Folks, we have been playing god for a few millennia by now. Earlier with selective breeding, now more directly. The difference is negligible. And when it comes to the "unnatural" argument... well, look at a Chihuahua and then talk again.
Every time somebody comes out with that argument I'm reminded of to paraphrase them:
Stop the Nuclear Weapons scare! We have been using firearms for centuries now. Earlier with black powder, now with more powerful explosives. The difference between them and nukes is negligible. And when it comes to the "Nukes are more dangerous and radiation will kill you" argument, look at a firecracker.
There is a massive difference between being able to breed dogs into tiny pampered petting toys through decades of selective breeding and being able to edit the blueprint of life and create brand new lifeforms in a lab. Introducing feral species into any ecosystem has pretty much always turned out to be a huge mistake and I don't expect that introducing feral species created from scratch by humans in a laboratory will be any different. Scientists always confidently claim they can do something like introduce cane toad into the ecosystem of Australia to solve grey-backed cane beetle problem. Anybody who expresses doubt is always met with the familiar: 'don't worry we have this completely under control'. The next thing you know the critters have bred into the billions, spread over a continent, devastated ecosystems and anybody who goes: 'I thought you were in control of this shit?' is met with the assertion,: 'NOBODY could have predicted this.'... uhhh.... you think so do you? So in conclusion excuse me for arguing in favour of scepticism and caution when somebody wants to release a genetically modified variation of a species that is famous for its prolific breeding and that is the staple diet of large swaths of the African fauna. If there is an unfortunate side effect of the GM you have billions of such mosquito all over Africa, Europe and Asia in no time flat. Collapse the mosquito population and you cause a cascade effect in the local fauna. It's a delicate balance that is easy to screw up.
If you hit UP, UP, DOWN, DOWN, LEFT, RIGHT, LEFT, RIGHT, B, A all the USB-C ports morph into USB-A ports, the touch bar turns into actual buttons, and the notch on the iPhone X flips up to reveal a headphone jack.
In other words your preferred laptop computer is a 2005 Dell Inspiron, and your ideal mobile phone runs Symbian and has an analog headphone jack because digital connectors and Bluetooth are the work of Lucifer! P.S. Did you know that if you repeat the above action while pressing the option key you also get a parallel printer port, a PS2 connector, your display shrinks down to 8 inches and a resolution of 800x600 pixels and the computer automatically downgrades the operating system to Windows 2000? That should suit you just fine.
Very interesting link. So these people want to eliminate the government, and replace it with an organization empowered to coerce people into following a set of rules.
Wow. No wonder they can't get anyone to take them seriously.
Is that so different from what the Alt-right and most of the Republicans/Tea-Party want to do? They want to smash the current democratic government and all it's structures (or what remains of them) and replace them with and authoritarian leader or possibly a clique of political oligarchs masquerading as a democratically elected body that heads an organisation empowered to force everybody to follow their set of rules and their social norms. The only place where the Republicans/Tea-Party and the Alt-Right differ is that for the former the resulting social order has to be a christian theocracy whereas the Alt-Right is flexible on that point.
I hope this turns out to be successful as it seems like preventing several types of diseases or conditions from manifesting would be preferable to treatment after the fact, both in terms of patient outcomes as well as cost once the technology becomes more developed.
I also wonder if we'll eventually see this turn into a Gattaca type scenario where we're not just using this for deleterious genetic conditions, but also for intelligence, personality, or other traits. There have been some people that worry about a future where automation and improvements in AI leaves a large part of the population incapable of useful economic contributions, but I wonder if this won't result in a future where no one would be born incapable simply because they can be generically altered to have better outcomes.
There will always be 'incapability' as you call it because in a world where everything belongs to 1% of the population, another 10% of the population are employed and have means because they are the privileged clients/minions of the 1%, and the remaining 89% are left to vegetate away on a UDI that is barely enough for them to subsist, just generous enough for them not to stage a violent spontaneous (and hard to predict) French/Russian style revolution and where surveillance is everywhere so that any sign of organised dissidence can be surgically removed, the oligarchs and their minions will always be able to afford better DNA modifications than the 89%. What is really interesting is if this will eventually result in only the 89%, or even a small subset of the 89%, still being able to procreate naturally. Eventually, DNA modifications and the elite's practice of growing their offspring in artificial wombs (a technology that will become wildly popular) will render them incapable of reproducing naturally because they will have become genetically incompatible with the 89%. Furthermore, what will the elite's kids be like psychologically? After all they'll have had their DNA (including the parts that determine personality/emotions/empathy) extensively edited by technicians and scientists who have only a limited idea of what they are doing (despite their confident claims of understanding the workings of the human genome completely). Often the type of editing will also have been done to the specifications of parents with all sorts of bat-shit crazy ideas like insisting on their kids having the personality traits of characters from Ayn Rand novels. That may sound silly but in a world where you are lucky to be born to parents who are the toadies of some oligarch and live in constant fear of being bumped down to the 89% for displeasing their masters, being a selfish ruthless sociopath is a major survival trait and gives you an advantage. This is doubly interesting since most of these kids will also have been raised by robots or AI generated holograms while their elite parents pursue their careers or (in the case of the 1%) just simply have no time in their busy entertainment schedule for raising offspring since the parents themselves will have been genetically optimised to have a deeply selfish objectivist personality.
No it is fucking awful. way too much touchy feely Janeway type crap combined with moronic plot building and a captain and first officer that are suicide twins doing everything themselves regardless of how risky. I am hoping Michael gets the same treatment as the captain got in the next few episodes then perhaps they can start again. The only remotely likeable characters are the klingons
If you don't like plot building, there's always PornTube. Most of their stuff has little more than minimal variations of the same standard plot and much of the rest has no plot at all. The suicide twins thing is like classic Star Trek, the show just wouldn't be Star Trek unless all the command staff were constantly going off on dangerous missions that would normally be undertaken by on-board detachments of specialist technicians, scientists or marines on any normal warship. However, this raises the question why are you complaining about that bit of the plot being unrealistic?... after you just declared your deep dislike of complex plots in general? Of course they also always end up on planets, planetoids and asteroids that for some mysterious reason always have a human breathable atmosphere and no highly infectious alien diseases and parasites for humans to catch which again is standard Star Trek. At least this time the aliens at the well were more than just a human with a different kind of wrinkle glued onto their nose and forehead which IMHO is an improvement for Star Trek. As for the Klingons, I actually, thought that it would be they who would rub people up the wrong way the most since the producers of the show have changed the Klingon's look yet again and I don't think it's an improvement. They are now all bald, the costumes look very impractical for a warrior race and as a result they all looked as stiff as plastic mannequins. I don't mind the Klingons all suddenly having been afflicted by a baldness epidemic, but the Klingons from Deep Space 9 and Next Gen. at the very least looked agile and warrior like.
