(Actually, to be clear, it's not even that I think a lot of this is wrong, but you're doing a lot of shouting and you should be providing links for some of this stuff; some of it is non-obvious when googling.)
Why is it so hard to understand that some of us *loathe* wires? One of the best things that's ever happened to me is wireless headphones, though I'm still plagued with a cable for my headphones at my desk. I catch wires on things as I walk around, routing the cable while I work out was always a pain, all of my headphone failures had to do with either the cable housing cracking from normal use, or the jack itself going on the fritz. My wired headphones haven't lasted any longer than my wireless ones—about 2 years.
I buy cheap wireless ones off of Amazon, so I'm still saddled with a wire that goes between the two sides, but I'm really looking forward to the price of truly wireless headphones coming down.
Yes, many wired headphones sound quite good, but I don't care. My headphones are for convenience while I'm being active; I'm rarely in a position to really sit and enjoy music without doing something else at the same time, where sound quality would actually matter. It's fine that it matters to you, it's just irrelevant to all of us that are buying wireless headphones.
Preface: I'm pro-helmet. I race bikes, and I pretty much always wear a helmet when I go out.
That said, I find the claims that these guys make about the concussion-protection factor of their helmet pretty dubious. To the point: you don't need to hit your head to end up with a concussion. Falling off your bike and never striking your head can STILL give you a concussion. To make claims about how good the concussion-prevention design of this helmet is may border on misleading or negligent.
But it looks like it might be more comfortable and provide better protection in some categories of crashes, so I'm not going to criticise them too much.
You've basically got five cities that can now make whatever demands they want. Losing any one of those top five would be a huge problem, and now they all know it.
Uber is gonna wish they hadn't been so pugnacious, I suspect.
I think it is more to the point that a lot of this stuff is tied up in how much sleep these kids are getting, and teenagers have always had a tough time of thatâ"look at recommendations that the school day be shifted a few hours later so they can sleep in.
I admit I havenâ(TM)t read these studies, but is it a case of kids not sleeping because their phones are keeping them up, or they're using their phones because they're awake anyway?
Okay, put aside things like EA Widows and excessive overtime and layoffs. Take those things off the table entirely and ask the question: is game development a dream job?
Answer (unsurprisingly): no. It's a job. It's a job with slightly different parameters than normal programming, but I've been doing this for over 15 years, and I use the same tools most other programmers do (emacs, Visual Studio, a PC) and I work on teams with other programmers, I have to live with the decisions of managers that I disagree with, etc. Particularly as a developer of AAA games, it's not much different than when I worked at an oil company. A lot of the development is not very interesting. It's just code, man. Occasionally you get to scratch a creative itch, but most of the time it's just the same programming that you do anywhere else. (Except, usually, the pay is worse.)
There are some things that are better about the games industry than other industries. You might actually have fans of your work, people will find out about a game you made and express some joy they had in playing it. People are always interested in your job, and you get to mingle with artists and animators and writers.
But don't come to this industry expecting like it's not work just because the end product is entertainment. Think about what it really means to have a 'dream job'. You probably won't change the world here, or get rich, or become influential. If you're lucky, you'll work on a decent project with decent people, get paid passably well and make something that other people find entertaining or useful. Just like any other job.
They're not making any extra on the repairs. I've heard of people bringing in their laptops multiple times for keyboard problems, especially in the first generation. Because the whole top of the case needs to be replaced, it's, like, a $600 part for Apple every time they do it. There's a very real possibility that the repairs is affecting Apple's bottom line when it comes to this model. On top of that, they'll repair ANY laptop with this keyboard from the first two generations, even if you didn't have AppleCare+. It's stunning to me that they released yet another incremental change on this design, even from just a selfish, capitalist standpoint. Leave aside that it's a terrible look for them, it's shrinking their margins.
