Or maybe there's not really all that much NEW stuff that can be done "with a computer" or "in the Cloud"?

It's just possible that the industry is entering maturity, and the only things left are doing the things it already does slightly more efficiently than the competition, rather than in a radically different way.

Note that the very early years of aviation included a lot of innovation, both in terms of capability and use-cases. But the airline industry has since pretty much settled down to "move people about long distances as cost-effectively as possible". Not much has really changed in a long time other than incremental improvements in aircraft efficiency....

Or did everyone really think that computers/cloud-computing/whatever were going to be new and rapidly changing forever?

The Secret Squirrels should not be monitoring all Americans. They should be tracking terrorists!

Great idea! Wonder why noone ever thought of that before.

So, any ideas about how to go about "tracking terrorists"? I'm assuming you're going to start by identifying some of them? And then you're going to do what, exactly?

No, there's not a whole lot of really good reason for warrantless (or even warranted) wiretapping of everyone. Nonetheless, security takes a bit more than "well, we should track terrorists!!!"

Note that the real question is more properly phrased as "how much liberty should we sacrifice in exchange for how much security?"

Everyone will have a different answer to that (mostly divided along "how much of YOUR liberty for MY security" lines. A small number of people will rephrase that as "how much of MY liberty for YOUR security", and an even smaller number will say "I'd rather have the liberty than the security, thank you".

Most of the latter group will, of course, change their minds the first time they lose a job for an extended period, but that's neither here nor there.

What is relevant is that the question won't go away. You can't have absolute liberty and absolute security at the same time. So finding a level acceptable to as many people as possible is essential.

And mostly done by guess and by golly....

Teaching computers to beat humans at bluffing, decoying, and no doubt (now or in time) lying? Is that what we want AI to be capable of? I'm not sure that is a good idea, and the code to do that should never be among the "standard includes". I understand the utility of it in dealing with humans, but still ...

And I don't need to look at my phone to know whether someone important is calling, because that's what distinctive ring/vibration is for.

I said why in the parent post, and in the post I made before that too.

https://itunes.apple.com/us/ap...

"lololololol" right back at you. What's the domain called? Maybe you thought I meant the itunes application? If so your retort is understandable, but you still misunderstood.

How do you get third party apps without using Apple services (for example without using itunes.apple.com) smart ass?

If only there was some way of getting apps for it without relying on apple, that might actually be true. But there is not, so its not.

Android wear might completely dependent on google than I thought; I really don't know. I speculate that if you can run it cyanogenmod you don't need google services to use it... but perhaps not. It doesn't really matter... I'm not advocating an android wear anyway.

Without Apple so is your apple watch. Because without itunes (itunes the service not itunes the app), there are no 3rd party apps for it.

You really don't think energy costs will go up over time? Ironically, the only way they wouldn't is if we committed to more renewables.

You have to finish the sentence before you can understand it. I'd bet you just interrupt in the middle of sentences all the time, and thus fail to understand what people are telling you by preventing them from actually finishing a complete thought.

If you go back and read the complete sentence, which expresses a complete thought, then it makes perfect sense.

You've proven full well that I do.

But you're wrong.

Cost-effective for who, and on what basis?

It's not cost-effective for them, because they don't have a secondary use for the battery.

You still have failed to support your argument in the slightest. We're waiting, though we're not holding our breath, because we want to live.

This is a problem?

What damage, specifically?

Could you give some examples of the truly toxic?

Most of the stuff you highlight can be handled by a feature phone, though, except reading books. I use my 6-year-old Android, doesn't seem to crash or need to reboot unless the battery is on empty (and shocking the battery still works pretty well after 6 years - will go 12+ hours between charges). You don't need anything fancy - what you want is something stable.

I'm really struggling with what to get next - the screen on my phone has been cracked for a couple of years now, so I should probably replace it one of these days. But now it's all these damn giant phones that don't fit in my pockets, don't have replaceable batteries - what ever happened to cell phones getting smaller?

If you have that problem often enough to care, you need better friends, not a better phone!

Fact: Putting the word "fact" before your sentence does not absolve you of the need to back it up with actual evidence.

Inflation was cooked up to explain most of that after the fact, though, so it's unsurprising that it does. The fundamental problem with inflation is that too much is tunable. Penrose's cyclic cosmology explains all the same stuff, and at least has the decency to make some bizarre (and very likely false) predictions outside of the early universe.

Theories of the very early universe that require new fields that there's a way to detect today are interesting. Certainly there are ideas to explain dark energy as an extension of inflation that fit that bill. But theories that propose a bunch of cool new physics that all conveniently vanished early on are a bit sketchy, at least until we can somehow make an equivalent of WMAP for the neutrino background radiation, and observe the very early universe directly. I hope I live to see that!