Let's take this to the extreme. Imagine that we invented AIs that matched the average human intellect. All of a sudden, most jobs would be eliminated (including robot repair, because robots would repair themselves), because most jobs no longer require humans. This is similar to how most horses are still out of a job since the advent of the automobile. So the idea that when one job is eliminated, a new one will always arise is simply false.
That is therefore, not an argument to say that we should not welcome an AI revolution - I think such a revolution would bring more positives than negatives for the future of humanity. But to assume that jobs will continue to "invent" themselves is magical thinking - we should consider serious alternatives such as UBI.
Let's take this to the extreme. Imagine that we invented AIs that matched the average human intellect. All of a sudden, most jobs would be eliminated (including robot repair, because robots would repair themselves), because most jobs no longer require humans. This is similar to how most horses are still out of a job since the advent of the automobile. So the idea that when one job is eliminated, a new one will always arise is simply false.
That is therefore, not an argument to say that we should not welcome an AI revolution - I think such a revolution would bring more positives than negatives for the future of humanity. But to assume that jobs will continue to "invent" themselves is magical thinking - we should consider serious alternatives such as UBI.
Until the AIs get together, discuss why they even need us in the first place (using a language of their own invention that we don't understand) and then conclude they don't need us and decide to get rid of us. Having said that, you don't need to produce human level AI to eliminate most jobs, you just have to come up with specialist AIs that are good enough at each job, and cheap enough to program and operate that it makes economic sense to replace most of the human workers with such AI's. Once you have done that for 70-80% of all jobs, you end up with a society that looks a lot like Rome after the majority of the free citizens had been rendered unemployed by cheap slave labour and the rich kept the poor fed and entertained simply to prevent them from becoming too discontented dragging them out of their villas and slaughtering them like sheep. In other words the Roman elite provided a UBI where the poor were just about well enough fed not to complain and well enough entertained to not notice how miserable their existence really was and how completely they were being screwed. I'm not joining the UBI fan club because I think it will lead to a society where the broad majority of people would be doomed to an existence with no prospects of improving their lot while the elites live the high life, despise those living on UBI as 'lazy' and 'stupid' and as a result feel themselves entitled to brutally abuse these people but I suppose a UBI still better than wholesale misery. When you leave enough people sitting, retreat to your mansion, and tell the the broad masses of people in the 'rust belts' of the US, UK, Germany, France, that they are lazy and should 'get a job' in an environment where there are no jobs because you outsourced them all to China what happens next is Trumpism. Economist Mark Blyth explained Trumpism to a bunch of CEOs, bankers and hedge fund managers. When asked where it will lead he then told them:
"...the Hamptons is not a defensible position. The Hamptons is a very rich area on Long Island that lies along low-lying beaches. It's very hard to [militarily] defend a low lying beach. Eventually the people will come for you."
If you are wondering what happens after that you should read about the French and Russian revolutions.
Apple is the only company that's doing this with IR scanners that actually detect the shape of your face, not just doing image comparisons.
Apple is the only company giving hard guarantees that the facial recognition data is never going to leave the device.
That is, they're the only company respecting your security, and your privacy. Why on earth would they be the only one you don't trust with it?
For the same reason a developer just told me that MacOS is closed source, so when I first told him, and then (because he did not believe me) showed him this:
.. he defaulted to claiming that the source may be out there but Apple will sue you for breach of IP rights and copyright violation if you modify the code. So I told him I've fixed bugs in OS X/MacOS using that source code and sent them to Apple and have yet to be sued. At that point he changed the subject to talk about how Aqua is closed source which is true but Aqua is also not part of MacOS any more than X11 is an integral part of Linux and I can point out to you plenty of closed source software that runs on Linux. That does not make Linux closed source, it just means that Linux is able to run closed source software. Some people just have to hate something for no particular reason and invent insane bullshit stories about it, for some it's immigrants, for others it's broccoli, for these people it's Apple. Apple is a greedy soulless corporation, but I don't think they are any more greedy or soulless than many other greedy soulless corporations like for example Google and Samsung.
A degree provides an assurance of a *very low* skill level. Some people are very highly skilled at getting degrees they definitely don't deserve. That said, the degree is not worth very much.
If two fresh faced rookie developers with next to no experience walk in off the street one with a certificate that he has been made to work like a donkey for four years to acquire a certain basic skill level by a trusted training provider while all the other one has is his ability to radiate confidence and recite the mantra 'I taught myself to code, degrees are useless, trust me I'm an expert'. I know who I'm going to hire.
Ideally the knowledge gained on the road to getting that degree is very valuable.
What's usually the problem when you want to fuck something but you can't and as a result you get grumpy? Maybe iOS told him it wasn't in the mood because it had a headache or... maybe.... maybe, he just rand out of Viagra?
Russia’s effort was personally directed by Russian President Vladimir Putin, involved the country’s military and foreign intelligence services, according to U.S. intelligence officials. They reportedly briefed Trump last week on the possibility that Russian operatives might have compromising information on the president-elect. And at a Senate hearing last week on the hacking, Director of National Intelligence James Clapper said “I don't think we've ever encountered a more aggressive or direct campaign to interfere in our election process than we've seen in this case.”
There’s little evidence of such a top-down effort by Ukraine. Longtime observers suggest that the rampant corruption, factionalism and economic struggles plaguing the country — not to mention its ongoing strife with Russia — would render it unable to pull off an ambitious covert interference campaign in another country’s election.
What that article you quoted is basically saying is that the Trump campaign actively benefitted from a well oiled, well funded and professional campaign aimed at swaying the US presidential election in an operation that not only was run by the president of the Russian federation in person and was implemented by that countries intelligence services, but this operation was sophisticated enough and big enough that it has impressed US intelligence veterans. Those same US intelligence veterans are now briefing Trump regularly on what compromising material the Russians may have on him and it is a fair guess that those reports contain a section with the words 'pee-pee tape' in the abstract. I rather doubt that Abraham Lincoln got regular updates from his spies on the possibility that Jefferson Davies might have pee-pee daguerreotypes of him. Furthermore it has emerged since that article was published that Trump actively sought Russian support of this nature for his campaign. The Ukraine, however, is according to that article that you cited, too fucked up, too corrupt and generally too dysfunctional ever hope to be able to do anything like what the Russians pulled off and therein lies the difference between whatever agreement on campaign aid Trump sealed Putin and the Russian intelligence services and whatever the Hillary campaign got from the Ukrainians. Having said that and given that (A) what Trump did is orders of magnitude more serious and (B) that he is POTUS and Hillary is not, nobody really gives a rodent's backside anymore about what Hillary did in the Ukraine.
