Humans have started to heavily wreck the environment long before modern times, yes.

This is hardly surprising. Humans were neophytes almost everywhere and disrupted the local fauna and flora. They also multiplied like rabbits.

But this has become a global problem now, with more than 7 billion of us. The number of existing species is plummeting, just like the number of living animals of all species that are not our pets or cattle. We are the cause of a modern mass extinction event that is very similar to the handful of former extinction events, just that it happens much faster.

... like a bathtub full of saltwater is "the ocean".

These pings (including an unscheduled "incomplete" one that Inmarsat says is consistent with the hardware rebooting after a short power cut, which is to be expected when the fuel runs out on an airliner) as well as the few signals of the blackboxes are the ONLY hard evidence we have. It's far better than nothing though and we would have nothing if the Inmarsat hardware on that plane wouldn't have pinged the satellite with a data-less handshake every hour despite the airline not subscribing to the engine monitoring program (in which case we would have detailed data).

Everyone with the slightest scientific inkling should know which trail to follow here. And everyone with the slightest commercial inkling should know how to use that golden opportunity to get you into the news. And everyone with an axe to grind will know how to use that plane to further his case, whatever it may be.

Sometimes I think if the pilot of that plane cunningly vanished it along with the crew and the passengers and his own live just to spite his government and create a mystery he nearly perfectly succeeded. And without this tiny technical detail of the satellite handshakes we would have not the tiniest chance to ever find out what happened. Just imagine that. The perfect meme bomb.

Half of the iPhones in the last quarter were the first iPhone for the buyers and two thirds of the iPads were the first.

Apple is caught between their high-margin strategy and falling market share. The 5s/5c was a first try to do something but those were too similar to each other. Making the 5c cheaper would have eaten into the margins too much and making it crappier would have made it too crappy. So they have to make the "premium" version more premium and the budget version more different so it isn't just a cheaper iPhone.

I guess the 6s will have a sapphire screen, a 4.7" display with minimal bezels, an aluminum/ceramic case, the fingerprint sensor, a better camera and a faster SoC. The 6c will have a glass screen, a 5.x" display, larger bezels, a thicker plastic case, no sensor, a cheaper camera and a slower SoC (making it more of a phablet than a smartphone). This way they can charge a premium for the 6s, with more than healthy margins and the 6c will be sufficiently different from (and cheaper than) the 6s without one being just a slightly cheaper or more expensive version of the other. Those who want the 6s won't just buy the cheaper 6c because it is a very different beast and there'll be lots of people buying the 6c who wouldn't have considered an iPhone at all before.

It's one of the very few things Apple can do without cutting deeply into the margins. Up the margin for the premium version and make a version with tighter margins that is so different that you don't just switch to that for the price and can draw in new customers.

Well, as far as the sapphire goes: It's just there to justify higher prices and up the "premium" notion. It also may have some practical value, but honestly: My iPhone 4 is now more than three years old and there's not one scratch on the screen.

(And I also think that with smartphones becoming just "normal" products instead of "small computers for nerds" having more options in all directions is a good thing. In most normal products you have much larger price spans than even that. Go and buy furniture, clothes, houses... there's easily an order of magnitude between the cheapest and the most expensive even without going into the most outrageous luxury offers.)

This isn't Communism. It's Socialism. In Communism nothing is centralized, there even isn't a state or a government, nobody owns anything, everybody does his best and takes only what he needs.

Socialism was meant as the first step on the road to Communism and of course Communism never works apart from exceptional circumstances in small communities for a short while. It's a lovely daydream of "wouldn't it be great if...". Well, but it isn't.

Civilisation is all about getting organized. We have learned a lot about that in the past, but this still is like alchemy. Thinking that millions or billions of people in their entirety are different than lots of atoms (who are totally unpredictable individually but highly predictable in larger lumps) is magic thinking.

But yes, there's a difference here and this is being aware of what happens and understanding things which can lead to feedback. But be assured, most people don't want to understand. They even actively resist it and then all their individual idiocies (which usually aren't very unique anyway but just a handful of familiar patterns) average out and you can nearly treat them as a fluid with certain parameters. You're seem to be a good example of that.

And if you really think we can get by on this very small planet with 7 or more billions of us just by letting things go, well. We need to get organized for real.

