There are a fair number of people out there who happily traded the 2-week battery life of their perfectly functional cell phones for dead-in-a-day smartphones. As it turns out, the inconvenience of having to constantly recharge a smartphone was worth putting up with in exchange for being able to do all the things you can do with a smartphone. Clearly, not everyone shared this sentiment, as you can still see any number of people using non-smartphones today--but significant numbers of people chose functionality over battery life.

It's hardly a stretch of the imagination to see the same thing happening with smart watches.

Yes, but now we can find out whether we read Slashdot because we are nerds, or we are nerds because we read Slashdot.

Perhaps in some cases it would be possible to detect that both X and Y were being affected by the same noise, implying the existence of some unknown Z?

The standard t-test for detecting an effect is already probabalistic. In science and medicine a 95% confidence value is commonly used, which means a 1/20 of detecting something that isn't there.

I think it was fairly clear what was going on, the neural networks latch on to conditions that are necessary but not sufficient because they found common characteristics of real images but never got any negative feedback. Like in the peacock photo the colors and pattern are similar, but clearly not in the shape of a bird but if it's never seen any non-bird peacock colored items how's the algorithm supposed to know? At any rate, it seems like the neural network is excessively focusing on one thing, maybe it would perform better if you divided up the work so one factor didn't become dominant. For example you send outlines to one network, textures to a second network and colors to a third network then using a fourth network to try learning which of the other three to listen to. After all, the brain has very clear centers too, it's not just one big chunk of goo.

"First they ignore you, then they ridicule you, then they fight you. Then you lose and kill yourself."
- Hitler (well, not really)

I never understood what that Gandhi quote is so popular, sure that's what a victory looks like out the rear view mirror but most defeats start just the same.

It was the 1960s. You were lucky to have a 300 baud modem, they wanted to save two bits by chopping the "19" off 1960 and encryption was regulated as munitions. Heck, even in the 1990s they wanted to restrict my browser to 40 bits so I didn't have "export grade" cryptography. I still hear cost for servers and battery life on clients as an argument for why sites don't move to HTTPS, The very idea to build the Internet with strong encryption by default was ridiculous on technical merits and I don't recall anyone even suggesting it so feel free to quote some sources.

Yes, MITM attacks are possible. But unlike wiretapping they're also detectable and I don't just mean in the theoretical sense. You could still use CAs to "boost" the credibility of an IP encryption key fingerprint (The CA signs my cert, I sign a message saying my IP uses fingerprint aa:bb:cc:dd:ee:ff), you can verify by proxy (connect to your server from friends/family/open wifi/proxy or ask a third party to what certificate fingerprint they see) or you can use in-band ad hoc verification. For example you're in a chat and it says at the top "finger print for this session is aa:bb:cc:dd:ee:ff" you might say "reverse it and you get ff:ee:dd:cc:bb:aa" or "third pair is a double c" or "last two are 255 in hex" as part of the conversation. Even better if it's voice communication, think they can MITM a buddy saying the fingerprint?

MITM only works if there's a protocol you can use to automatically block/filter any information about the key. For example imagine you take a photo, overlay the fingerprint semi-transparently and display it on your website. Now they have to create a very custom solution for your site to create an identical photo to replace it with. Transparent MITM in an interactive process - not just your cell phone checking your mail - is going to be really tough to do on a mass scale. It won't have the perfect theoretical characteristics, but it sure will work for most people most of the time.

That depends. For example many countries have laws regarding historical artifacts, you can own them but you can't take them out of the country. Or you can legally buy cryptography chips in the US that needs an export license. Just because Microsoft Ireland can legally possess the customer data in Ireland, doesn't mean they're free to ship it around the world or provide access to it in violation of Irish law.

So either you comply "voluntarily" or your lack of compliance is used as a reason do to if forcefully, either way the cops get to do whatever they want. Maybe they should start at home and repeal the 4th amendment first?

Any concepts "lost in translation" could be easily appended as a new word to a common tounge, there's an absurd amount of redundancy in that there are hundreds (thousands?) of ways to express simple concepts like "yes". The English say yes, the French oui, the Germans ja, the Spanish si, the Russians da, the Japanese hai, the Portugese sim, the Polish tak... is there a value to this? Language barriers are sand in the machinery for any kind of human endeavour in science, technology, commerce, travel, communities and so on. The Internet has enabled me to reach billions of people but I don't know how to talk to most of them. What they have to contribute to the global village isn't easily available to the rest and they can't access the global resources we're building. I think I read once that more than half the world's science papers are now written in English.

Sure I'd probably keep my own language for all those other reasons but I'd welcome a world where everybody could talk to everybody. Sometimes a particular concept just takes a little longer in English, that's all. For example the word "dumsnill" in Norwegian, it means something like naive but that usually implies that you're simple or gullible while this word in particular means your generosity is being exploited to taken advantage of you. I might need half a sentence to explain it in English, I don't need a whole language for that. I think the idea that some concepts are only expressible in one language is rather silly, I speak three and there's always a way of getting what I want across. Even with a simple vocabulary you can usually explain more advanced concepts without looking it up in a thesaurus.

Why? SWAT teams are already armed and armored to the teeth and will assault with massive force, it's extremely rare that any of them are killed relative to the hostages. Sending in a robot to stir the hornet's nest would only lead to a massacre, either you go in full force or you don't. It could end non-hostage situations sooner but just waiting it out until the nutcase with the gun surrenders (or suicides) seems to be pretty efficient too. I guess you could have a telepresence hostage negotiator, but a smart hostage taker wouldn't give the police a live video stream to plan and time their raid with.

True, but ignorance of the law is no defense. Which basically means that not only must you know the text of the law, but the entire applicable body of law, relevant precedents and current interpretation of the law. Heck, you can still end up losing a trial because the Supreme Court will disagree with your reading of an ambiguous and previously unsettled area of law so being a psychic or clairvoyant could be quite useful. They'll try interpreting the law as intended and you bear the burden if they decide your gray area is on the illegal side.

In contract law you're not assumed to know anything about the background or history of the license except as written. Sure, if you've been negotiating a contract then that communication is relevant for the interpretation as you're one of the parties but developers and users of GPL software aren't generally in contact. You download a piece of software, accept the agreement and any ambiguity in a take it or leave it license will be almost certainly be interpreted in disfavor of the one who wrote it. Unlike the lawmaking it won't be assumed that their way to read the contract is the authoritative one.

Well, that part is actually not up to the GPL to define it's a key part of copyright law, if it's not derivative it's not covered by copyright so the GPL wouldn't apply.

That's fairly common here in Norway if you apply for it, they call it "account credit" though you typically don't get the 30 day free delay, you pay credit interest from day one but at least your payments don't bounce. With most terminals being online it's actually pretty hard to overdraft a debit account these days, if there's no money in the account the transaction will usually be refused.

More like the inverse debit card. When I pay with a debit card, money is withdrawn online there and then. Why can't we do the same for deposits and transfers? I just checked here in Norway and money only transfers between banks four times a day, 05.35, 11.05, 13.35 and 15.35. I guess that's fast enough for my uses, but if I pay a buddy at 4 PM why can't he buy a beer with it at 7 PM? It's not like it takes three hours to make a transaction. I understand that settling balances is hell when things change 24x7 but surely there must be some way to deal with that.