memory, guessing and bullshitting when he doesn't know the answer, jumping to conclusions, failure to understand statistics, but might be obsessive of knowing all the stas for red sox last 100 years. Forward the occasional chain letter and MMF scheme.
Wearing a watch in bed is idiotic. Your skin needs to breathe now and then. Do you wear your shoes to bed as well? You deserve also to wake up with the imprint of the watch on your forehead,.
Same, but involuntarily, I developed extremely sensitivity to nickel. and could no longer wear anything on my wrist except gold or titanium. I bought skagen titanium watches, but first one they had used stainless steel for the claps, so it game me a horrible itch, next one the glass broke, and last one the latch broke. That some $300 wasted on low quality Danish junk that looks nice but can't stand up to normal wear. I still look for watches, but they all advertize their material for the face side. The back is usually steel. So have not worn one for many years now. I am sure there will never bee any smart watch that has a back with no metal, or a clasp with no metal.
Serious inferiority syndrome going on here. The classical trait of someone extremely unaccomplished, is to try to diminish the greatness of those that are great. Either you are inferior, or you come from an inferior country. Possibly a country that really hates gays, such as Russia? I've found Russians in general to be very unpleasant and arrogant, and not at all as smart as they think they are. A Russian with money is even worse than an Arab.
If nothing else, Turing really brought to light what can be called a general computer. Sure, Charles Babbage was important, Sure, Ada was important, but he really got into the matter of what a computer's limitations are, and what it could possibly do. That elevates one from being just a mechanic to being a real thinker and philosopher. My cell phone , if it had been sent in time back to 1975, would have passed the Turing test with flying colors by a baffled audience. Today however, everybody knows something about search engines and voice recognition, and with the addition of some grammar and heuristics, so we would not so easily say the test has been passed. Today's Turing test would have to involve a human control group. The computer would have to be dumbed down, with a less perfect search engine, but with better heuristics for guessing, lying and bullshitting etc, and more refined voice engines.
The movie was titled ":The Imitation Game", and is a feature film, with a script adapted by a person of same persuasion as Turing. As with all feature films, that are not called flat out documentaries or biographies, there tends to be historical inaccuracies, fro dramatic effect.
It was not funded by North Korea with the title. " A Patrotic Biography that shall be used as propaganda to inspire more young patriots to become computer scientists in the service of the great leader, and which also would be pleasing to certain film critics"
No wonder critics are considered the scum of earth.,
While I know perfectly well how a computer works, that is a far cry from being able to build a computer from scratch (and that means designing all the silicon etc, nit just remembering from CS class about binary arithmetic and assembler programming) . As more and more advanced programming and design tools become available, and ideas can be abstracted at higher and higher levels, there is actually less NEED for a software designer to know how a computer actually works. It might even be beneficial to not know how it works, or even need to think about algorithms, but work with abstractions at higher and higher levels. But it will always be beneficial for a software designed to know basic science, such as physics, and statistics. But even more important than knowing computer science, is to know the domain, whether that is business, chemistry, manufacturing. Statistics and probability is where most people draw a short stick causing them to make poor design decisions, making software that is not future proof or scalable. Too many experts lack any insight outside their little turf. If you try to design a system strictly on specs, you already have lost, The business analysts or consultants who have handed down those specs, don't know all the important questions that need to be asked. A great architect would have a decent grasp of both the business domain, and of the technology (and its limitations) used to implement the solution.
I know scores that went to MIT and Harvard, and while a few of them are outstanding, the smartest people I have met went to other schools.
The best science teacher that ever lived, is possibly Isaac Asimov, and he never graduated from one of the top notch schools, or obtained tenure at a top school. When he started making enough money on his writing, he gladly said goodbye to the snooty assholes at Boston Colleges.
" I don't know about you, but sometime I put my smart phone on the table for extended periods while I move around!"
Jimeney crickets!
So you would lose out on dozens of steps, and maybe 2 calories worth of tracking. That's a complete disaster. How the hell are you now going to know how many calories you have burnt today. You might have to walk an extra 50 meters tonight to be on safe side.
That seems to be the entryway though. The fitness gadgets (trackers, mp3 players) are the gateway drugs that potentially can lead to an exercising lifestyle. Once you start exercising, at first you can only do it indoors, because you are ashamed of your physical appearance or poor fitness. When you graduate to move outdoors, you will need gadgets to get you going. Track the progress, see the improvement. And the mp3 player to distract you from the rote of moving around. After a year or 2, you can drop the mp3, and save your knees by actually hearing how your feet strike the ground, instead of lady gagas latest dance tune. Soon enough you will be addicted to the activity itself, and all the gadgetry is just a chore and in the way, and will soon enough end up in a drawer.