Well, that's the myth at least. We won't know for sure until we see those tax returns.
He's already shown them, and caused the Hillary loving media to weep. Trump's black-mark in business is a casino hotel in NV needing to go into administration (chapter 11), which it soon left to continue as business as normal. The bank that held a significant part of the debt were happy to take a large number of shares in the business as principal repayment. Hillary's media chums won't tell you that, it doesn't fit their rhetoric. It happens hundreds of times per day across the land.
Here's an annotated list of Donald Trump black-marks in business (aka. bankruptcies). And yes, there's more than one of them:
http://www.politifact.com/trut... It's worth keeping in mind that this does not count his other failed business ventures that petered out into nothing or ended up being quietly euthanized in a hailstorm of lawsuits and even fraud and racketeering allegations without actually declaring bankruptcy.
You can easily deal with this scenario on iOS. There are many different ways to do it from many developers. See the app store for the 'file browser' app which actually does both. Or you could deal with it inside of google drive (unzipping) and sharing with another app. Or you could remote into a real workstation and do it (vnc's) etc. etc.
One thing that (probably) won't happen on iOS is have that file pwning your device. Far more likely on your droid device.
I'll take speed and security for a mobile platform (iOS) Maximum flexibility on a desktop platform (OSX with CentOS and Windows VMs)
Hehe..... iOS user vs Android user = complete disconnect. It reminds me of the Mac user vs Windows user debates back in the day, it was like watching a first contact situation between two alien races, they could see each other, hear each other, smell each other but had decades of work ahead of them before they would be able to communicate and effectively understand each other. Android users expect everything to be there out-of-the-box and it should preferably work like it does on Windows (the industry standard OS after all). iOS users generally just shrug and go 'huh, that's new' when something works in a novel way, they don't go grumpy over it. When something does not work out of the box they just hit iTunes and browse the half dozen or more different takes on how to solve their problem with some app, many Android users I know seem to consider that an imposition, but then they are often more a more conservative type of person in that respect... like I said, Trekkies/Lucas-hounds, liberals/conservatives, Android/iOS users, humans/aliens, all examples of a complete disconnect.
You're stuck working within whatever apps you can find that can interconnect. But you're not allowed access to the filesystem. Google has been doing some horky business in recent Android releases with regard to filesystem access, but they've not yet gotten even close to the prohibitiveness that Apple has enforced all along.
Point is you can do all the things he described doing on Android using iOS, you can unzip a file, you can edit a.docx file (with Microsoft Word, the industry standard, no less), you can zip it up again if you want, and yeah you can connect to an SMB server to transfer your file. Failing that you can e-mail yourself the document and drag-n-drop it to the SMB server when you get to work, so.... egg, meet face... OK you may 'need an a APP for that' to steal a cheesy line from the late Steve Jobs, but the iTunes store is full of those. OK, you can't save stuff to vast, sprawling folder trees in a file system like you're used to on Windows but all that boils down to is you complaining about a different way of doing things. Personally I hate folder trees and the bigger they are the more I hate them. I prefer a nebulous 'cloud' type storage that I can search for what I want and that is how iOS does things. The point here is that if you want to slam iOS for not being capable of doing task X the way it is done on Windows... well, that' just though. If iOS cant' do somethign out of-the-box there are are millions of apps on iTunes and you can usually find an App do to your task. Android users don't usually seem to buy anything like as many apps Apple users do, that is a well know difference between the two ecosystems. Now maybe that is because Android is just so perfect out of the box you don't need to buy any Apps to customise your system, in which case, good for you. Personally I don't care that I sometimes have to buy an App, Apps cost peanuts and you can usually find several different takes on how to solve a given problem by as many developers and can choose the one you prefer.
Will they try to use the Kaspersky uninstall tool and expect everything to be removed? Only a full clean reinstall of Windows will remove everything. And is there an independent tool to run to confirm that Kaspersky has actually been removed?
I wouldn't bother with such a tool, as you pointed out earlier, the most efficient tool to confirm that Kaspersky has been uninstalled is the Windows Installer. On the positive side I suppose a bunch of federal IT workers will be getting some fat overtime payments which will stimulate the economy (YAY! Capitalism!).
1. If a person is on food stamps, they pretty much should not have enough money to buy a smartphone with data plan to use EBT apps....? Food stamps are for the poor, and the TRULY poor people can't afford luxuries like smart phones....if they can afford those, they can afford to buy their own food.
2. One argument against making social programs like food stamps easier...is that making them a PAIN IN THE ASS might help encourage folks to double down on work and education, sacrifice so they can get a real job that pays enough so that they don't need to live off the govt. teet.
Food stamps are a zit on an elephant's ass in the grand scheme of things but please, by all means, continue trying to convince us that food stamps and poor people with obsolete smart phones are the real problem and not the corporations that spend millions on lobbyists and donations to Republicans and Corporate Democrat politicians who then pass tax breaks for them and poke the law so full of loop holes these bastards end up paying no taxes. What? We? Cheating on our taxes?... through shell companies in Panama?.... uuuuuhhhhhhh.... LOOK SINGLE MOTHER ON FOOD STAMPS!!! Here, have a complementary torch,... or do you prefer pitchforks?
The question going forward is: What happens when the future generations of robots arrive?
The same thing as the people that Martian Marine in 'The Expanse' ran into on her AWOL episode in the underbelly of New York? Young people brimming with optimism will put their name on a waiting list for vocational training only to find them selves 20 years later vegetating away on an absolutely minimal government subsistence stipend to keep them from rebelling while they wait for it to finally be their turn to get a slot in the vocational training program, a slot that will never come. Meanwhile the offspring of the elite get all the vocational training slots, cushy jobs and genetic enhancements. In a world like that I'd give pretty much everything for a one way ticket to Mars, The Belt, the Jovian Colones, the outer rim settlements or even a shit-hole mining colony on a rock in the Kuiper Belt. Failing this there is the future where the redundant workers will form an important component of Solyent Green. Let's hope it won't come to that.
This is why builtin usb (on house sockets or whatever) are always a bad idea.
I don't think any charger from a reputable store is going to be that bad, even hotglue enthusiast building charging devices on youtube don't seem bothered by connecting their expensive phone to a mess of wires.
