I can imagine how this went about a century ago...

Your assertion that automobiles will take over fails to take into account one of the major reasons we have such a large horse industry - people like to ride horses. They like to buy new horses, take care of old horses, and do stupid tricks with horses. At most, an automobile would be a convenience feature for the daily commute, but so long as people get an adrenaline rush when they ride horses at a full gallop, this will not change.

Certainly another possibility. Emphasis on "may have" in my original post. :)

Probably this one?

“I have no special talents. I am only passionately curious.” - Albert Einstein.

But you know, his subjectively modest opinion of his own relative intelligence, doesn't disprove that his brain had unusual features which may have provided certain advantages. Saying "anybody who works hard and has a good sense of curiosity has the potential to be an Einstein" is a nice thought, but that doesn't actually make it true.

Good question. This is where trends actually become useful. During the height of the flooding, we had four topics trending on the top 10.. #yycflood, #abflood, Calgary, and Alberta.

I "manned" #yycflood and #abflood long into the night, passing along important information and answering any questions I saw anyone asking (eg "Is the tapwater safe to drink?" was a continually asked question, and monitored situation, all night). It was an absolute lifeline of information.

Calgary Police were incredibly responsive on it as well which was amazing to see. Somebody asks a question and everybody can see the answer. And our kickass Mayor Nenshi (who was a rockstar before, but is now a deity) was tweeting status updates from a helicopter. After he was awake for 43 hours straight, #nap4nenshi started trending. He complied. How's that for community feedback? :)

You're correct of course about it being primarily useful as a self-organizing tool, requiring a functioning internet to work, but I will dispute you on one point there; it's not (necessarily) the first thing to go down. Tons of people from areas with power outages were still using their cells to communicate. But then again, I suppose it depends on the particulars of your cell provider's infrastructure.

That's why I started my post with "In theory".

Ditto for the recent floods in Calgary, Twitter was an absolute godsend. I felt like I had never really USED Twitter before that day.

Obviously you're only going to get so much from your personal feed, but just hop on a popular hashtag for a major event and suddenly you're reading 1000s of people describing conditions in real-time around the city. Just incredible. Checking the mainstream news was an afterthought... a formality. Twitter was moving 100x faster (it helped that the police and mayor were using it heavily).

In fact the police used it so heavily that their account was blocked temporarily. Funnily enough at the time, one thing we were thinking was how useful it would be if Twitter actually had formal support for emergency communications.

GTA4 was buggy as shit when it first came out on PC. Seriously, probably the buggiest AAA title I've even seen.

So no, I don't think the delay is (primarily, anyway) to make it "refined and bug free"... it's because it's so much easier to pirate on PC, ergo a simultaneous release would hurt console sales.

Simply stated, X number of people would download the Skidrow crack instead of rushing out to buy the XBOX or PS version, where X is some value greater than zero.

Oh yes. Your poor, poor karma. Because Slashdot adores Apple and hates Android. What a brave, bold stance you have taken.

Are you fucking high? Or just playing the old cliched "I know I'm going to get downvoted for this, but..." karma whoring trick?

In theory, yes.

From what I understand, The secure region of the A7 chip that the fingerprint profile is stored on has a WRITE function, and an AUTHENTICATE function. There is no READ function.

So yeah... because it is protected like this at the hardware level, you're not getting that information out again, period (short of physically breaking into the NVRAM with some sort of forensics tech).

So that makes this exactly the same?

As numerous people have pointed out, ATRIX used an optical scanner, on the back of the phone, that you had to swipe across with your finger.

As opposed to a capacitance scanner, built right into the home button, that you don't need to swipe, just touch like you always do.

Night and day.

Nope.

Apple's scanner measures capacitance, not optics. So you need to precisely mimic the electrical conductivity signature, not just the physical structure.

Should be interesting to see how easy/hard it is to fake out.

The only valid concern is whether or not someone can take an existing copy of your fingerprint and gain access to the device.

Considering the fingerprint scanner on the new iPhone uses capacitance (ie, minute differences in electrical conductivity) instead of optical imaging, it will be very interesting to see how "hackable" this is.

I don't have many devices lying around that can simulate the electrical conductivity signature of a fingerprint, do you?

Of course it's technically possible, but the chicken littles running around squawking about how easy it will be to fake this out are pretty hilarious.

Why must we continue to flog dead horses?

Says the guy flogging George Lucas in his signature? ;)

Did you just seriously compare your six year-old's daydreaming, to a 57-page proposal document written by the guy behind SpaceX and Tesla?

Maybe if you actually read the aforementioned paper, you'd have a fucking clue about "why he thinks this can be done", instead of asininely comparing it to "dreaming".

trying to separately store and analyze each separate event takes vastly more resources than doing periodic static analysis of the contents of your email folder

Scanning the 10,000 pieces of email in my inbox, over and over again, is more efficient than tracking each individual piece as it comes in? That doesn't really follow.