Your anecdote doesn't really mean much. Apple has much better retention than other companies, and when you look at buying intention or people who have switched, the numbers do come out on Apple's side. It's nice that you and your wife have found things that work for you. When I borrowed a Nexus 4 for a week, I had to struggle to make it a week before I went back to my iPhone 4. I just couldn't find anything particularly redeeming about Android phones that I didn't get from my iPhone (other than the speed of a new phone, obviously, but any new phone would give me that; and the price).
You're assuming he means that they purchased the phones 'by accident' rather than what he probably intended, which is that they later had buyer's remorse and felt they'd made a mistake. He's deliberately blurring the meaning here, but he's almost certainly not claiming that people went home with phones and didn't realise until later that they weren't made by Apple.
Tim Cook is clearly trying to get across that he feels that these people bought these phones and then realised the error of their ways, not that they walked into stores, put money down, and only realised when they got home that they had Android phones instead of iPhones.
The distinction in this case is subtle because 'by mistake' usually does mean 'by accident', or 'unintentionally'. He's TRYING to be subtle here because he's almost certainly trying to make an allusion to their court cases and how Samsung made phones that really did look like iPhones for a while.
I also came up with this on my own; it's not a terribly complicated concept once you divide 365 by 7 and realise that you've only got a 1 (or 2) remainder.
The solution is also incredibly simple. The extra day is always New Years. It has no 'day of the week' name associated with it. If there's a leap year, you've got 2 days for holidays.
Congratulations, you've fallen into the trap that so many other techies here at/. have in thinking that this is consumer stuff targeted at YOU.
It isn't.
The people that this is aimed at don't even know what you're talking about when you say 'FTP'. They just want to move their files around easily and transparently. Now they can. They'll like that.
Take a look at the actual tech stuff if you want to gripe or be excited. But the consumer facing stuff will be really interesting to consumers. They like a bit of GUI change as long as it's not too drastic. (Apple isn't moving the buttons or anything, they're just making a few things more accessible and modifying the design a little; this isn't near the magnitude of the change to the Windows Desktop OS.)
Apple is very good at selling things to people. For non-essential goods, there is basically no company on the planet that's better at making money from consumers. What is small potatoes to you is a big upgrade to some. And it's free. That tends to smooth out any rough edges that crop up.
If all you do is read the Spec sheet, yeah, it was underpowered. The benchmarks bore it out as a legit flagship phone, though.
Remember, on paper, the iPhone 5s is 'only' dual core with 1GB of RAM, but if you look up the benchmarks on Anandtech, it clearly outperforms all comers. This is the magic of well designed and intentionally designed silicon. The Moto X was a little less off-the-shelf than its competitors in terms of components, and that showed in the actual performance.
But big numbers sell, I guess. It's a pity to me as an iPhone user that the Moto X didn't sell better. They were doing new and useful stuff with that phone. Instead, Apple is forced to compete primarily against Samsung, who clearly don't really know exactly what to do, but they're sure to do LOTS of it.
I'm friends with some artists, and the problem with Zazzle (and many other sites like them) is that actually stolen content gets submitted all the time, and they probably got sick of getting 1000 emails from an artist and all of that artist's fans for someone effectively stealing a design and submitting it as their own.
This guy doesn't have a leg to stand on, but it doesn't mean that nobody ever has a reason to complain. The reality is that the internet is a place where people try and pass things off as their own constantly. That's bad enough, but when someone starts making money off of your art--your original, actual art--it becomes really damaging to you. People start thinking YOUR design is the fake, even though it's the original. It sucks.
So yeah, this is lame and bit lazy, but not immediately responding to an infringement notice is also lame and lazy.
Remember, Apple bought Soundjam and released iTunes something like 6 months later.
Buying something that already exists is much faster than rolling your own, even if you COULD roll your own. It's probably worth Apple's time not just for licencing reasons but for software reasons as well.
I'm predicting that iTunes will be phased out over the next couple of years in favour of the Beats software. Everyone agrees at this point that iTunes has sort of run its course, and this will give Apple something to transition to. This will unify all of Apple's music service, and Apple can merge the App Store stuff together on the Mac and release a stand-alone iDevice app store for windows.
This is wild speculation on my part, I admit, but it makes so many things so much easier.