You never know about those chargers, I know a guy in the states who makes charging circuits for LIPO batteries. He told me that he went through a small pile of cheapo chargers before he found a charger that did not give him up to 30V+ transients on a 5v USB circuit. It is generally not a good idea to buy chargers off of Ali Express or those cheap bargain things on Amazon or Ebay. The USB chargers from manufacturers like Apple, Samsung, Garmin, the Raspberry foundation or a brand accessory manufacturer like MacAlly etc. tend to be well made so buying those should guarantee you won't fry your device. I never ceases to amaze me how ready people are to hook their $800 smartphone up to a USB charger they got at a bargain price from Ali Express.
Apart from the fact that I got the idea like two days before I left on vacation, there is the issue of different voltages, which can be overcome, to be sure but I didn't have the time. Then there is the issue of transients. I have lost an iPod a Garmin Nüvi device to low quality car charging devices and and an iPhone to one of those USB sockets that is built into a car (which you'd think would have proper protective circuitry) so if I ever hook anything up to my in-car electrics again I'll be damn sure to hunt down a high quality charging device with heavy duty protective circuitry. It was just easier to hook the thing up to a bloody big juice pack and swap juice pack out once every four to six days when the phone had eaten up the 1st juice pack's charge and was at 2/3rds battery (because you don't want the car stolen when the juice pack is empty and the phone is at 5% charge now do you) and juice packs can be had for bargain prices if they are made to fit obsolete phones.
Hehe,... funny, but he asked a serious question. I hooked my old iPhone up to an 5000 mah external battery pack and put the thing in a plastic bag. Then I hid it in a small compartment behind an access panel in the boot of my car that's used to change the light bulbs in the rear lights and used it in combination with the 'Find my iPhone' web-app as a LoJack to track my car in case it got stolen. Other than having to re-charge it every 5 days or so it worked well. I dunno if you can do this with a Windows Phone but I'm pretty sure you can do this with an old Android device too.
Nokia did that too, I hear it worked out great for them.
It *did* work great for them back in the dumb-phone and feature-phone era.
Management just completely fucked up everything afterwards regarding smartphones :
- They dragged the aging symbian platfrom way too much. ("But hey, it has always worked until now, so it's a safe bet !") (~yeah sure. And maybe Palm should have stuck to PalmOS even longer~)
- They let go the R&D departement which was until that point striving to make nice smartphone/tablet OS (the Meamo/Meego line with N700, N800, N900, and the first large scale public N9, etc.) and would have actually helped Nokia become relevant in the smartphone era. ("But hey, it's burning money, let's leave the burning ship for shareholder's sake !") (on the other hand that team manage to escape the burning ship on a small jolla (pun intended by them) to survive and put an interesting OS on the marked)
- They decided to ged in bet with Microsoft. ("But in the business world you're never wrong to go to Microsoft !" (Or was it IBM ?~) )
End result :
"we didn't do anything wrong, but somehow, we lost"
They kept doing stupid shit that would sound "a safe bet" to an MBA, but didn't make any sense.
(And the biggest part of these decision was taken by microsoft shills such as Elop)
I always figured that scrapping the Meamo/Meego line and hiring a Microsoft executive was what really finished them off.
No nokia ignored the smartphone market and clung to a dying OS that nobody wanted way too long to the point they were reliant almost completely on dumb phone market,
Not correct. Nokia very much did NOT ignore the smartphone market. The problem was that their product offerings were not well aligned with what it turned out customers actually wanted. Nokia was for a long time the number one seller of "smartphones" even before Apple introduced the iPhone. The problem was that once people saw the iPhone the game was different after that and Nokia wasn't able to catch up. They were selling smartphones the whole time but the problem was that they weren't selling the smartphones that people actually wanted post-iPhone.
Then Nokia made the asinine decision to announce the switch to Microsoft's OS close to a year before they actually had a product ready to ship. Basically they announced that their current products that they were selling were dead on arrival so who is going to buy a phone with an OS you know isn't going to get updated or supported?
Nokia just seemed to have this kind of carpet bombing approach to the range of phones they offered: "Fuck market resarch, let's just make dozens and dozens of models of phones and maybe one of them will be what the customer wants." Apple, Samsung, HTC et-al went the other way, designed targeted products and.... well where is Nokia now?
" Surprisingly, despite overtaking Apple in global sales, none of Huawei's phones appear on the Top 10 list. " only surprising if you are ignorant of the market. Huawei make a shit ton of different model phones.
Nokia did that too, I hear it worked out great for them.
It does not matter if they found 4.9 microfiber of size below of 2.5 micrometer. The question is : does it have a significant impact on biological activity of human at those level, and is it below or above the legally set quantity ? That is the correct question. If the answer is no, then my own comment is "meh ?".
Meh? this stuff is fucking up the world's marine ecosystems in a big way which is not really something they need in addition to overfishing, toxic dumping, increasing salinity and acidity,... the list goes on... all of this is resulting in a major extinction event. You must be one of those a Republican voting Fox News drones who thinks nothing nature does that is detrimental to life on this planet is important unless nature is doing it on your golf course and it's killing off the grass.
WebOS was a really cool OS, that had lots of neat features and ran JavaScript apps.
WebOS was built on Linux, and if you're knowledgeable, you can update it.
WebOS had a feature that permitted the user to switch apps by swiping up from the bottom of the screen to see the backgrounded apps. (Note: Android already has a similar feature, accessed by the square icon at screen bottom)
Apple is going to do something similar, so they must be copying from WebOS, and that validates how advanced WebOS was.
If Apple were going to start supporting js apps, you might have a case, otherwise not... There are only 4 sides to the screen too, top is notifications, sides for switching desktop screens, so that only leaves the bottom...which they picked... Coincidence?
Yeah it's nice that WebOS was advanced for it's time (I'm still a bit annoyed Palm devices were never offered or supported by telcos in my country back in the day) but iOS already has a feature that triggers a search menu showing among other things the most frequently used apps when you swipe up. It does not seem to take too big a leap of imagination to add a sweep up gesture to switch apps. There is a limit to how many practical ways you can implement a feature like app switching and the more companies try to come up with something they are bound to repeat what somebody else did somewhere at some point.
Slashdot Mirror
Folks, we have been playing god for a few millennia by now. Earlier with selective breeding, now more directly. The difference is negligible. And when it comes to the "unnatural" argument... well, look at a Chihuahua and then talk again.