Interesting. In Canada, open credit lines count as liabilities AGAINST you (at least the last time I was told by my bank). If you have 5 credit cards with $25k of available credit each, you're treated as a walking credit nightmare, and nobody will extend any extra credit to you. You may as well have all 5 cards maxed out for all they care, banks don't want to give you a loan if they already feel like you're over-extended.
But maybe that changed since I last checked. It wouldn't surprise me, since banks are always hoping you'll over-extend yourself and pay their fees.
Yes, it's so much better to let people that wouldn't know that they have an irregular heartbeat die. I'm sure the cardiologists aren't going to be too concerned with the uptick in appointments—there doesn't appear to be a problem with false alarms. Like, that's in the first couple of lines of the *summary*.
First of all, the feature can't be triggered accidentally. You actually have to actively participate in this measurement. So any privacy concerns are pretty unfounded.
Secondly, it's designed to be a useful tool, but its sole purpose is not to detect irregular heart rhythms. It's something Apple thought they could do that would make the lives of some people better, so they did it. But that doesn't mean it's an actual medical-grade device. It's just good enough to tell you to contact your doctor so they can hook you up to a single-purpose medical-grade system (which I'm sure also has its own margin of error).
They're not taking pictures of themselves FOR themselves, they're taking pictures of themselves for OTHER PEOPLE.
It's not that they're self absorbed, they're trying to share themselves and their lives with their friends. It's just a different kind of socalizing, and it can be done at great distances, asynchronously, with zero cost. They may as well take 5 or 10 to get the shot they want, because why not send a great picture of yourself to your friends, whether you're at home or traveling?
It's just a generational shift. I don't think they're any more or less absorbed with themselves as any other generation, they're just expressing it differently.
I have an 8GB/month plan, and that's actually quite large for a Canadian consumer. There are very few plans larger than that, and they cost an arm and a leg. I'm already really stingy with downloading things just so I can make sure I'm not paying overages. What the hell do I care about a faster network? I don't want to get through this data any faster, and frankly, I don't have a lot more I can download. I spend a lot of time in wifi range (though my mobile data is more reliable than a lot of those wifi networks; I'll switch over sometimes just so I don't have to wait), and most of what I'm downloading is podcast episodes or my instagram feed.
At least here, this is just going to be an excuse to raise prices again without any meaningful difference in my service. No thanks.
So I actually studied up before an interview once. I found some good tips-and-tricks style books, and I came across several solutions to the fibonacci sequence problem. The so-called obvious solution is the recursive one, but if you just store a few numbers, the iterative solution is actually better.
I got asked to solve the fibonacci sequence problem, and the first way I solved it was the iterative way. The next question the interviewer asked was a way to solve the problem *faster*. (I happened to have a way to do that too, though the solution eludes me at the moment.) But it was clear that I had screwed up his plan. He had a sequence of events that he wanted me to jump through, and he seemed sort of put out that I didn't follow his plan exactly.
Beware of people that want specific solutions to specific problems in a specific order. I had a better solution ready to go. When people reject good answers for the sake of 'right' answers, it's trouble.
(I just thought about this interview because you mention recursion at the end. I fully agree with everything you said.)
A lot of that extra padding and whitespace is useful guidance in its own right, from a UI perspective. It makes things easier to read and delineate and manipulate. We're working on fundamentally space-limited devices, so crowding the UI doesn't make any more sense.
But you're right that it's still not a good argument. I *know* the screen space is limited. I'm coming into my phone experience expecting something different from my PC. I think they make large devices easier to use with one hand if you already know exactly what you're doing, but they're terrible if you don't. Phones are already becoming something of a "hard-mode" device from a discoverability perspective, and this is just exacerbating it.
You don't really, just a small space at the bottom of the screen. I wouldn't say that it takes less space, but it probably takes no more real space.
The advantage to gestures is that they're a lot easier to use on the huge phones that have been foisted on us, regardless of hand size. There's no reaching for anything if you're holding your phone from the bottom already.
