You still have to have the phone on you.

Yeah, but just because you have your phone on you, it doesn't mean it's as convenient to use as a watch. When I go running, I've usually got my phone strapped to my upper arm. It's difficult to see the screen or take an action compared with if I could just glance at my wrist. The watch also has a heart rate monitor.

My odds on winning the lottery for hundreds of millions of dollars, and buying a ticket on a Soyuz to the Space Station are *vastly* better than your odds of catching ebola.

For that matter, my odds of getting killed when someone "looses control" of their car and jumps the sidewalk are zillions of times higher than catching ebola.

Oh... and I work not a few hundred yearas from where one of the nurses that was suspected of having it was sent.

                    mark, in the home of the of the terrified and stupid

Cheer up, my friends said, things could be worse. So I cheered up, and, sure enough, they got worse.

                mark "if I am depressed, it is for good and sufficent reasons, and if I wasn't depressed, I wouldn't be facing reality"*

* copyright, me, 1983

Legal:? Last week, I heard a speech by Vint Cerf, and he says the next iteration of google car will NOT HAVE A GAS OR BREAK PEDDLE, OR A STEERING WHEEL AT ALL.

              mark

I wonder if there's a longer term strategy to start migrating devices like the MacBook Air over to their A-series CPUs, instead of Intel.

They have undoubtedly got internal prototypes of a MacBook Air running OS X on their own processors. And their development toolchain and libraries are merging iOS and OS X more and more every year. This year, there were a couple of WWDC talks specifically about sharing code between the two platforms.

I think it's fairly obvious that the technology stack is ready both on the software and hardware side. It's just switching architectures isn't just about whether you can, it's about when the best time is to maximise chances of success. When they moved to Intel, they could supply an emulation layer to run older applications. That won't work as well this time around because it will be a lot slower. So they will need to push developers hard to port their software, and their best tool for doing that - the Mac App Store - isn't a huge success.

One thing they've been doing in their latest hardware designs is supplying two chips that are used in different circumstances. Surfing the web? Use the low power GPU. Playing a game? Switch to the high power GPU. Need to detect orientation? Use the low power accelerometer. Need accurate movement information? Use the high power accelerometer.

They could conceivably do this with their laptops. Ship an Intel co-processor for running things like Photoshop that haven't been ported, and switch it off when you're only running ARM64-only applications for better battery life. It would raise manufacturing costs, but it would ease the transition and Apple might be willing to take the hit on it for that reason. And they just added a feature to point out applications that hog battery to the end user last year. They are making this visible for a reason.

Aside from their computer lineup, the other piece of the puzzle is Apple TV. They've already got the makings of a very successful games console. They have a set-top box running iOS, CPUs and GPUs that can handle good quality games, dedicated controllers, a large games library, and an online distribution channel. Their current hardware is underpowered, but drop an iPad Air 2's internals into an Apple TV box and they'd have a very successful console.

Apple seem to be pushing their mobile CPUs forward quite fast - they're also way ahead of the curve in adopting 64-bit ARM. I wonder if there's a longer term strategy to start migrating devices like the MacBook Air over to their A-series CPUs, instead of Intel. That could tie things together quite nicely for them.

As others of that culture were. Um, guys, is it unreasonable of me to not assume that they burnt them due to plague, but rather that they were burnt down by invaders, and there was no one left to live there?

                mark

Google car ain't going anywhere.

Last week, we had an IPv6 transition seminar where I work, and the keynote speaker was none other than Vint Cerf.

His title of "Internet evangelist" is right - sorta like, I dunno, Pat Robertson.

He told us that the next iteration of google car will *NOT* have a steering wheel, brake, or gas peddle. I quote, "you might be in the back, drinking, or doing crosswords, and so you won't have the context if an alarm goes off, and you'll do the wrong thing".

Now, when I drive home, one road goes from two narrow lanes, with the center line going away to no center line, cars are parked on one side (there's a park on the other), and busses use this route. Go ahead, tell me that anyone's software can handle that road... and we're in a old, big suburb of Washington, DC.

                mark "and I don't want *you* to have a flying car, either, since you'd crash into my second-floor bedroom"

And George W. Bush and the Republicans, pandering to their funnymentalist base, close to stopped all stem cell research...

And killed Superman.

Hmmm, Dick cheney *does* seem to channel Lex Luthor....

              mark

My phrase "near absolute" in context to the rest of my writings could be interpreted in many different ways.

No, there's only one meaning: not quite, but almost, absolute. Now it's debatable exactly how near you have to be to qualify as "near absolute", but TubeSteak did a good job of pointing out that SCOTUS has several large failings in this area, which is enough to demonstrate that it is not near absolute.

The fact that you are still stuck on debating the semantics of my original post demonstrates you have nothing of actual value to contribute to the conversation.

You said something untrue and dumb. You are repeatedly insulting and dismissing people who point that out. The people who are pointing out your mistake are signal, you are noise. Learn to ignore your ego and admit when you are wrong and maybe you won't drag discussions into the sewer so much.

Your response demonstrates that you failed to read and understand my points.

No, he rightly took issue with your description of SCOTUS' interpretation of free speech as "near absolute", which simply isn't true. Your reply now is defending the much milder, different claim that free speech in the USA is better than in the UK. That may be so, but that doesn't make SCTOUS' interpretation of free speech "near absolute" by any means. This is the country that invented the concepts of a piece of code being a munition and a prime number being property, remember.

I'll give you one: preservatives.

Many years ago, at one job, I was drinking several cans of soda a day. One day, while eating lunch, I started thinking about the label: 1/10 of 1% preservative. So, 1% from drinking 10 cans... and a hundred cans, which might be one month, is a pound of preservative.....

No need for embalming when you go, you're already well-preserved.

                    mark

Easy: first build several *real* space stations, not "outposts in space", that serve the same way airports do, and use orbit-to-orbit ships - true spacegoing vessels. Once those are up, interplanetary travel is *much* cheaper.

Then we build the magelev launchers on the Moon....

                mark

Yeah, under Bush the W, the US prison population surpassed that of the Soviet Union's prisons at their worst under Stalin.

But now that populations are falling, I'd say the first things to go are the UNCONSTITUTIONAL PRIVATIZED PRISONS (aka slave labor shops).

          mark