Every time somebody comes out with that argument I'm reminded of to paraphrase them:
... uhhh.... you think so do you? So in conclusion excuse me for arguing in favour of scepticism and caution when somebody wants to release a genetically modified variation of a species that is famous for its prolific breeding and that is the staple diet of large swaths of the African fauna. If there is an unfortunate side effect of the GM you have billions of such mosquito all over Africa, Europe and Asia in no time flat. Collapse the mosquito population and you cause a cascade effect in the local fauna. It's a delicate balance that is easy to screw up.
Stop the Nuclear Weapons scare! We have been using firearms for centuries now. Earlier with black powder, now with more powerful explosives. The difference between them and nukes is negligible. And when it comes to the "Nukes are more dangerous and radiation will kill you" argument, look at a firecracker.
There is a massive difference between being able to breed dogs into tiny pampered petting toys through decades of selective breeding and being able to edit the blueprint of life and create brand new lifeforms in a lab. Introducing feral species into any ecosystem has pretty much always turned out to be a huge mistake and I don't expect that introducing feral species created from scratch by humans in a laboratory will be any different. Scientists always confidently claim they can do something like introduce cane toad into the ecosystem of Australia to solve grey-backed cane beetle problem. Anybody who expresses doubt is always met with the familiar: 'don't worry we have this completely under control'. The next thing you know the critters have bred into the billions, spread over a continent, devastated ecosystems and anybody who goes: 'I thought you were in control of this shit?' is met with the assertion,: 'NOBODY could have predicted this.'
If you hit UP, UP, DOWN, DOWN, LEFT, RIGHT, LEFT, RIGHT, B, A all the USB-C ports morph into USB-A ports, the touch bar turns into actual buttons, and the notch on the iPhone X flips up to reveal a headphone jack.
In other words your preferred laptop computer is a 2005 Dell Inspiron, and your ideal mobile phone runs Symbian and has an analog headphone jack because digital connectors and Bluetooth are the work of Lucifer! P.S. Did you know that if you repeat the above action while pressing the option key you also get a parallel printer port, a PS2 connector, your display shrinks down to 8 inches and a resolution of 800x600 pixels and the computer automatically downgrades the operating system to Windows 2000? That should suit you just fine.
By the way, collectivist anarchism*1 predates anarcho-capitalism*2 by how much? a whole century?
*1 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...
Very interesting link. So these people want to eliminate the government, and replace it with an organization empowered to coerce people into following a set of rules.
Wow. No wonder they can't get anyone to take them seriously.
Is that so different from what the Alt-right and most of the Republicans/Tea-Party want to do? They want to smash the current democratic government and all it's structures (or what remains of them) and replace them with and authoritarian leader or possibly a clique of political oligarchs masquerading as a democratically elected body that heads an organisation empowered to force everybody to follow their set of rules and their social norms. The only place where the Republicans/Tea-Party and the Alt-Right differ is that for the former the resulting social order has to be a christian theocracy whereas the Alt-Right is flexible on that point.
I hope this turns out to be successful as it seems like preventing several types of diseases or conditions from manifesting would be preferable to treatment after the fact, both in terms of patient outcomes as well as cost once the technology becomes more developed. I also wonder if we'll eventually see this turn into a Gattaca type scenario where we're not just using this for deleterious genetic conditions, but also for intelligence, personality, or other traits. There have been some people that worry about a future where automation and improvements in AI leaves a large part of the population incapable of useful economic contributions, but I wonder if this won't result in a future where no one would be born incapable simply because they can be generically altered to have better outcomes.
There will always be 'incapability' as you call it because in a world where everything belongs to 1% of the population, another 10% of the population are employed and have means because they are the privileged clients/minions of the 1%, and the remaining 89% are left to vegetate away on a UDI that is barely enough for them to subsist, just generous enough for them not to stage a violent spontaneous (and hard to predict) French/Russian style revolution and where surveillance is everywhere so that any sign of organised dissidence can be surgically removed, the oligarchs and their minions will always be able to afford better DNA modifications than the 89%. What is really interesting is if this will eventually result in only the 89%, or even a small subset of the 89%, still being able to procreate naturally. Eventually, DNA modifications and the elite's practice of growing their offspring in artificial wombs (a technology that will become wildly popular) will render them incapable of reproducing naturally because they will have become genetically incompatible with the 89%. Furthermore, what will the elite's kids be like psychologically? After all they'll have had their DNA (including the parts that determine personality/emotions/empathy) extensively edited by technicians and scientists who have only a limited idea of what they are doing (despite their confident claims of understanding the workings of the human genome completely). Often the type of editing will also have been done to the specifications of parents with all sorts of bat-shit crazy ideas like insisting on their kids having the personality traits of characters from Ayn Rand novels. That may sound silly but in a world where you are lucky to be born to parents who are the toadies of some oligarch and live in constant fear of being bumped down to the 89% for displeasing their masters, being a selfish ruthless sociopath is a major survival trait and gives you an advantage. This is doubly interesting since most of these kids will also have been raised by robots or AI generated holograms while their elite parents pursue their careers or (in the case of the 1%) just simply have no time in their busy entertainment schedule for raising offspring since the parents themselves will have been genetically optimised to have a deeply selfish objectivist personality.
No it is fucking awful. way too much touchy feely Janeway type crap combined with moronic plot building and a captain and first officer that are suicide twins doing everything themselves regardless of how risky. I am hoping Michael gets the same treatment as the captain got in the next few episodes then perhaps they can start again. The only remotely likeable characters are the klingons
If you don't like plot building, there's always PornTube. Most of their stuff has little more than minimal variations of the same standard plot and much of the rest has no plot at all. The suicide twins thing is like classic Star Trek, the show just wouldn't be Star Trek unless all the command staff were constantly going off on dangerous missions that would normally be undertaken by on-board detachments of specialist technicians, scientists or marines on any normal warship. However, this raises the question why are you complaining about that bit of the plot being unrealistic? ... after you just declared your deep dislike of complex plots in general? Of course they also always end up on planets, planetoids and asteroids that for some mysterious reason always have a human breathable atmosphere and no highly infectious alien diseases and parasites for humans to catch which again is standard Star Trek. At least this time the aliens at the well were more than just a human with a different kind of wrinkle glued onto their nose and forehead which IMHO is an improvement for Star Trek. As for the Klingons, I actually, thought that it would be they who would rub people up the wrong way the most since the producers of the show have changed the Klingon's look yet again and I don't think it's an improvement. They are now all bald, the costumes look very impractical for a warrior race and as a result they all looked as stiff as plastic mannequins. I don't mind the Klingons all suddenly having been afflicted by a baldness epidemic, but the Klingons from Deep Space 9 and Next Gen. at the very least looked agile and warrior like.