The (significant) disadvantage is that they're an extra thing to learn, and they're not discoverable. There is very little about the bar across the bottom of my iPhone XR that indicates what will happen if I interact with it. At best, I can take it as a marker that some sort of interaction is available, but that's it. If I don't know how to use it and I make a mistake, I might discover the other functionality.
I LIKE the gestures on my iPhone. I like them better than the home button, I'd say. But from a UI perspective, I have major reservations about how these features are communicated and made obvious. Frankly, in that sense, they're a nightmare, and nobody has solved that issue yet that I've seen.
You first have to assume that the state has the interests of its citizens at heart. If you can't make that base assumption, everything else falls apart. When you're dealing with authoritarian regimes it's POSSIBLE that the citizens are near the top of the list, but the base assumption has to be that the regime is working for itself first and citizens second.
I'm not going to make any grandiose claims about western democracies serving the people first, but taking care of the population through a government funded or run medical system aligns better with the claimed goals of a stable democracy. (Arguably, the democracy functions first to maintain itself as well, but maintaining that framework is at the behest of and to the benefit of the voters. In theory.)
At the very least, I think it's obvious that governments are better at tasks that have no obvious profit to them (healthcare, roads, the military, the justice system) because that's ultimately why they exist at all. Corporations are bad at those things, because as we can see here, they can solve problems in a way that puts them out of business or limits their profits, so they don't want to solve problems at all.
First, I think you should consider that your sample space is pretty skewed. I don't think that you live in poverty, so your exposure to that population is quite low.
Second, the working poor is a surpassingly large segment of the population. Real wages haven’t increased with inflation for years, and while things like TVs and electronics have gone down in price relative to inflation, essential goods haven't.
There's some location dependency as well. Consider a worker in San Francisco that drives a bus or works at contracted janitorial staff. Many of them have to live far outside the city and spend enormous amounts of time commuting. It leaves very little time to do anything that might get them into a better job, and they’re spending every penny they have on rent and survival; many have low or non-existent credit (though that may be a blessing in disguise, because you're not wrong about the dangers of credit or how businesses extending credit are predatory nightmares).
Poverty isn't just a matter of how hard you work. There are a lot of circumstances that go into how it plays out, and once you're poor, the options for getting out become more and more limited. Social mobility is getting lower by the year.
Lastly, there are "frivolous" purchases that poor people make that bring them just a bit of joy or relief, and while it's easy to say that they shouldn't be smoking or eating a bag of chips, life is hard enough without letting yourself just have something small for yourself.
The working poor are just that, and it can be nearly impossible for them to break out of the cycles of poverty once they're in them. Plenty of them are perfectly willing to work to get out of the mess they're in but circumstances don't always allow for it.
Yeah, USB-C combines all the benefits of not knowing what your cable does with the freedom to plug it into whatever you want and have it silently fail to do what you expect.
No, they removed it because it took up space that they wanted for other things. The fact that they have wireless headphones to sell gave them options, but I don't think it was because of that specifically.
The haptic feedback system they're using takes up space. The screen design takes up space. The reason why they don't have an audio jack on the new iPad Pros is because it would intrude on the space taken up by the screen because there are almost no bezels—they've decided that aesthetic of small bezels is more important than the headphone jack.
I'm not going to argue that Apple spends a lot of time nickle-and-diming its customers with demonstrably worse accessory products (I miss you, mag-safe with integrated cable management power brick:( ) but they decided certain aesthetics and user experience was more important than the headphone jack. You may not agree with that design decision, but it's probably not the case that they did it to boost wireless headphone sales. Indeed, bluetooth headphones have been increasing in popularity since long before the removal of that jack—it was likely that they just picked that time to do it because they felt that few enough people would care because so many were already switching to wireless solutions.
If you see it as spooky invasive shit, it's because you have no idea what's actually happening. FaceID in particular doesn't take a picture of you and doesn't save any images. It projects a bunch of dots onto your face and creates an abstract mathematical representation of it, which is then stored in a secure cryptographic vault. There's no way to get that information back out of the vault, all you can do is create a new mathematical abstraction and ask if the two are sufficiently similar that the phone should be unlocked. The vault only says 'yes' or 'no'.