The headphones business is just a nice way to make sure the company is paying for itself right away. This is an acquisition that won't lose Apple any money over the short term, and will make their long-term prospects in the space a lot better.
Sony phones have had ANT+ built in for quite a while. I'm sure they'd be surprised to hear that they have a long way to catch up.
I've been able to take my heartrate on my iPhone 4 for a long time using the camera and the flash. The HR apps are plentiful and free. I haven't seen any evidence that the S5's HR monitor is, in fact, any better than that low-tech solution, or actually even reliable at all. Most of the reviews I read when it came out said that the HR monitor was clumsy and never actually terribly accurate. So maybe it's reporting variability in your heart rate, but it may just be reporting variability in the phone's ability to detect your heart rate.
And, of course, third party HR straps have been available for iPhones for a while. I'd like to see them add an ANT+ sensor into the iPhone because I'm a cyclist and have ANT+ gear already, but if I went insane and wanted to use my expensive phone as a cheap bike computer, I could've bought an HR monitor without any problems.
I have an objective sense of smell, honest. I've had jeans that stunk. I've had these jeans smell bad. But after a while, the smell is gone. I have a partner and I work in mixed company, and I KNOW someone would've mentioned it if they were terrible. (My partner is honest; some of the people I work with are reasonably tactless.) I've been caught out at a restaurant unexpectedly in jeans that I was embarrassed to be wearing because they smelled terrible.
I shower and wear clean clothes and different jeans. If you held these up with any other pair I have, I doubt you'd notice a difference. They don't smell like laundry soap, but they don't smell like crap, either. Try it. You'll be surprised.
I've done this. I was working with a pair of raw denim jeans, and the advice is to not wash it until you've worn them for 6 months.
The first month is the worst, but after that, they stop smelling like anything at all. As long as you're not doing deep lunges in the summer sun while you're going commando, it's probably fine. Actually, even that might be fine.
Those jeans have gone their whole lives with only two full washes and that's it. They still look good and like I said, they don't smell like anything at all, even when you put your face up to them to test them. I think maybe we just have to get used to the thinking that we overwash EVERYTHING.
I might buy it if he took anything with him other than his brain. I greatly suspect that Oculus and Carmack will argue that he left ZeniMax with nothing except his know-how, and they can't own that, no matter how he came by it. He's just a clever guy. He re-invented everything in a different way when he got to Oculus, and that's that. Zenimax can use anything that Carmack left behind, but this is all new.
Maybe if we can't afford to treat the animals properly, we don't deserve to see them.
As we've all hashed it over several times in this story, keeping the animals in a tank that small is basically torture and significantly reduces their lifespan. There's no way to do it properly. We're killing them, and I'm sorry for the kids that don't get to see the animals, but let's be real here: if you've got enough money to travel to San Diego and pay the fee into SeaWorld, you probably have the scratch to go down to the docks and take a quick guided tour on a boat. Whale watching tours aren't actually that expensive, and they guarantee that you'll see whales that day or your money back.
It's not that there's no place for zoos in this world, it's that there's no place for badly run zoos that can't provide the facilities for the animals so that they live a decent life. Bird parks and petting zoos are all fine, but keeping an Orca in captivity is several orders of magnitude different.
True enough; intelligence is certainly not a specific measure of worth. The only reason it's worth bringing up in this case is because something that's smart understands how bad the situation is. I don't like it when bees die (and frankly, the issue of bee intelligence isn't solved either; they've got quite the vocabulary, and there's evidence of voting and democracy in hives), but I think on an individual level, they're likely unable to comprehend their situation. But I can't really prove that.:)
The research that we get from animals in captivity is usually useless, frankly. It's like trying to understand human behaviour by going to a jail. Even insects and fish are affected by this; I keep species of snails in my tank that have never been bred in captivity.
All you can learn from animals in captivity is how they behave in captivity.
I understand that the handlers and the scientists TRY. They really do. But more often than not, they also quit and move on because they can't handle the conditions the animals are in, or they're fired because they're becoming a nuisance for advocating for the animals. Just read any of the stories that have come out of MarineLand in Ontario. It's brutal. Honestly, completely brutal.
Really, I think what you want are marine parks rather than zoos. It's really just not feasible to give these animals enough space to move inside the boundaries of a land-based park. It's insane, really, if you contemplate it. This is a creature that's intelligent and migrates thousands of kilometres a year. Even if you remove the migration component, the amount of space you need to not drive it insane is unbelievable. They're animals that need to be in motion. We just can't provide it to them.