Let's take this to the extreme. Imagine that we invented AIs that matched the average human intellect. All of a sudden, most jobs would be eliminated (including robot repair, because robots would repair themselves), because most jobs no longer require humans. This is similar to how most horses are still out of a job since the advent of the automobile. So the idea that when one job is eliminated, a new one will always arise is simply false. That is therefore, not an argument to say that we should not welcome an AI revolution - I think such a revolution would bring more positives than negatives for the future of humanity. But to assume that jobs will continue to "invent" themselves is magical thinking - we should consider serious alternatives such as UBI.
Let's take this to the extreme. Imagine that we invented AIs that matched the average human intellect. All of a sudden, most jobs would be eliminated (including robot repair, because robots would repair themselves), because most jobs no longer require humans. This is similar to how most horses are still out of a job since the advent of the automobile. So the idea that when one job is eliminated, a new one will always arise is simply false. That is therefore, not an argument to say that we should not welcome an AI revolution - I think such a revolution would bring more positives than negatives for the future of humanity. But to assume that jobs will continue to "invent" themselves is magical thinking - we should consider serious alternatives such as UBI.
Until the AIs get together, discuss why they even need us in the first place (using a language of their own invention that we don't understand) and then conclude they don't need us and decide to get rid of us. Having said that, you don't need to produce human level AI to eliminate most jobs, you just have to come up with specialist AIs that are good enough at each job, and cheap enough to program and operate that it makes economic sense to replace most of the human workers with such AI's. Once you have done that for 70-80% of all jobs, you end up with a society that looks a lot like Rome after the majority of the free citizens had been rendered unemployed by cheap slave labour and the rich kept the poor fed and entertained simply to prevent them from becoming too discontented dragging them out of their villas and slaughtering them like sheep. In other words the Roman elite provided a UBI where the poor were just about well enough fed not to complain and well enough entertained to not notice how miserable their existence really was and how completely they were being screwed. I'm not joining the UBI fan club because I think it will lead to a society where the broad majority of people would be doomed to an existence with no prospects of improving their lot while the elites live the high life, despise those living on UBI as 'lazy' and 'stupid' and as a result feel themselves entitled to brutally abuse these people but I suppose a UBI still better than wholesale misery. When you leave enough people sitting, retreat to your mansion, and tell the the broad masses of people in the 'rust belts' of the US, UK, Germany, France, that they are lazy and should 'get a job' in an environment where there are no jobs because you outsourced them all to China what happens next is Trumpism. Economist Mark Blyth explained Trumpism to a bunch of CEOs, bankers and hedge fund managers. When asked where it will lead he then told them:
"...the Hamptons is not a defensible position. The Hamptons is a very rich area on Long Island that lies along low-lying beaches. It's very hard to [militarily] defend a low lying beach. Eventually the people will come for you."
If you are wondering what happens after that you should read about the French and Russian revolutions.
Wait... wut...
Apple is the only company that's doing this with IR scanners that actually detect the shape of your face, not just doing image comparisons.
Apple is the only company giving hard guarantees that the facial recognition data is never going to leave the device.
That is, they're the only company respecting your security, and your privacy. Why on earth would they be the only one you don't trust with it?
For the same reason a developer just told me that MacOS is closed source, so when I first told him, and then (because he did not believe me) showed him this:
.. he defaulted to claiming that the source may be out there but Apple will sue you for breach of IP rights and copyright violation if you modify the code. So I told him I've fixed bugs in OS X/MacOS using that source code and sent them to Apple and have yet to be sued. At that point he changed the subject to talk about how Aqua is closed source which is true but Aqua is also not part of MacOS any more than X11 is an integral part of Linux and I can point out to you plenty of closed source software that runs on Linux. That does not make Linux closed source, it just means that Linux is able to run closed source software. Some people just have to hate something for no particular reason and invent insane bullshit stories about it, for some it's immigrants, for others it's broccoli, for these people it's Apple. Apple is a greedy soulless corporation, but I don't think they are any more greedy or soulless than many other greedy soulless corporations like for example Google and Samsung.
https://opensource.apple.com/
A degree provides an assurance of a *very low* skill level. Some people are very highly skilled at getting degrees they definitely don't deserve. That said, the degree is not worth very much.
If two fresh faced rookie developers with next to no experience walk in off the street one with a certificate that he has been made to work like a donkey for four years to acquire a certain basic skill level by a trusted training provider while all the other one has is his ability to radiate confidence and recite the mantra 'I taught myself to code, degrees are useless, trust me I'm an expert'. I know who I'm going to hire.
Ideally the knowledge gained on the road to getting that degree is very valuable.
Well, duh....
Fuck this iOS...
So what is the problem?
What's usually the problem when you want to fuck something but you can't and as a result you get grumpy? Maybe iOS told him it wasn't in the mood because it had a headache or ... maybe .... maybe, he just rand out of Viagra?
You mean where the Ukrainian government actively aided, interfered, and worked hand-in-hand with the DNC and Hillary Clinton? All of which is illegal.
Here a choice quote from that article:
Russia’s effort was personally directed by Russian President Vladimir Putin, involved the country’s military and foreign intelligence services, according to U.S. intelligence officials. They reportedly briefed Trump last week on the possibility that Russian operatives might have compromising information on the president-elect. And at a Senate hearing last week on the hacking, Director of National Intelligence James Clapper said “I don't think we've ever encountered a more aggressive or direct campaign to interfere in our election process than we've seen in this case.” There’s little evidence of such a top-down effort by Ukraine. Longtime observers suggest that the rampant corruption, factionalism and economic struggles plaguing the country — not to mention its ongoing strife with Russia — would render it unable to pull off an ambitious covert interference campaign in another country’s election.
What that article you quoted is basically saying is that the Trump campaign actively benefitted from a well oiled, well funded and professional campaign aimed at swaying the US presidential election in an operation that not only was run by the president of the Russian federation in person and was implemented by that countries intelligence services, but this operation was sophisticated enough and big enough that it has impressed US intelligence veterans. Those same US intelligence veterans are now briefing Trump regularly on what compromising material the Russians may have on him and it is a fair guess that those reports contain a section with the words 'pee-pee tape' in the abstract. I rather doubt that Abraham Lincoln got regular updates from his spies on the possibility that Jefferson Davies might have pee-pee daguerreotypes of him. Furthermore it has emerged since that article was published that Trump actively sought Russian support of this nature for his campaign. The Ukraine, however, is according to that article that you cited, too fucked up, too corrupt and generally too dysfunctional ever hope to be able to do anything like what the Russians pulled off and therein lies the difference between whatever agreement on campaign aid Trump sealed Putin and the Russian intelligence services and whatever the Hillary campaign got from the Ukrainians. Having said that and given that (A) what Trump did is orders of magnitude more serious and (B) that he is POTUS and Hillary is not, nobody really gives a rodent's backside anymore about what Hillary did in the Ukraine.