Also, thunder isn't supernatural beings fighting in the sky, or a giant dragon or whatever. Stop being afraid of things because you don't understand them, just go out and do the minimal amount of research it takes to understand the mechanism.
(Other face identification systems on Android phones are markedly less secure; they ARE based on images, which is why they're so easily fooled.)
Indeed, the Norwegian prison system focuses on rehabilitation and has incredibly low recidivism rates. So much so, that at some point they had prisons that were empty, if I'm remembering correctly. https://www.businessinsider.co...
There is certainly the question of culture—Norway is not the USA—but a capitalist system where many of the prisons are privately owned and have contracts for minimum occupancy with the state certainly only benefits shareholders and not society at large. Recidivism rates in the USA are high, and that's just how prison owners like it. Think about that for a moment: there's someone that owns a prison and honestly goes to sleep at night hoping people commit crimes, and implicitly, that there are many victims of crime. It's monstrous.
I suspect that this is for reasons of density rather than specific impact. There are enough people there that you can figure out whether or not the system really works at a decent scale, and if people find it truly convenient. Since they're partnering with UPS, that's also a place where a lot of deliveries are happening anyway, so they have the capacity to absorb those deliveries (and pickups).
I agree that a lot of the plastic problem seems to be happening in China (last I read), but we live a particularly disposable culture here in North America. Perhaps if we reduce the demand for single-use plastic containers (and the corresponding demand for recycling those same containers, much of which happens—or not—in China), we can have an impact on the amount of plastic in those locations. It seems like a bit of a long shot, but from the perspective of a middle-class westerner, I should try to do what I can even if nobody else is. (Assuming that this is a net win; I understand there's a tension between fossil fuel use transporting reusable containers versus the amount of plastic I create to put into the world.)
Slashdot Mirror
(Actually, to be clear, it's not even that I think a lot of this is wrong, but you're doing a lot of shouting and you should be providing links for some of this stuff; some of it is non-obvious when googling.)
[citation needed]
Why is it so hard to understand that some of us *loathe* wires? One of the best things that's ever happened to me is wireless headphones, though I'm still plagued with a cable for my headphones at my desk. I catch wires on things as I walk around, routing the cable while I work out was always a pain, all of my headphone failures had to do with either the cable housing cracking from normal use, or the jack itself going on the fritz. My wired headphones haven't lasted any longer than my wireless ones—about 2 years.
I buy cheap wireless ones off of Amazon, so I'm still saddled with a wire that goes between the two sides, but I'm really looking forward to the price of truly wireless headphones coming down.
Yes, many wired headphones sound quite good, but I don't care. My headphones are for convenience while I'm being active; I'm rarely in a position to really sit and enjoy music without doing something else at the same time, where sound quality would actually matter. It's fine that it matters to you, it's just irrelevant to all of us that are buying wireless headphones.
Preface: I'm pro-helmet. I race bikes, and I pretty much always wear a helmet when I go out.
That said, I find the claims that these guys make about the concussion-protection factor of their helmet pretty dubious. To the point: you don't need to hit your head to end up with a concussion. Falling off your bike and never striking your head can STILL give you a concussion. To make claims about how good the concussion-prevention design of this helmet is may border on misleading or negligent.
But it looks like it might be more comfortable and provide better protection in some categories of crashes, so I'm not going to criticise them too much.
You've basically got five cities that can now make whatever demands they want. Losing any one of those top five would be a huge problem, and now they all know it.
Uber is gonna wish they hadn't been so pugnacious, I suspect.
I think it is more to the point that a lot of this stuff is tied up in how much sleep these kids are getting, and teenagers have always had a tough time of thatâ"look at recommendations that the school day be shifted a few hours later so they can sleep in.
I admit I havenâ(TM)t read these studies, but is it a case of kids not sleeping because their phones are keeping them up, or they're using their phones because they're awake anyway?