Maybe what we should be doing instead is designating zones of the ocean as inviolable and make sure that we protect the animals and water in those zones as best we can. Then if you want to go to the 'zoo', you take a tour ship out. This is how the safari model works, more or less, and those give a reason for the local people to take care of the area rather than exploit it.
No, I think that planning and collaborating count as 'highly intelligent'. Human children are bad at nearly all the things that were mentioned (long term planning, teaching, general communication, etc.)
Our inability to measure animal intelligence by our human-centric values doesn't indicate that they're not intelligent, it indicates that we know less than we think about how to quantify that sort of thing. By nearly every measure, those orcas would find us USELESS in the water. Orca scientists would lament our ability to think effectively in 3 dimensions and do all sorts of things that they're cognitively evolved to do.
Human hubris keeps us from recognising that other animals have exceptional intelligence because we're so concerned about measuring their abilities against ours. Our accomplishments as a species are undeniable, but to a certain extent, our dominance on the planet is a bit of an accident of timing and luck. If you've read Guns, Germs and Steel, you'll understand the parallel I'm trying to draw--sometimes the winner isn't necessarily the smartest or best, but the ones that had some luck early on and have circumstance on their side.
In any case, we almost certainly agree that keeping animals of this level of intelligence--whether we agree precisely on the degree or not--in captivity is immoral. It's effectively torture and cruelty; however you measure human intelligence, we should be able to recognise THAT.
I lived in Alberta most of my life. I've lived with and around oil companies for most of my life. My view is clear. I know how much money goes to those companies, and how significantly my own government bends over backwards for them. The penalties that they face for environmental damage are a pittance, and it's actually the case that they've covered less of the cost than they need to for even a basic recovery. Canadian tax payers are on the hook for significant cleanup costs that can't be recovered from companies for one reason or another.
Your ad hominem attacks and sad cries of 'indoctrination' and 'bias' don't have any particular effect on me; who are you, anyway?:/
I disagree that using other factories is somehow a better measure. The conditions that lead to suicide are multi-faceted, and a job is only going to be part of the equation, one way or another. The population at large is a good baseline--is a worker's life in one of these factory's better or worse than the general populace, all things be being equal? If the suicide rate deviates strongly above that baseline, then there's probably a fundamental problem with the factory. If the rate is no higher, than you're probably seeing the normal tragedy (normal tragedy, yeesh--but it is) of life in that society. If it's significantly lower, you're probably seeing that the life of that worker is better than the populace. They've got more factors that are keeping them alive than the people outside those walls. That some factories are better than others merely speaks to those situations being better than life without those jobs. It's exemplary either way, honestly.
If the plant is killing them slowly with leukaemia, maybe they'd be better off if they did?
Seriously though, the suicide rate at Apple contracted Foxconn plants was blown way out of proportion. The suicide rate at the plants was LOWER than in the general population. Try to have a little perspective. People commit suicide all the time. It's tragic, and doesn't usually have anything to do with the one specific job they were working at the time. As far as I know, Foxconn employees were never barred from quitting; if the conditions were that bad, they really could have left. Instead, many of them were disappointed that the maximum number of hours they could work was cut. (This is, by and large, a Chinese cultural thing. They believe that you should work hard and make a lot of money even if the job sucks because you can quit and take all that money with you. My Chinese half of the family is often recommending that I move to somewhere terrible and work for tonnes of money for a few years; they don't understand that I'd rather enjoy my job and make less.)
1) The big oil conspiracy is out in the open. They're out to make money, and they've relatively little regard for the environment at large and the long-term prospects for it. They only care insofar as the government forces them to. The penalties for violation are fairly minor. Large corporations rarely have a sense of long-term perspective, and the oil companies know that their long-term prospects are inherently limited (oil will eventually run out), so they need to make money now while people are still willing to buy it and they can get to it so easily. Big Oil subsidies in North America are well known. Somehow, they're still getting tax breaks and incentives from governments despite the massive profits.
