You forget that your brain is a biological mechanism and does not have I/O that permits download or upload of all its data and business logic. It is quite possible that something with the information processing capability of the human brain can only exist biologically in this universe and that said I/O is impossible.
So, no, not an indicator. Apples and oranges.
People on slashdot, a large proportion of whom are computer scientists/software programmers of some kind, start with the assumption that ANYTHING is reproducible in software.
It's an amusing variation on the "when all you have is a hammer every problem looks like a nail" meme.
Hmm... I'd rather think homicides would skyrocket. I mean, today, if you're fed up with your parents, you can think "one day, you'll be dead", but what can you do when they achieved immortality?
But you've got a lot more to lose if you're caught and face the death penalty or even worse a life sentence
An individual ordinary life is not interesting in terms of the big picture,
Who cares about the big picture or The Few Great Men version of history? This is all about old people feeling better and young people having access to the records of loved ones.
For instance, I don't think my pet cat is ever going to amount to anything on the world historical scene, but I would love to have a living record of him so that I could access it when he's dead in twenty years time.
I expect to bore my grandchildren with a couple of stories from when I was a lad (Star Wars first time 'round, 9-11 attacks, Princess Di's death, the moon landings,
etc)
Unless you were a direct witness to 9/11, the death of Di or the moon landings, your stories will be irrelevant, as there will be plenty of archived footage of those events that your grandkids can look up.
Already done in a Charlie Stross novel... people are walking the streets but appear as pixellated blurs... Anonymity in the crowd taken to the extreme.....
Sounds like the scramble suits in Philip K Dick's A Scanner Darkly.
Why in the hell is induction charging not a standard feature for phones yet? Battery life would be less of an issue if we could just set the phone down on a charge pad and not worry about having to plug the thing in all the time. I'd be more than happy to have several charge pads around the house and at the office.
Hell, toothbrushes have had this technology for years.
Maybe I'm missing something, but don't the charging pads have to get their electricity from the mains somehow? It seems like a very marginal saving in time and convenience.
I've got an HTC with a fixed battery, whereas my previous phone had a removeable one. However, if you're going to carry around a spare battery in a case (as I did) it's just as easy to get an external battery/charger and carry that around. Plus, you don't have to re-start your phone.
That doesn't help if the internal battery dies or becomes unable to hold a decent charge, of course, but I assume you would be able to claim under guarantee if that happened.
the fact that the majority of purchasers of the S3 were iPhone 4 owners who finished their contract and the iPhone 5 was delayed
I don't believe that for a second. Most existing iPhone users would just hold onto their phone a bit longer, or do your contracts mean that after 2 years you have to give the phone back regardless?
A stylus on a small screen can be very useful for doing things like handwriting notes or drawing smiley faces, or even just accurately clicking on web links.
Soon Apple's target market will be the empty set. Some aging nerdy kid with fadey jeans... oh wait, the kid switched to button down shirts years ago. And those Apple chicks are all getting wrinkles.
In case you hadn't noticed, when hipsters grow old and sensible, there's always a new generation of kids with whacky tastes in music, clothes, bodily mutilation and facial hair to replace them. Same goes for the guys too.
Plastic body? How about the far better screen, processor, ram, feature set (NFC, Bluetooth 4), external SD card, better sound quality.
Shit give me a plastic body with those features any day.
It just means you're pretty much forced to buy a back protector for the phone, but I suppose most people do anyway so it's no biggie. Personally, I went for an HTC because it looks and feels nicer, and gives you some hope of it not disintegrating if you drop it.
I've never understood the need to have a phone last weeks on a single charge. Have people evolved beyond the need for sleep? After all, it seems like it's the perfect time to charge your phone. Heck, I always charged my dumbphones every night anyways - I never even bothered trying to run it for weeks.
The problem with smartphones is that with any significant usage, the battery doesn't even last all day. I carry a spare battery and emergency battery charger with me most of the time. If I turn on (say) GPS and/or Bluetooth I can practically watch the battery level indicator moving down in real time.
I know that if you turn everything off and just make occasional phone calls a smartphone's battery life is OK, but then it's not being used as a smartphone.
Actually, it is only fleecing if customers aren't willing to pay the price asked.... If happy customers pay the retail price it's just good business!