Okay, put aside things like EA Widows and excessive overtime and layoffs. Take those things off the table entirely and ask the question: is game development a dream job?
Answer (unsurprisingly): no. It's a job. It's a job with slightly different parameters than normal programming, but I've been doing this for over 15 years, and I use the same tools most other programmers do (emacs, Visual Studio, a PC) and I work on teams with other programmers, I have to live with the decisions of managers that I disagree with, etc. Particularly as a developer of AAA games, it's not much different than when I worked at an oil company. A lot of the development is not very interesting. It's just code, man. Occasionally you get to scratch a creative itch, but most of the time it's just the same programming that you do anywhere else. (Except, usually, the pay is worse.)
There are some things that are better about the games industry than other industries. You might actually have fans of your work, people will find out about a game you made and express some joy they had in playing it. People are always interested in your job, and you get to mingle with artists and animators and writers.
But don't come to this industry expecting like it's not work just because the end product is entertainment. Think about what it really means to have a 'dream job'. You probably won't change the world here, or get rich, or become influential. If you're lucky, you'll work on a decent project with decent people, get paid passably well and make something that other people find entertaining or useful. Just like any other job.
They're not making any extra on the repairs. I've heard of people bringing in their laptops multiple times for keyboard problems, especially in the first generation. Because the whole top of the case needs to be replaced, it's, like, a $600 part for Apple every time they do it. There's a very real possibility that the repairs is affecting Apple's bottom line when it comes to this model. On top of that, they'll repair ANY laptop with this keyboard from the first two generations, even if you didn't have AppleCare+. It's stunning to me that they released yet another incremental change on this design, even from just a selfish, capitalist standpoint. Leave aside that it's a terrible look for them, it's shrinking their margins.
Interesting. In Canada, open credit lines count as liabilities AGAINST you (at least the last time I was told by my bank). If you have 5 credit cards with $25k of available credit each, you're treated as a walking credit nightmare, and nobody will extend any extra credit to you. You may as well have all 5 cards maxed out for all they care, banks don't want to give you a loan if they already feel like you're over-extended.
But maybe that changed since I last checked. It wouldn't surprise me, since banks are always hoping you'll over-extend yourself and pay their fees.
Yes, it's so much better to let people that wouldn't know that they have an irregular heartbeat die. I'm sure the cardiologists aren't going to be too concerned with the uptick in appointments—there doesn't appear to be a problem with false alarms. Like, that's in the first couple of lines of the *summary*.
First of all, the feature can't be triggered accidentally. You actually have to actively participate in this measurement. So any privacy concerns are pretty unfounded.
Secondly, it's designed to be a useful tool, but its sole purpose is not to detect irregular heart rhythms. It's something Apple thought they could do that would make the lives of some people better, so they did it. But that doesn't mean it's an actual medical-grade device. It's just good enough to tell you to contact your doctor so they can hook you up to a single-purpose medical-grade system (which I'm sure also has its own margin of error).
They're not taking pictures of themselves FOR themselves, they're taking pictures of themselves for OTHER PEOPLE.
It's not that they're self absorbed, they're trying to share themselves and their lives with their friends. It's just a different kind of socalizing, and it can be done at great distances, asynchronously, with zero cost. They may as well take 5 or 10 to get the shot they want, because why not send a great picture of yourself to your friends, whether you're at home or traveling?
It's just a generational shift. I don't think they're any more or less absorbed with themselves as any other generation, they're just expressing it differently.
What's next, letting EVERY citizen vote?
"Human creativity is the only kind of creativity, because other kinds of creativity are not HUMAN creativity."
For a professor of philosophy, this whole argument sure feels like he's begging the question.
I have an 8GB/month plan, and that's actually quite large for a Canadian consumer. There are very few plans larger than that, and they cost an arm and a leg. I'm already really stingy with downloading things just so I can make sure I'm not paying overages. What the hell do I care about a faster network? I don't want to get through this data any faster, and frankly, I don't have a lot more I can download. I spend a lot of time in wifi range (though my mobile data is more reliable than a lot of those wifi networks; I'll switch over sometimes just so I don't have to wait), and most of what I'm downloading is podcast episodes or my instagram feed.