2) The predictive power of the models isn't exact, but that doesn't mean it's not sufficient to act on. Long term climate analysis is hard, but for our purposes, the problem isn't intractable. Think about it this way: I can already predict the climate with sufficient fidelity to know what clothes I should be putting at the front of my closet in December of 2015. The fact that I won't know the day-to-day temperatures or whether there will be wildly anomalous days where it's freakishly warm aren't relevant: December of 2015 in Canada will be cold, like it always is. (I can't predict what it'll be like in 2050 just yet, but it's almost certainly still the case that it will be colder than July 2050.) The science is better than you think it is, I reckon.
3) Some of the catastrophes are somewhat beyond our ability to fix or adapt to, for a variety of reasons, and most of them have to do with greed or fundamental undermining of the system. If you're talking about ocean acidification, for instance, it's really hard to undo. Jellyfish are taking over the oceans because we've fundamentally overfished them and upended the ecology. We're likely to see the collapse of several fisheries, and those take a long time to recover. With the added pressure of climate change, we might not see those species recover, and that means a huge portion of the world will lose an essential protein source. We're doing incredible violence to a lot of systems, and it may have been possible for them to survive them well enough, but we're hitting them on a lot of levels simultaneously. If climate change due to CO2 emissionswere the ONLY problem, I might be a little less worried--we could plant more trees, or change our farming methods, etc.--but we're in a bad spot where we've given ourselves no room to manoeuvre. Technology and science will help, but only if we sit down and believe in what the science is telling us and move to fix the problem. Deluding ourselves into rejecting the problem out of hand means that it CAN'T be solved.
This seems almost certainly correct, and I think one additional step will be implemented, which is to try to deploy safety gear inside the car before the impact actually occurs. Airbags work well in preventing injury, but they require the impact to actually trigger the sensors before deploying, and so they have to deploy in fractions of a second, causing their own problems and injuries. If you've got half a second before the impact actually occurs, and you might be able to reduce the severity of the impact by starting the braking as soon as possible (a window of opportunity that humans can miss entirely, due to our slow-ass reflexes, relative to the speed of travel) the vehicle can additionally inflate the airbags and prepare the seats in such a way that the passengers take the least amount of damage. If you're trying to avoid a non-vehicle, then do what's necessary to avoid hitting that entity without guaranteeing the death of the vehicle passengers (like driving off a cliff), even if that means smashing into a wall.
The point of this exercise is to avoid hurting people, even at the expense of the vehicle itself. It's a meaningless exercise to try and decide which vehicle to destroy. If the technology inside the vehicles is good at preventing damage to the passengers, you can almost not care about anything else.
I think, honestly, that he IS that one-dimensional, and that's exactly what proselytizers kind of need to be. Any variation in his message stands to weaken it.
I don't actually believe in much of what he says, but I feel that, like many extremists, that he serves a really useful purpose from the perspective of philosophy. Most people won't adopt his views, but he serves to pull the middle over to his direction a bit and create a space where more of us can work. GNU/Linux wouldn't be the same without him, and he keeps the whole community a bit honest.
As he gets older, he'll be even more set in his ways. He can learn new tricks, but only within the confines of his philosophy. Fundamentally, I don't think he knows that trading freedom for convenience is something that people always do, in every society, and always have. Without that acknowledgement, he thinks that it's reasonable that perhaps everyone would rather go without a phone instead of give up a bit of theoretical freedom.
The iPad is still more convenient than a macbook Air, if you ask me. I do a lot of reading on mine, and there are a lot of apps that I prefer to actually being in a browser. My RSS reader is generally nicer than the stuff I have at a desktop machine, and I like flipboard and tumblr better on my iPad as well. I find that I rarely sit at my desktop at home anymore because my home computing life centres more around relaxing than doing.
I'm not going to write a novel on it (though people have written novels on their mobile phones using T9, so it's not like it's impossible), but I would say 90% of my personal emails are done on my iPad or iPhone.
But the thing is that every tool has its place, and the pundits have decided that a screwdriver should try to be a hammer. It's not that the iPad isn't a useful device, it's just that it's not the useful device that a bunch of other people said that it was. I don't think Apple has ever tried to tell you that it's going to be your desktop replacement--they just want it to be another tool in your box.