That's silly. Customers are by definition willing to pay the price, or else they wouldn't be customers. That doesn't mean they're not being ripped off.
I can't (in normal use) see the individual pixels on my boring old 1368 x 768 15" laptop at home, so I seriously doubt I'd be able to on a phone with a 5" screen.
"My baseless claim contradicts your baseless claim" != "informative".
At least in the UK most smartphone users are on 2 year contracts, paying quite a high monthly fee to get sensible data allowances. So almost everyone renews their phone on a "free" upgrade every 2 years.
Obviously, if you're a real fanboy/girl you can upgrade your phone once a year with each new version, but that works out to be relatively expensive (although high end phones do seem to depreciate quite slowly).
The only thing I really want for mu S3 is wireless charging
Until someone provides a Tesla style source of wireless electricity, there's no such thing as wireless charging. Plugging a charging mat/dock/whatever into the mains and then resting your phone on top of that is not wireless charging.
I mean, I've got a battery back up charger that charges my phone wirelessly if necessary, but I still have to charge the battery back up from the mains.
What is the big deal about having to plug your phone in to charge it? Is it just that it's so uncool to have a micro USB slot spoiling the phone's sleek lines?
What about S2 owners? What's your advice for them?
Throw away your ludicrously old-fashioned phone immediately and buy the new shiny phone before you lose all your friends, your wife runs off with the milkman (who has an S4 already) and your kids sue you for mental anguish caused by being unfashionable.
Slashdot Mirror
the fact that things are stacked in the house's favor and that the house keeps it that way is dubious ethically speaking
It is precisely as dubious ethically speaking as a car manufacturer selling cars at a profit instead of at cost. It's called capitalism.
Everyone's life is important to them, fuckbag. There is no such thing as an unimportant life.
You forget that your brain is a biological mechanism and does not have I/O that permits download or upload of all its data and business logic. It is quite possible that something with the information processing capability of the human brain can only exist biologically in this universe and that said I/O is impossible.
So, no, not an indicator. Apples and oranges.
People on slashdot, a large proportion of whom are computer scientists/software programmers of some kind, start with the assumption that ANYTHING is reproducible in software.
It's an amusing variation on the "when all you have is a hammer every problem looks like a nail" meme.
Hmm... I'd rather think homicides would skyrocket. I mean, today, if you're fed up with your parents, you can think "one day, you'll be dead", but what can you do when they achieved immortality?
But you've got a lot more to lose if you're caught and face the death penalty or even worse a life sentence
Death will be vanquished within the next couple of centuries, I'm sure, but that won't necessarily be a blessing.
Yeah sure, and we'll have Artificial Intelligence, FTL/time travel and limitless energy by then too.
An individual ordinary life is not interesting in terms of the big picture,
Who cares about the big picture or The Few Great Men version of history? This is all about old people feeling better and young people having access to the records of loved ones.
For instance, I don't think my pet cat is ever going to amount to anything on the world historical scene, but I would love to have a living record of him so that I could access it when he's dead in twenty years time.
This will appeal most to the boomers who refuse to get old or die.
Anyone wanting to get old and/or die is insane.
Refusing to accept the inevitable is also insane. We are all going to die, hopefully we'll have the chance to grow old first.
I know people like Ray Kurzweil like to think that in twenty years time we'll have cracked immortality but that's just magical thinking.
I expect to bore my grandchildren with a couple of stories from when I was a lad (Star Wars first time 'round, 9-11 attacks, Princess Di's death, the moon landings, etc)
Unless you were a direct witness to 9/11, the death of Di or the moon landings, your stories will be irrelevant, as there will be plenty of archived footage of those events that your grandkids can look up.
Already done in a Charlie Stross novel... people are walking the streets but appear as pixellated blurs... Anonymity in the crowd taken to the extreme... ..
Sounds like the scramble suits in Philip K Dick's A Scanner Darkly.
Why in the hell is induction charging not a standard feature for phones yet? Battery life would be less of an issue if we could just set the phone down on a charge pad and not worry about having to plug the thing in all the time. I'd be more than happy to have several charge pads around the house and at the office.
Hell, toothbrushes have had this technology for years.