I think understanding nature (and this includes us) has always been the key for our success as a species and stopping with understanding things because we feel insulted by "being handled" is idiotic. We basically stopped being animals exactly when we got a grip on the world around us. And this world is now made up by mostly... us. So we need to get a grip on us. There's no way around that. Either that or we will descend again and since we have long exhausted all easily accessible resources we will never get a second chance. There's only one way left for us and this way is onwards.

Statistics works the same with people as with atoms and this is real science. Individuals may be hard to quantify, but a mass of people certainly is. That's the reason for the fact that with a small random sample you get reliable data about the population. The fact that YOU may not be part of that sample just is irrelevant since what you do is mostly irrelevant (or only relevant with a very small probability).

In physics this is exactly the same: You can't make any predictions when it comes to individual particles, but since never deal with individual particles all of this averages out and you can make predictions them as you deal with lots of them.

I'm pretty sure that every single particle would be mightily insulted if you would tell it about physics: "I have free will and nothing is telling me what to do!". Yes. But in the big picture what this particle does or not does just doesn't matter.

The irony is that at a deeper level it's utterly unpredictable what and when a single particle will do in physics. Take a lump of uranium -- it's easy to predict when how much of it will have decayed to lead. It works all the time, always the same. But look at a single uranium atom and there's no way to predict when it will decay. It may be the next second or in a thousand years. All you have is probabilities but these work out into cold, hard predictable facts if what you're dealing with is a lump large enough.

Psychology works very similar. You can't predict what an individual person will do, but look at enough of them and you'll be able to predict what will happen if you have good enough data. YOU may have "free will" and the freedom to do what you want but as a mass we may still follow strict laws, like everything else in nature.

You may feel insulted by that or you may see such things as great tools for better understanding of social dynamics.

Really. You'd need military-grade security and strictly planned access levels -- and then look at what Snowden did.

Even more, in most companies there's just no way to implement this. Data is just what they're working with and often the most basic security is bypassed or never implemented just because it's too bothersome while being without any immediately visible gain.

Come on, every admin out there will know that just too well. Security against attacks from the outside, yes. Security against attacks from the inside? Forget it. People need to work with the data and even just to make sure that people have only the access they really need often is so much bother that nobody wants to start with that.

Yes, if a pressure-sensitive stylus is your thing, this is interesting. But I have never missed that (or any stylus at all). I would gladly take it as a feature, but this is just ONE thing of many that people may want besides a screen on the front.

What I was saying is that almost all tablets are of the most generic kind, with everything but the hardware and the price being judged as totally unimportant. Some try to stand out with the fastest specs, others with the cheapest price and that's it. It's as if you could just buy cars with four wheels and an engine and some would try to have the most powerful engine and others the most cheap price and none came with air condition or seats you actually want to sit on or even a trunk to put your luggage into.

The current state of the art in tablets is really pathetic.

So many words just because you have no idea what you're talking about...

It's not the camera that is always on. Its the HDR mode that is always on when you use the camera. Reading "always-on HDR camera" and jumping up and down just because you can almost feel the well-known button ("NSA! Spies! They want to see me all day long!!) being pressed is a bit tired now.

Really, it's almost like Spam these days. In the original Mounty Python meaning that coined the phrase (not that /. readers these days would know about that). "You can have Egg and Spam. Or Egg, Bacon and Spam. Egg, Bacon, Sausage and Spam. Spam, Bacon, Sausage and Spam. Spam, Egg, Spam, Spam, Bacon and Spam. Spam, Spam, Spam, Egg and Spam..."

This still isn't going to give you very much to work with. Taking two shots with a given sensor and its limits can give you much better dynamic range by using different settings to begin with. HDR can be ugly, but used within reason it can give you much better photos.

I recently handled a Lenovo Yoga 8 tablet. This thing has paltry specs, but front-facing stereo speakers, an adjustable stand and power and volume buttons you can actually press without looking for them without any risk of pressing them by accident. I was utterly impressed.

Most tablets are just so BORING. There are very few tablets that actually try some new and useful things. Really, being able to put that thing up onto a table and easily adjust the angle so that the camera when using Skype actually shows me and not the ceiling is more useful to me than pushing the benchmarks a little farther out. Why are there so precious few tablets allowing this? Why has even the fine Nexus 7 the power and volume button hidden behind the bezel, all of them in the same shape and close together, so that half of the time you have to first hunt them down and then you still press the wrong one often enough? Why?

So why people complain at smartphones batteries giving out after 6 hours in a day?

Believe me, people DO use smartphones to do heavy surfing. They really do. People do everything (and more) on smartphones they do on PCs.