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Your anecdote doesn't really mean much. Apple has much better retention than other companies, and when you look at buying intention or people who have switched, the numbers do come out on Apple's side. It's nice that you and your wife have found things that work for you. When I borrowed a Nexus 4 for a week, I had to struggle to make it a week before I went back to my iPhone 4. I just couldn't find anything particularly redeeming about Android phones that I didn't get from my iPhone (other than the speed of a new phone, obviously, but any new phone would give me that; and the price).
You're assuming he means that they purchased the phones 'by accident' rather than what he probably intended, which is that they later had buyer's remorse and felt they'd made a mistake. He's deliberately blurring the meaning here, but he's almost certainly not claiming that people went home with phones and didn't realise until later that they weren't made by Apple.
Tim Cook is clearly trying to get across that he feels that these people bought these phones and then realised the error of their ways, not that they walked into stores, put money down, and only realised when they got home that they had Android phones instead of iPhones.
The distinction in this case is subtle because 'by mistake' usually does mean 'by accident', or 'unintentionally'. He's TRYING to be subtle here because he's almost certainly trying to make an allusion to their court cases and how Samsung made phones that really did look like iPhones for a while.
I also came up with this on my own; it's not a terribly complicated concept once you divide 365 by 7 and realise that you've only got a 1 (or 2) remainder.
The solution is also incredibly simple. The extra day is always New Years. It has no 'day of the week' name associated with it. If there's a leap year, you've got 2 days for holidays.
Done.
Congratulations, you've fallen into the trap that so many other techies here at /. have in thinking that this is consumer stuff targeted at YOU.
It isn't.
The people that this is aimed at don't even know what you're talking about when you say 'FTP'. They just want to move their files around easily and transparently. Now they can. They'll like that.
Take a look at the actual tech stuff if you want to gripe or be excited. But the consumer facing stuff will be really interesting to consumers. They like a bit of GUI change as long as it's not too drastic. (Apple isn't moving the buttons or anything, they're just making a few things more accessible and modifying the design a little; this isn't near the magnitude of the change to the Windows Desktop OS.)
Apple is very good at selling things to people. For non-essential goods, there is basically no company on the planet that's better at making money from consumers. What is small potatoes to you is a big upgrade to some. And it's free. That tends to smooth out any rough edges that crop up.
If all you do is read the Spec sheet, yeah, it was underpowered. The benchmarks bore it out as a legit flagship phone, though.
Remember, on paper, the iPhone 5s is 'only' dual core with 1GB of RAM, but if you look up the benchmarks on Anandtech, it clearly outperforms all comers. This is the magic of well designed and intentionally designed silicon. The Moto X was a little less off-the-shelf than its competitors in terms of components, and that showed in the actual performance.
But big numbers sell, I guess. It's a pity to me as an iPhone user that the Moto X didn't sell better. They were doing new and useful stuff with that phone. Instead, Apple is forced to compete primarily against Samsung, who clearly don't really know exactly what to do, but they're sure to do LOTS of it.
I'm friends with some artists, and the problem with Zazzle (and many other sites like them) is that actually stolen content gets submitted all the time, and they probably got sick of getting 1000 emails from an artist and all of that artist's fans for someone effectively stealing a design and submitting it as their own.
This guy doesn't have a leg to stand on, but it doesn't mean that nobody ever has a reason to complain. The reality is that the internet is a place where people try and pass things off as their own constantly. That's bad enough, but when someone starts making money off of your art--your original, actual art--it becomes really damaging to you. People start thinking YOUR design is the fake, even though it's the original. It sucks.
So yeah, this is lame and bit lazy, but not immediately responding to an infringement notice is also lame and lazy.
Remember, Apple bought Soundjam and released iTunes something like 6 months later.
Buying something that already exists is much faster than rolling your own, even if you COULD roll your own. It's probably worth Apple's time not just for licencing reasons but for software reasons as well.
I'm predicting that iTunes will be phased out over the next couple of years in favour of the Beats software. Everyone agrees at this point that iTunes has sort of run its course, and this will give Apple something to transition to. This will unify all of Apple's music service, and Apple can merge the App Store stuff together on the Mac and release a stand-alone iDevice app store for windows.
This is wild speculation on my part, I admit, but it makes so many things so much easier.
The headphones business is just a nice way to make sure the company is paying for itself right away. This is an acquisition that won't lose Apple any money over the short term, and will make their long-term prospects in the space a lot better.
Sony phones have had ANT+ built in for quite a while. I'm sure they'd be surprised to hear that they have a long way to catch up.