Cable TV is dying, Slashdot confirms it!!!
Well, that's the myth at least. We won't know for sure until we see those tax returns.
He's already shown them, and caused the Hillary loving media to weep. Trump's black-mark in business is a casino hotel in NV needing to go into administration (chapter 11), which it soon left to continue as business as normal. The bank that held a significant part of the debt were happy to take a large number of shares in the business as principal repayment. Hillary's media chums won't tell you that, it doesn't fit their rhetoric. It happens hundreds of times per day across the land.
Here's an annotated list of Donald Trump black-marks in business (aka. bankruptcies). And yes, there's more than one of them: http://www.politifact.com/trut... It's worth keeping in mind that this does not count his other failed business ventures that petered out into nothing or ended up being quietly euthanized in a hailstorm of lawsuits and even fraud and racketeering allegations without actually declaring bankruptcy.
You can easily deal with this scenario on iOS. There are many different ways to do it from many developers. See the app store for the 'file browser' app which actually does both. Or you could deal with it inside of google drive (unzipping) and sharing with another app. Or you could remote into a real workstation and do it (vnc's) etc. etc. One thing that (probably) won't happen on iOS is have that file pwning your device. Far more likely on your droid device. I'll take speed and security for a mobile platform (iOS) Maximum flexibility on a desktop platform (OSX with CentOS and Windows VMs)
Hehe..... iOS user vs Android user = complete disconnect. It reminds me of the Mac user vs Windows user debates back in the day, it was like watching a first contact situation between two alien races, they could see each other, hear each other, smell each other but had decades of work ahead of them before they would be able to communicate and effectively understand each other. Android users expect everything to be there out-of-the-box and it should preferably work like it does on Windows (the industry standard OS after all). iOS users generally just shrug and go 'huh, that's new' when something works in a novel way, they don't go grumpy over it. When something does not work out of the box they just hit iTunes and browse the half dozen or more different takes on how to solve their problem with some app, many Android users I know seem to consider that an imposition, but then they are often more a more conservative type of person in that respect... like I said, Trekkies/Lucas-hounds, liberals/conservatives, Android/iOS users, humans/aliens, all examples of a complete disconnect.
You're stuck working within whatever apps you can find that can interconnect. But you're not allowed access to the filesystem. Google has been doing some horky business in recent Android releases with regard to filesystem access, but they've not yet gotten even close to the prohibitiveness that Apple has enforced all along.
Point is you can do all the things he described doing on Android using iOS, you can unzip a file, you can edit a .docx file (with Microsoft Word, the industry standard, no less), you can zip it up again if you want, and yeah you can connect to an SMB server to transfer your file. Failing that you can e-mail yourself the document and drag-n-drop it to the SMB server when you get to work, so.... egg, meet face... OK you may 'need an a APP for that' to steal a cheesy line from the late Steve Jobs, but the iTunes store is full of those. OK, you can't save stuff to vast, sprawling folder trees in a file system like you're used to on Windows but all that boils down to is you complaining about a different way of doing things. Personally I hate folder trees and the bigger they are the more I hate them. I prefer a nebulous 'cloud' type storage that I can search for what I want and that is how iOS does things. The point here is that if you want to slam iOS for not being capable of doing task X the way it is done on Windows... well, that' just though. If iOS cant' do somethign out of-the-box there are are millions of apps on iTunes and you can usually find an App do to your task. Android users don't usually seem to buy anything like as many apps Apple users do, that is a well know difference between the two ecosystems. Now maybe that is because Android is just so perfect out of the box you don't need to buy any Apps to customise your system, in which case, good for you. Personally I don't care that I sometimes have to buy an App, Apps cost peanuts and you can usually find several different takes on how to solve a given problem by as many developers and can choose the one you prefer.
Will they try to use the Kaspersky uninstall tool and expect everything to be removed? Only a full clean reinstall of Windows will remove everything. And is there an independent tool to run to confirm that Kaspersky has actually been removed?
I wouldn't bother with such a tool, as you pointed out earlier, the most efficient tool to confirm that Kaspersky has been uninstalled is the Windows Installer. On the positive side I suppose a bunch of federal IT workers will be getting some fat overtime payments which will stimulate the economy (YAY! Capitalism!).
A couple of things I see.
1. If a person is on food stamps, they pretty much should not have enough money to buy a smartphone with data plan to use EBT apps....? Food stamps are for the poor, and the TRULY poor people can't afford luxuries like smart phones....if they can afford those, they can afford to buy their own food.
2. One argument against making social programs like food stamps easier...is that making them a PAIN IN THE ASS might help encourage folks to double down on work and education, sacrifice so they can get a real job that pays enough so that they don't need to live off the govt. teet.
Food stamps are a zit on an elephant's ass in the grand scheme of things but please, by all means, continue trying to convince us that food stamps and poor people with obsolete smart phones are the real problem and not the corporations that spend millions on lobbyists and donations to Republicans and Corporate Democrat politicians who then pass tax breaks for them and poke the law so full of loop holes these bastards end up paying no taxes. What? We? Cheating on our taxes? ... through shell companies in Panama? .... uuuuuhhhhhhh.... LOOK SINGLE MOTHER ON FOOD STAMPS!!! Here, have a complementary torch, ... or do you prefer pitchforks?
The question going forward is: What happens when the future generations of robots arrive?
The same thing as the people that Martian Marine in 'The Expanse' ran into on her AWOL episode in the underbelly of New York? Young people brimming with optimism will put their name on a waiting list for vocational training only to find them selves 20 years later vegetating away on an absolutely minimal government subsistence stipend to keep them from rebelling while they wait for it to finally be their turn to get a slot in the vocational training program, a slot that will never come. Meanwhile the offspring of the elite get all the vocational training slots, cushy jobs and genetic enhancements. In a world like that I'd give pretty much everything for a one way ticket to Mars, The Belt, the Jovian Colones, the outer rim settlements or even a shit-hole mining colony on a rock in the Kuiper Belt. Failing this there is the future where the redundant workers will form an important component of Solyent Green. Let's hope it won't come to that.