If you don't need the accuracy, why in the godforsaken earth do you even need a tracker. Spend 1 minute at the end of each week or month, and do the napkin math.
But if you are a user of a fitness tracker, you are also possibly a novice exerciser, and bring an mp3 player. Now you have 2 devices that could be replaced with a smartphone. And the smartphone can call 911, and take a picture of that man biting a squirrel on the path. There are tons of reasons to bring along the smartphone, even if you did not use as a tracker.
Slashdot Mirror
When they have put that dick in their mouth, they might as well swallow.
What fucking asshats occupying these committee seats thinks that just because you can find a word in the dictionary, should it be allowed as one of the core road signs on the internet.
Let ICANN eat a bowl of dicks for breakfast until eternity.
And guess what ICANNS Irish Oat meal might not be what you think it is,
I never though I could ever write such a post and be 100% on topic....
Looks like a lucrative business,
Maybe amazon should offer their own payola review service instead of shutting down these honest entrepreneurs.....
Well, you cannot really trust any review or rating system without doing a lot of sanity checking and your own home work.
Look at the pattern in terms of reviews with similar language.
Distribution of stars. Amount of gushing reviews.
Competency of the reviewers. For this it helps to have some competency yourself.
And your own subject matter expertise. If a product is aimed at beginners of anything, they will tend to write overly positive or negative reviews.
Too positive, because they don't know how to assess the quality of an item. Too negative, colored by them not understanding the item.
If there is an abundance of a varieties of a particular product, I might go with just average stars to thin the herd before digging into the reviews.
I don't thin I have ever been surprised by the quality of a product, If it is an important or expensive item, I will also seek reviews outside of amazon, or user groups.
I never ignore the reviews, That would be stupid. I have steered away from many lemons by heeding warnings. Especially if a seller has poor customer service and the item is NOT fulfilled by amazon. I take a chance on a dubious item only if it has the amazon return policy.
Was car mechanics ever core subjects, or dentistry?
CS is a pretty small field, and while there are a lot of "IT workers", there is nothing special with computer science that should elevate it to a core subject.
I'm not an astronomer, but again, big numbers will play tricks with us.
A quick google search states:.
"As of October 2005, astronomers have been able to detect the presence of planets around only 28 G-type stars (including Sol) -- or around 5.5 percent -- of those 511 stars located within 100 light-years of Earth."
Lets double it to 50, to be on safe side.
I'm thinking that chance of life being created is very small even if the favorable conditions for it exist for millions of years.
I'm thinking maybe 1 in a million or less. But let's say it is 1 in 20, and that we get 2 stars with life within 100 parsecs.
I'm also thinking that the chance of evolving into sentient life is also very small, and also that the reign of any species at the top of the food chain might be similar to what we have at earth, very short. Humans have been at the top for some 50k years. We have only recently (100 years) been able to reach a level of technology where space faring and space colonization is feasible or at at least thinkable. At this level of technology, we have also become a very serious threat to our own ecosystem, and endangering the future for the species, and a real risk that it might devolve in to a less technologically savvy species.
If an advanced civilization in relative proximity could keep the reign for millions of years before falling into civil wars or destroying their own habitats, and continually sending colonization ships in all directions, yes we might see some traces of life. But the chance of such civilization ever existing I find extremely unlikely. Such a civilization would need to have extreme aversion to conflict and govern itself very well, being able to plan projects that last not 100's but 1000's of years, be no danger to its ecosystem, and maintain a stable population, and those traits is also the reason such a civilization would be unlikely to ever need or want to colonize the neighboring stars. It will be a civilization of cows that have no wish for space travel, or humanoids, who would love to space travel if they could just avoid killing each other first.
OK, and even if we win the lottery, what are the chances that we would ever see real aliens in a UFO?
Well, let's say it's 2 instances of life, and 1 millionth chance that this life becomes space travelling, almost 1/1 chance that they would be able to identify Sol as a potential life form hosting system, and maybe 1 millionth chance that the civilization's would overlap with the time that we have humans on earth. No matter how I turn it, it is still likelier to win the lottery (which happens every day for someone, somewhere) than humans ever finding remnants of alien life. The difference between someone winning the lottery every day and this chance of meeting UFO is that we only have 1 ticket. Maybe if there were billions or trillions of earth-like civilizations, there might be a decent chance that one of them would get to meet one of the other, or find traces of each other.
would you be willing to bet against these guys not being paid lobbyists for Comcast?
NON-PROFIT NON-PARTISAN think tanks don't earn their money for salt on the bread by submitting stories to Reason.