I've been able to take my heartrate on my iPhone 4 for a long time using the camera and the flash. The HR apps are plentiful and free. I haven't seen any evidence that the S5's HR monitor is, in fact, any better than that low-tech solution, or actually even reliable at all. Most of the reviews I read when it came out said that the HR monitor was clumsy and never actually terribly accurate. So maybe it's reporting variability in your heart rate, but it may just be reporting variability in the phone's ability to detect your heart rate.
And, of course, third party HR straps have been available for iPhones for a while. I'd like to see them add an ANT+ sensor into the iPhone because I'm a cyclist and have ANT+ gear already, but if I went insane and wanted to use my expensive phone as a cheap bike computer, I could've bought an HR monitor without any problems.
I have an objective sense of smell, honest. I've had jeans that stunk. I've had these jeans smell bad. But after a while, the smell is gone. I have a partner and I work in mixed company, and I KNOW someone would've mentioned it if they were terrible. (My partner is honest; some of the people I work with are reasonably tactless.) I've been caught out at a restaurant unexpectedly in jeans that I was embarrassed to be wearing because they smelled terrible.
I shower and wear clean clothes and different jeans. If you held these up with any other pair I have, I doubt you'd notice a difference. They don't smell like laundry soap, but they don't smell like crap, either. Try it. You'll be surprised.
I've done this. I was working with a pair of raw denim jeans, and the advice is to not wash it until you've worn them for 6 months.
The first month is the worst, but after that, they stop smelling like anything at all. As long as you're not doing deep lunges in the summer sun while you're going commando, it's probably fine. Actually, even that might be fine.
Those jeans have gone their whole lives with only two full washes and that's it. They still look good and like I said, they don't smell like anything at all, even when you put your face up to them to test them. I think maybe we just have to get used to the thinking that we overwash EVERYTHING.
I had one of those 3D headsets, and I used it with Descent. It was terrifying. One of the best game experiences I've ever had.
I'd probably grab Descent and an Oculus if a proper reboot happened.
I might buy it if he took anything with him other than his brain. I greatly suspect that Oculus and Carmack will argue that he left ZeniMax with nothing except his know-how, and they can't own that, no matter how he came by it. He's just a clever guy. He re-invented everything in a different way when he got to Oculus, and that's that. Zenimax can use anything that Carmack left behind, but this is all new.
Maybe if we can't afford to treat the animals properly, we don't deserve to see them.
As we've all hashed it over several times in this story, keeping the animals in a tank that small is basically torture and significantly reduces their lifespan. There's no way to do it properly. We're killing them, and I'm sorry for the kids that don't get to see the animals, but let's be real here: if you've got enough money to travel to San Diego and pay the fee into SeaWorld, you probably have the scratch to go down to the docks and take a quick guided tour on a boat. Whale watching tours aren't actually that expensive, and they guarantee that you'll see whales that day or your money back.
It's not that there's no place for zoos in this world, it's that there's no place for badly run zoos that can't provide the facilities for the animals so that they live a decent life. Bird parks and petting zoos are all fine, but keeping an Orca in captivity is several orders of magnitude different.
True enough; intelligence is certainly not a specific measure of worth. The only reason it's worth bringing up in this case is because something that's smart understands how bad the situation is. I don't like it when bees die (and frankly, the issue of bee intelligence isn't solved either; they've got quite the vocabulary, and there's evidence of voting and democracy in hives), but I think on an individual level, they're likely unable to comprehend their situation. But I can't really prove that. :)
So, yeah. We agree.
The research that we get from animals in captivity is usually useless, frankly. It's like trying to understand human behaviour by going to a jail. Even insects and fish are affected by this; I keep species of snails in my tank that have never been bred in captivity.
All you can learn from animals in captivity is how they behave in captivity.
I understand that the handlers and the scientists TRY. They really do. But more often than not, they also quit and move on because they can't handle the conditions the animals are in, or they're fired because they're becoming a nuisance for advocating for the animals. Just read any of the stories that have come out of MarineLand in Ontario. It's brutal. Honestly, completely brutal.