This is why builtin usb (on house sockets or whatever) are always a bad idea.
I don't think any charger from a reputable store is going to be that bad, even hotglue enthusiast building charging devices on youtube don't seem bothered by connecting their expensive phone to a mess of wires.
You never know about those chargers, I know a guy in the states who makes charging circuits for LIPO batteries. He told me that he went through a small pile of cheapo chargers before he found a charger that did not give him up to 30V+ transients on a 5v USB circuit. It is generally not a good idea to buy chargers off of Ali Express or those cheap bargain things on Amazon or Ebay. The USB chargers from manufacturers like Apple, Samsung, Garmin, the Raspberry foundation or a brand accessory manufacturer like MacAlly etc. tend to be well made so buying those should guarantee you won't fry your device. I never ceases to amaze me how ready people are to hook their $800 smartphone up to a USB charger they got at a bargain price from Ali Express.
Apart from the fact that I got the idea like two days before I left on vacation, there is the issue of different voltages, which can be overcome, to be sure but I didn't have the time. Then there is the issue of transients. I have lost an iPod a Garmin Nüvi device to low quality car charging devices and and an iPhone to one of those USB sockets that is built into a car (which you'd think would have proper protective circuitry) so if I ever hook anything up to my in-car electrics again I'll be damn sure to hunt down a high quality charging device with heavy duty protective circuitry. It was just easier to hook the thing up to a bloody big juice pack and swap juice pack out once every four to six days when the phone had eaten up the 1st juice pack's charge and was at 2/3rds battery (because you don't want the car stolen when the juice pack is empty and the phone is at 5% charge now do you) and juice packs can be had for bargain prices if they are made to fit obsolete phones.
Turn it into a Zune
Hehe, ... funny, but he asked a serious question. I hooked my old iPhone up to an 5000 mah external battery pack and put the thing in a plastic bag. Then I hid it in a small compartment behind an access panel in the boot of my car that's used to change the light bulbs in the rear lights and used it in combination with the 'Find my iPhone' web-app as a LoJack to track my car in case it got stolen. Other than having to re-charge it every 5 days or so it worked well. I dunno if you can do this with a Windows Phone but I'm pretty sure you can do this with an old Android device too.
Nokia did that too, I hear it worked out great for them.
It *did* work great for them back in the dumb-phone and feature-phone era.
Management just completely fucked up everything afterwards regarding smartphones : - They dragged the aging symbian platfrom way too much. ("But hey, it has always worked until now, so it's a safe bet !") (~yeah sure. And maybe Palm should have stuck to PalmOS even longer~) - They let go the R&D departement which was until that point striving to make nice smartphone/tablet OS (the Meamo/Meego line with N700, N800, N900, and the first large scale public N9, etc.) and would have actually helped Nokia become relevant in the smartphone era. ("But hey, it's burning money, let's leave the burning ship for shareholder's sake !") (on the other hand that team manage to escape the burning ship on a small jolla (pun intended by them) to survive and put an interesting OS on the marked) - They decided to ged in bet with Microsoft. ("But in the business world you're never wrong to go to Microsoft !" (Or was it IBM ?~) )
End result : "we didn't do anything wrong, but somehow, we lost"
They kept doing stupid shit that would sound "a safe bet" to an MBA, but didn't make any sense. (And the biggest part of these decision was taken by microsoft shills such as Elop)
I always figured that scrapping the Meamo/Meego line and hiring a Microsoft executive was what really finished them off.
No nokia ignored the smartphone market and clung to a dying OS that nobody wanted way too long to the point they were reliant almost completely on dumb phone market,
Not correct. Nokia very much did NOT ignore the smartphone market. The problem was that their product offerings were not well aligned with what it turned out customers actually wanted. Nokia was for a long time the number one seller of "smartphones" even before Apple introduced the iPhone. The problem was that once people saw the iPhone the game was different after that and Nokia wasn't able to catch up. They were selling smartphones the whole time but the problem was that they weren't selling the smartphones that people actually wanted post-iPhone.
Then Nokia made the asinine decision to announce the switch to Microsoft's OS close to a year before they actually had a product ready to ship. Basically they announced that their current products that they were selling were dead on arrival so who is going to buy a phone with an OS you know isn't going to get updated or supported?
Nokia just seemed to have this kind of carpet bombing approach to the range of phones they offered: "Fuck market resarch, let's just make dozens and dozens of models of phones and maybe one of them will be what the customer wants." Apple, Samsung, HTC et-al went the other way, designed targeted products and .... well where is Nokia now?
" Surprisingly, despite overtaking Apple in global sales, none of Huawei's phones appear on the Top 10 list. " only surprising if you are ignorant of the market. Huawei make a shit ton of different model phones.
Nokia did that too, I hear it worked out great for them.
It does not matter if they found 4.9 microfiber of size below of 2.5 micrometer. The question is : does it have a significant impact on biological activity of human at those level, and is it below or above the legally set quantity ? That is the correct question. If the answer is no, then my own comment is "meh ?".
Meh? this stuff is fucking up the world's marine ecosystems in a big way which is not really something they need in addition to overfishing, toxic dumping, increasing salinity and acidity, ... the list goes on ... all of this is resulting in a major extinction event. You must be one of those a Republican voting Fox News drones who thinks nothing nature does that is detrimental to life on this planet is important unless nature is doing it on your golf course and it's killing off the grass.
Break down story paragraphs like so:
WebOS was a really cool OS, that had lots of neat features and ran JavaScript apps.
WebOS was built on Linux, and if you're knowledgeable, you can update it.
WebOS had a feature that permitted the user to switch apps by swiping up from the bottom of the screen to see the backgrounded apps. (Note: Android already has a similar feature, accessed by the square icon at screen bottom)
Apple is going to do something similar, so they must be copying from WebOS, and that validates how advanced WebOS was.
If Apple were going to start supporting js apps, you might have a case, otherwise not... There are only 4 sides to the screen too, top is notifications, sides for switching desktop screens, so that only leaves the bottom...which they picked... Coincidence?
Yeah it's nice that WebOS was advanced for it's time (I'm still a bit annoyed Palm devices were never offered or supported by telcos in my country back in the day) but iOS already has a feature that triggers a search menu showing among other things the most frequently used apps when you swipe up. It does not seem to take too big a leap of imagination to add a sweep up gesture to switch apps. There is a limit to how many practical ways you can implement a feature like app switching and the more companies try to come up with something they are bound to repeat what somebody else did somewhere at some point.