They depend on generous sugar daddies to fund their thinktankery.
Comcast has a vast network of lobbyists.
Thyey clearlyt hate net neutrality, and you can bet your sweet ass that it has nothing to do with th e"fear of breaking the internet", and everything to do with not wanting government at all to regulate thewir business, just as Wall street don't want SEC to regulate them, or the oil companies not wanting the EPA to regulate them.
Corporations since the dawn of industry ALWAYS claimed that they don't want regulations, that they are good guys that can self-regulate, and that the invisible hand of the market will make everything OK.
We KNOW that if Comcast was to control the internet, it would very soon look like someone invented broadcast TV anno 1955.
Comcast would want to block skype, netflix, pandora etc. They want the option to start cutting off or hamnstringing third party services in order to better place their own service. They would love to play highway robbers or "toll gate" bandits extracting a toll for users.
They want the content providers to share ad or royalties revenue with them. And they want more flexibility to charge for "premium" content, under the giuse of quality of service. And who know what else they want around the corner. Maybe we wont really know what they want until they have a near monopoly so that they can start gouging folks with no alternative provider to escape to.
Let us make a few assumptions first, and maybe throw in some facts as well.
1. What are the odds that there exist or has existed life beyond earth?
Well, even if the chance of a given solar system or any of its planets has life, we are talking about an infitesimal number of galaxies with their solar systems and planets So I'd say the odds are pretty good, almost so good that I would not bet a penny against it for a dollar.
2. What are the odds that evidence of such life or remnants of such life could be found within a few decades in human time scale? Almost impossible, if not flat out impossible.
Why do I say that?
Well, I learnt when I was a kid watching a Sagan program that the universe was sort of like a giant dough with raisins i it, that is ever expanding. The odds that one raisin will ever meet another raisin is pretty slim , and the raisins will get further and further apart over time. So whatever crap they find digging in mars rocks is likely stuff from our solar system, and if they find any stuff from outside the solar system, due to the nature of the big bang, you would only find stuff from the very birth of the universe.
Since it takes up to a few billions of years to get all the conditions right for the nurture of life, I'd think it very unlikely that any such primordial space debris would have any remaining evidence of life.
Aliens here, what utter nonsense. Assume that time travel and travel beyond velocity of light is impossible. Given the distances at play, an alien could not target earth, or even our solar system for a trip. What they observed from our solar system would have been millions of years old when they saw it, and given the expanding nature of the universe, they might even need to break the laws of physics to travel in that direction fast enough for millions of years to catch earth.
If life was achieved in the very few birthing moments of the universe, and if intelligent species managed to come up with space travel and colonized a fair amount of of the primordial matter, we still would have only infinitesimally small chances of ever finding any evidence of this.
I find it distasteful that NASA, which should be founded on science is engaging is such claptrap gallopping charlatanism. The universe is plenty interesting enough as it is, no need to add hobgoblins and other hocus pocus.
It's not white, it's a paler shade of white.
Yes, it is actually slavery.
Someone who has signed such a contract would be forced to stay and work in same shitty job with same shitty pay forever if he wants to put food on the table. He has in fact been removed from the competitive part of the workforce unless he is retrained to do something completely different such as teacher or nurse,
Well, if you are going to compete against google, what makes you think google should be obliged to promote YOUR business above their own?
Or, it could have the effect that the thief now has to steal 10x as many phones to get enough money for a fix.
It's worse than that.
In practice, you can't invest in foreign mutual funds.
Foreign institutions are required by US authorities to withold 30% of all gains if the client is an american citizen.
That's a major PITA for them, so what they do instead is just deny american citizens from opening an account.
Health care companies cannot operate without a license.
Just remove their license, or forever remain a toothless laughing stock.
Hook your machine up to your modem.
Dial up to to America online.
Upload the files to a gopher.
Well, I imagine a religious zealot would want his Robot indoctrinated with the exact same doctrines as himself.
So this is just a way to make robots less perfect.
If you want to create a good AI, as in one similar to a human, you have to give him human imperfections. It woulde more like a beer burping neighbor than a Jeopardy Winner.
Such as lying, bad memory, guessing and bullshitting when he doesn't know the answer, jumping to conclusions, failure to understand statistics, but might be obsessive of knowing all the stas for red sox last 100 years. Forward the occasional chain letter and MMF scheme.
Wearing a watch in bed is idiotic. Your skin needs to breathe now and then. Do you wear your shoes to bed as well? You deserve also to wake up with the imprint of the watch on your forehead,.