Really, I think what you want are marine parks rather than zoos. It's really just not feasible to give these animals enough space to move inside the boundaries of a land-based park. It's insane, really, if you contemplate it. This is a creature that's intelligent and migrates thousands of kilometres a year. Even if you remove the migration component, the amount of space you need to not drive it insane is unbelievable. They're animals that need to be in motion. We just can't provide it to them.
Maybe what we should be doing instead is designating zones of the ocean as inviolable and make sure that we protect the animals and water in those zones as best we can. Then if you want to go to the 'zoo', you take a tour ship out. This is how the safari model works, more or less, and those give a reason for the local people to take care of the area rather than exploit it.
No, I think that planning and collaborating count as 'highly intelligent'. Human children are bad at nearly all the things that were mentioned (long term planning, teaching, general communication, etc.)
Our inability to measure animal intelligence by our human-centric values doesn't indicate that they're not intelligent, it indicates that we know less than we think about how to quantify that sort of thing. By nearly every measure, those orcas would find us USELESS in the water. Orca scientists would lament our ability to think effectively in 3 dimensions and do all sorts of things that they're cognitively evolved to do.
Human hubris keeps us from recognising that other animals have exceptional intelligence because we're so concerned about measuring their abilities against ours. Our accomplishments as a species are undeniable, but to a certain extent, our dominance on the planet is a bit of an accident of timing and luck. If you've read Guns, Germs and Steel, you'll understand the parallel I'm trying to draw--sometimes the winner isn't necessarily the smartest or best, but the ones that had some luck early on and have circumstance on their side.
In any case, we almost certainly agree that keeping animals of this level of intelligence--whether we agree precisely on the degree or not--in captivity is immoral. It's effectively torture and cruelty; however you measure human intelligence, we should be able to recognise THAT.
Well done, chopping off the subordinate clause in that sentence. Here's the whole thing again. See if you can get to the end of it all in one go.
"They're out to make money, and they've relatively little regard for the environment at large and the long-term prospects for it."
I lived in Alberta most of my life. I've lived with and around oil companies for most of my life. My view is clear. I know how much money goes to those companies, and how significantly my own government bends over backwards for them. The penalties that they face for environmental damage are a pittance, and it's actually the case that they've covered less of the cost than they need to for even a basic recovery. Canadian tax payers are on the hook for significant cleanup costs that can't be recovered from companies for one reason or another.
Your ad hominem attacks and sad cries of 'indoctrination' and 'bias' don't have any particular effect on me; who are you, anyway? :/
I disagree that using other factories is somehow a better measure. The conditions that lead to suicide are multi-faceted, and a job is only going to be part of the equation, one way or another. The population at large is a good baseline--is a worker's life in one of these factory's better or worse than the general populace, all things be being equal? If the suicide rate deviates strongly above that baseline, then there's probably a fundamental problem with the factory. If the rate is no higher, than you're probably seeing the normal tragedy (normal tragedy, yeesh--but it is) of life in that society. If it's significantly lower, you're probably seeing that the life of that worker is better than the populace. They've got more factors that are keeping them alive than the people outside those walls. That some factories are better than others merely speaks to those situations being better than life without those jobs. It's exemplary either way, honestly.
If the plant is killing them slowly with leukaemia, maybe they'd be better off if they did?
Seriously though, the suicide rate at Apple contracted Foxconn plants was blown way out of proportion. The suicide rate at the plants was LOWER than in the general population. Try to have a little perspective. People commit suicide all the time. It's tragic, and doesn't usually have anything to do with the one specific job they were working at the time. As far as I know, Foxconn employees were never barred from quitting; if the conditions were that bad, they really could have left. Instead, many of them were disappointed that the maximum number of hours they could work was cut. (This is, by and large, a Chinese cultural thing. They believe that you should work hard and make a lot of money even if the job sucks because you can quit and take all that money with you. My Chinese half of the family is often recommending that I move to somewhere terrible and work for tonnes of money for a few years; they don't understand that I'd rather enjoy my job and make less.)
1) The big oil conspiracy is out in the open. They're out to make money, and they've relatively little regard for the environment at large and the long-term prospects for it. They only care insofar as the government forces them to. The penalties for violation are fairly minor. Large corporations rarely have a sense of long-term perspective, and the oil companies know that their long-term prospects are inherently limited (oil will eventually run out), so they need to make money now while people are still willing to buy it and they can get to it so easily. Big Oil subsidies in North America are well known. Somehow, they're still getting tax breaks and incentives from governments despite the massive profits.