At least here, this is just going to be an excuse to raise prices again without any meaningful difference in my service. No thanks.
So I actually studied up before an interview once. I found some good tips-and-tricks style books, and I came across several solutions to the fibonacci sequence problem. The so-called obvious solution is the recursive one, but if you just store a few numbers, the iterative solution is actually better.
I got asked to solve the fibonacci sequence problem, and the first way I solved it was the iterative way. The next question the interviewer asked was a way to solve the problem *faster*. (I happened to have a way to do that too, though the solution eludes me at the moment.) But it was clear that I had screwed up his plan. He had a sequence of events that he wanted me to jump through, and he seemed sort of put out that I didn't follow his plan exactly.
Beware of people that want specific solutions to specific problems in a specific order. I had a better solution ready to go. When people reject good answers for the sake of 'right' answers, it's trouble.
(I just thought about this interview because you mention recursion at the end. I fully agree with everything you said.)
A lot of that extra padding and whitespace is useful guidance in its own right, from a UI perspective. It makes things easier to read and delineate and manipulate. We're working on fundamentally space-limited devices, so crowding the UI doesn't make any more sense.
But you're right that it's still not a good argument. I *know* the screen space is limited. I'm coming into my phone experience expecting something different from my PC. I think they make large devices easier to use with one hand if you already know exactly what you're doing, but they're terrible if you don't. Phones are already becoming something of a "hard-mode" device from a discoverability perspective, and this is just exacerbating it.
You don't really, just a small space at the bottom of the screen. I wouldn't say that it takes less space, but it probably takes no more real space.
The advantage to gestures is that they're a lot easier to use on the huge phones that have been foisted on us, regardless of hand size. There's no reaching for anything if you're holding your phone from the bottom already.
The (significant) disadvantage is that they're an extra thing to learn, and they're not discoverable. There is very little about the bar across the bottom of my iPhone XR that indicates what will happen if I interact with it. At best, I can take it as a marker that some sort of interaction is available, but that's it. If I don't know how to use it and I make a mistake, I might discover the other functionality.
I LIKE the gestures on my iPhone. I like them better than the home button, I'd say. But from a UI perspective, I have major reservations about how these features are communicated and made obvious. Frankly, in that sense, they're a nightmare, and nobody has solved that issue yet that I've seen.
You first have to assume that the state has the interests of its citizens at heart. If you can't make that base assumption, everything else falls apart. When you're dealing with authoritarian regimes it's POSSIBLE that the citizens are near the top of the list, but the base assumption has to be that the regime is working for itself first and citizens second.
I'm not going to make any grandiose claims about western democracies serving the people first, but taking care of the population through a government funded or run medical system aligns better with the claimed goals of a stable democracy. (Arguably, the democracy functions first to maintain itself as well, but maintaining that framework is at the behest of and to the benefit of the voters. In theory.)
At the very least, I think it's obvious that governments are better at tasks that have no obvious profit to them (healthcare, roads, the military, the justice system) because that's ultimately why they exist at all. Corporations are bad at those things, because as we can see here, they can solve problems in a way that puts them out of business or limits their profits, so they don't want to solve problems at all.
First, I think you should consider that your sample space is pretty skewed. I don't think that you live in poverty, so your exposure to that population is quite low.
Second, the working poor is a surpassingly large segment of the population. Real wages haven’t increased with inflation for years, and while things like TVs and electronics have gone down in price relative to inflation, essential goods haven't.
There's some location dependency as well. Consider a worker in San Francisco that drives a bus or works at contracted janitorial staff. Many of them have to live far outside the city and spend enormous amounts of time commuting. It leaves very little time to do anything that might get them into a better job, and they’re spending every penny they have on rent and survival; many have low or non-existent credit (though that may be a blessing in disguise, because you're not wrong about the dangers of credit or how businesses extending credit are predatory nightmares).