Maybe I'm missing something, but don't the charging pads have to get their electricity from the mains somehow? It seems like a very marginal saving in time and convenience.
That doesn't help if the internal battery dies or becomes unable to hold a decent charge, of course, but I assume you would be able to claim under guarantee if that happened.
the fact that the majority of purchasers of the S3 were iPhone 4 owners who finished their contract and the iPhone 5 was delayed
I don't believe that for a second. Most existing iPhone users would just hold onto their phone a bit longer, or do your contracts mean that after 2 years you have to give the phone back regardless?
Who cares? The older versions of Android don't suddenly stop working when Google release a new one.
Lucky for you there's a statute of limitations on being an obnoxious little twat.
I know, I know...I'm old.
Soon Apple's target market will be the empty set. Some aging nerdy kid with fadey jeans... oh wait, the kid switched to button down shirts years ago. And those Apple chicks are all getting wrinkles.
In case you hadn't noticed, when hipsters grow old and sensible, there's always a new generation of kids with whacky tastes in music, clothes, bodily mutilation and facial hair to replace them. Same goes for the guys too.
Plastic body? How about the far better screen, processor, ram, feature set (NFC, Bluetooth 4), external SD card, better sound quality.
Shit give me a plastic body with those features any day.
It just means you're pretty much forced to buy a back protector for the phone, but I suppose most people do anyway so it's no biggie. Personally, I went for an HTC because it looks and feels nicer, and gives you some hope of it not disintegrating if you drop it.
I've never understood the need to have a phone last weeks on a single charge. Have people evolved beyond the need for sleep? After all, it seems like it's the perfect time to charge your phone. Heck, I always charged my dumbphones every night anyways - I never even bothered trying to run it for weeks.
The problem with smartphones is that with any significant usage, the battery doesn't even last all day. I carry a spare battery and emergency battery charger with me most of the time. If I turn on (say) GPS and/or Bluetooth I can practically watch the battery level indicator moving down in real time.
I know that if you turn everything off and just make occasional phone calls a smartphone's battery life is OK, but then it's not being used as a smartphone.
Actually, it is only fleecing if customers aren't willing to pay the price asked.... If happy customers pay the retail price it's just good business!
That's silly. Customers are by definition willing to pay the price, or else they wouldn't be customers. That doesn't mean they're not being ripped off.
I can't (in normal use) see the individual pixels on my boring old 1368 x 768 15" laptop at home, so I seriously doubt I'd be able to on a phone with a 5" screen.
Note to mods:
"My baseless claim contradicts your baseless claim" != "informative".
At least in the UK most smartphone users are on 2 year contracts, paying quite a high monthly fee to get sensible data allowances. So almost everyone renews their phone on a "free" upgrade every 2 years.
Obviously, if you're a real fanboy/girl you can upgrade your phone once a year with each new version, but that works out to be relatively expensive (although high end phones do seem to depreciate quite slowly).
The only thing I really want for mu S3 is wireless charging
Until someone provides a Tesla style source of wireless electricity, there's no such thing as wireless charging. Plugging a charging mat/dock/whatever into the mains and then resting your phone on top of that is not wireless charging.
I mean, I've got a battery back up charger that charges my phone wirelessly if necessary, but I still have to charge the battery back up from the mains.
What is the big deal about having to plug your phone in to charge it? Is it just that it's so uncool to have a micro USB slot spoiling the phone's sleek lines?
I just couldn't be bothered, so i bought a nokia lumia 920 instead, and while WP8 has its problems, i'm very happy with the phone.
Blasphemy! Blasphemy! Burn the witch!
What about S2 owners? What's your advice for them?
Throw away your ludicrously old-fashioned phone immediately and buy the new shiny phone before you lose all your friends, your wife runs off with the milkman (who has an S4 already) and your kids sue you for mental anguish caused by being unfashionable.
Might wipe the S1 and give it to my kid for her birthday. I feel a bit guilty at giving her a hand-me-down, but it still looks and works good as new.
dude, you can't buy your daughter a birthday present? "daddy, daddy, I really want your old crap for my birthday!"
He didn't say he was only going to give her his old phone for her birthday. No doubt she'll get a Ferrari, stable of ponies and a black Amex card too.