2) The predictive power of the models isn't exact, but that doesn't mean it's not sufficient to act on. Long term climate analysis is hard, but for our purposes, the problem isn't intractable. Think about it this way: I can already predict the climate with sufficient fidelity to know what clothes I should be putting at the front of my closet in December of 2015. The fact that I won't know the day-to-day temperatures or whether there will be wildly anomalous days where it's freakishly warm aren't relevant: December of 2015 in Canada will be cold, like it always is. (I can't predict what it'll be like in 2050 just yet, but it's almost certainly still the case that it will be colder than July 2050.) The science is better than you think it is, I reckon.
3) Some of the catastrophes are somewhat beyond our ability to fix or adapt to, for a variety of reasons, and most of them have to do with greed or fundamental undermining of the system. If you're talking about ocean acidification, for instance, it's really hard to undo. Jellyfish are taking over the oceans because we've fundamentally overfished them and upended the ecology. We're likely to see the collapse of several fisheries, and those take a long time to recover. With the added pressure of climate change, we might not see those species recover, and that means a huge portion of the world will lose an essential protein source. We're doing incredible violence to a lot of systems, and it may have been possible for them to survive them well enough, but we're hitting them on a lot of levels simultaneously. If climate change due to CO2 emissionswere the ONLY problem, I might be a little less worried--we could plant more trees, or change our farming methods, etc.--but we're in a bad spot where we've given ourselves no room to manoeuvre. Technology and science will help, but only if we sit down and believe in what the science is telling us and move to fix the problem. Deluding ourselves into rejecting the problem out of hand means that it CAN'T be solved.
This seems almost certainly correct, and I think one additional step will be implemented, which is to try to deploy safety gear inside the car before the impact actually occurs. Airbags work well in preventing injury, but they require the impact to actually trigger the sensors before deploying, and so they have to deploy in fractions of a second, causing their own problems and injuries. If you've got half a second before the impact actually occurs, and you might be able to reduce the severity of the impact by starting the braking as soon as possible (a window of opportunity that humans can miss entirely, due to our slow-ass reflexes, relative to the speed of travel) the vehicle can additionally inflate the airbags and prepare the seats in such a way that the passengers take the least amount of damage.
If you're trying to avoid a non-vehicle, then do what's necessary to avoid hitting that entity without guaranteeing the death of the vehicle passengers (like driving off a cliff), even if that means smashing into a wall.
The point of this exercise is to avoid hurting people, even at the expense of the vehicle itself. It's a meaningless exercise to try and decide which vehicle to destroy. If the technology inside the vehicles is good at preventing damage to the passengers, you can almost not care about anything else.
I think, honestly, that he IS that one-dimensional, and that's exactly what proselytizers kind of need to be. Any variation in his message stands to weaken it.
I don't actually believe in much of what he says, but I feel that, like many extremists, that he serves a really useful purpose from the perspective of philosophy. Most people won't adopt his views, but he serves to pull the middle over to his direction a bit and create a space where more of us can work. GNU/Linux wouldn't be the same without him, and he keeps the whole community a bit honest.
As he gets older, he'll be even more set in his ways. He can learn new tricks, but only within the confines of his philosophy. Fundamentally, I don't think he knows that trading freedom for convenience is something that people always do, in every society, and always have. Without that acknowledgement, he thinks that it's reasonable that perhaps everyone would rather go without a phone instead of give up a bit of theoretical freedom.
The iPad is still more convenient than a macbook Air, if you ask me. I do a lot of reading on mine, and there are a lot of apps that I prefer to actually being in a browser. My RSS reader is generally nicer than the stuff I have at a desktop machine, and I like flipboard and tumblr better on my iPad as well. I find that I rarely sit at my desktop at home anymore because my home computing life centres more around relaxing than doing.
I'm not going to write a novel on it (though people have written novels on their mobile phones using T9, so it's not like it's impossible), but I would say 90% of my personal emails are done on my iPad or iPhone.
But the thing is that every tool has its place, and the pundits have decided that a screwdriver should try to be a hammer. It's not that the iPad isn't a useful device, it's just that it's not the useful device that a bunch of other people said that it was. I don't think Apple has ever tried to tell you that it's going to be your desktop replacement--they just want it to be another tool in your box.