Poverty isn't just a matter of how hard you work. There are a lot of circumstances that go into how it plays out, and once you're poor, the options for getting out become more and more limited. Social mobility is getting lower by the year.
Lastly, there are "frivolous" purchases that poor people make that bring them just a bit of joy or relief, and while it's easy to say that they shouldn't be smoking or eating a bag of chips, life is hard enough without letting yourself just have something small for yourself.
The working poor are just that, and it can be nearly impossible for them to break out of the cycles of poverty once they're in them. Plenty of them are perfectly willing to work to get out of the mess they're in but circumstances don't always allow for it.
Yeah, USB-C combines all the benefits of not knowing what your cable does with the freedom to plug it into whatever you want and have it silently fail to do what you expect.
Great connector, abysmally poor planning.
No, they removed it because it took up space that they wanted for other things. The fact that they have wireless headphones to sell gave them options, but I don't think it was because of that specifically.
The haptic feedback system they're using takes up space. The screen design takes up space. The reason why they don't have an audio jack on the new iPad Pros is because it would intrude on the space taken up by the screen because there are almost no bezels—they've decided that aesthetic of small bezels is more important than the headphone jack.
I'm not going to argue that Apple spends a lot of time nickle-and-diming its customers with demonstrably worse accessory products (I miss you, mag-safe with integrated cable management power brick :( ) but they decided certain aesthetics and user experience was more important than the headphone jack. You may not agree with that design decision, but it's probably not the case that they did it to boost wireless headphone sales. Indeed, bluetooth headphones have been increasing in popularity since long before the removal of that jack—it was likely that they just picked that time to do it because they felt that few enough people would care because so many were already switching to wireless solutions.
If you see it as spooky invasive shit, it's because you have no idea what's actually happening. FaceID in particular doesn't take a picture of you and doesn't save any images. It projects a bunch of dots onto your face and creates an abstract mathematical representation of it, which is then stored in a secure cryptographic vault. There's no way to get that information back out of the vault, all you can do is create a new mathematical abstraction and ask if the two are sufficiently similar that the phone should be unlocked. The vault only says 'yes' or 'no'.
Also, thunder isn't supernatural beings fighting in the sky, or a giant dragon or whatever. Stop being afraid of things because you don't understand them, just go out and do the minimal amount of research it takes to understand the mechanism.
(Other face identification systems on Android phones are markedly less secure; they ARE based on images, which is why they're so easily fooled.)
Indeed, the Norwegian prison system focuses on rehabilitation and has incredibly low recidivism rates. So much so, that at some point they had prisons that were empty, if I'm remembering correctly. https://www.businessinsider.co...
There is certainly the question of culture—Norway is not the USA—but a capitalist system where many of the prisons are privately owned and have contracts for minimum occupancy with the state certainly only benefits shareholders and not society at large. Recidivism rates in the USA are high, and that's just how prison owners like it. Think about that for a moment: there's someone that owns a prison and honestly goes to sleep at night hoping people commit crimes, and implicitly, that there are many victims of crime. It's monstrous.
I suspect that this is for reasons of density rather than specific impact. There are enough people there that you can figure out whether or not the system really works at a decent scale, and if people find it truly convenient. Since they're partnering with UPS, that's also a place where a lot of deliveries are happening anyway, so they have the capacity to absorb those deliveries (and pickups).
I agree that a lot of the plastic problem seems to be happening in China (last I read), but we live a particularly disposable culture here in North America. Perhaps if we reduce the demand for single-use plastic containers (and the corresponding demand for recycling those same containers, much of which happens—or not—in China), we can have an impact on the amount of plastic in those locations. It seems like a bit of a long shot, but from the perspective of a middle-class westerner, I should try to do what I can even if nobody else is. (Assuming that this is a net win; I understand there's a tension between fossil fuel use transporting reusable containers versus the amount of plastic I create to put into the world.)