Same, but involuntarily, I developed extremely sensitivity to nickel. and could no longer wear anything on my wrist except gold or titanium. I bought skagen titanium watches, but first one they had used stainless steel for the claps, so it game me a horrible itch, next one the glass broke, and last one the latch broke. That some $300 wasted on low quality Danish junk that looks nice but can't stand up to normal wear. I still look for watches, but they all advertize their material for the face side. The back is usually steel. So have not worn one for many years now. I am sure there will never bee any smart watch that has a back with no metal, or a clasp with no metal.
Serious inferiority syndrome going on here.
The classical trait of someone extremely unaccomplished, is to try to diminish the greatness of those that are great.
Either you are inferior, or you come from an inferior country. Possibly a country that really hates gays, such as Russia?
I've found Russians in general to be very unpleasant and arrogant, and not at all as smart as they think they are.
A Russian with money is even worse than an Arab.
If nothing else, Turing really brought to light what can be called a general computer. Sure, Charles Babbage was important, Sure, Ada was important, but he really got into the matter of what a computer's limitations are, and what it could possibly do. That elevates one from being just a mechanic to being a real thinker and philosopher. My cell phone , if it had been sent in time back to 1975, would have passed the Turing test with flying colors by a baffled audience. Today however, everybody knows something about search engines and voice recognition, and with the addition of some grammar and heuristics, so we would not so easily say the test has been passed. Today's Turing test would have to involve a human control group. The computer would have to be dumbed down, with a less perfect search engine, but with better heuristics for guessing, lying and bullshitting etc, and more refined voice engines.
The movie was titled ":The Imitation Game", and is a feature film, with a script adapted by a person of same persuasion as Turing.
As with all feature films, that are not called flat out documentaries or biographies, there tends to be historical inaccuracies, fro dramatic effect.
It was not funded by North Korea with the title. " A Patrotic Biography that shall be used as propaganda to inspire more young patriots to become computer scientists in the service of the great leader, and which also would be pleasing to certain film critics"
No wonder critics are considered the scum of earth.,
While I know perfectly well how a computer works, that is a far cry from being able to build a computer from scratch (and that means designing all the silicon etc, nit just remembering from CS class about binary arithmetic and assembler programming) .
As more and more advanced programming and design tools become available, and ideas can be abstracted at higher and higher levels, there is actually less NEED for a software designer to know how a computer actually works. It might even be beneficial to not know how it works, or even need to think about algorithms, but work with abstractions at higher and higher levels. But it will always be beneficial for a software designed to know basic science, such as physics, and statistics. But even more important than knowing computer science, is to know the domain, whether that is business, chemistry, manufacturing. Statistics and probability is where most people draw a short stick causing them to make poor design decisions, making software that is not future proof or scalable. Too many experts lack any insight outside their little turf. If you try to design a system strictly on specs, you already have lost, The business analysts or consultants who have handed down those specs, don't know all the important questions that need to be asked. A great architect would have a decent grasp of both the business domain, and of the technology (and its limitations) used to implement the solution.
I know scores that went to MIT and Harvard, and while a few of them are outstanding, the smartest people I have met went to other schools.
The best science teacher that ever lived, is possibly Isaac Asimov, and he never graduated from one of the top notch schools, or obtained tenure at a top school.
When he started making enough money on his writing, he gladly said goodbye to the snooty assholes at Boston Colleges.
" I don't know about you, but sometime I put my smart phone on the table for extended periods while I move around!"
Jimeney crickets!
So you would lose out on dozens of steps, and maybe 2 calories worth of tracking. That's a complete disaster.
How the hell are you now going to know how many calories you have burnt today. You might have to walk an extra 50 meters tonight to be on safe side.
That seems to be the entryway though. The fitness gadgets (trackers, mp3 players) are the gateway drugs that potentially can lead to an exercising lifestyle.
Once you start exercising, at first you can only do it indoors, because you are ashamed of your physical appearance or poor fitness.
When you graduate to move outdoors, you will need gadgets to get you going. Track the progress, see the improvement. And the mp3 player to distract you from the rote of moving around. After a year or 2, you can drop the mp3, and save your knees by actually hearing how your feet strike the ground, instead of lady gagas latest dance tune. Soon enough you will be addicted to the activity itself, and all the gadgetry is just a chore and in the way, and will soon enough end up in a drawer.
If you don't need the accuracy, why in the godforsaken earth do you even need a tracker.
Spend 1 minute at the end of each week or month, and do the napkin math.
But if you are a user of a fitness tracker, you are also possibly a novice exerciser, and bring an mp3 player. Now you have 2 devices that could be replaced with a smartphone. And the smartphone can call 911, and take a picture of that man biting a squirrel on the path. There are tons of reasons to bring along the smartphone, even if you did not use as a tracker.