Apple celebrates one billion iPhones

... this just sounds like commercials for detergents.

Whatever Intel and Microsoft do, Apple will always have a cleaner OS, a more efficient CPU and it's a more approachable product.

Yeah, but that's hardly different than the clapping to open lights thing though, is it?

If you seriously can't just turn on a light switch, wouldn't you just want your phone to use geo-fencing to automatically turn on the lights when you get home AND it's night time?

Then again, I don't understand a lot of this home automation stuff personally. If we come home and it's hot, we turn on the air conditioner. If it's dark, we turn on the lights. These are hardly difficult tasks for a child, much less an adult.

In fact, with iOS 10, you can arrive at home and Siri will automatically turn on your Philips Hue lights for you.

I think you would be hard pressed to find an application of technology (in normal human terms, not the uptight definition of "applied knowledge") that does not consume resources.

Electronics in particular consume electricity which must be generated and stored, as well as refined mining products. The production of these resources also consumes additional resources. Distribution and eventual disposal likewise. All of these at a greater rate than would be consumed absent electronics.

You might consider these costs worth the benefits of having these electronics. Or you might, if you're more careful, pepper "some" throughout the prior sentence. Many of the impacts could certainly be reduced, but almost none of them can be eliminated.

Making things has a cost, often a greater cost than not making them. Dismissing that as insufficiently narrow for discussion is either ignorant or dishonest.

Furthermore, the cost of talking to your mother—global industrial production lines, addiction to technology, and the loss of social skills—is extremely hard to weigh. I land firmly on the side of luddite—I value sustainability and social intimacy over convenience. However, it is not even clear that the average techie considers the above problems at all, let alone major ones.

So—again, you're just assuming that I would consider communication worth what we're doing to our children and our planet. It is emphatically not worth it and does not improve quality of life except for problems you cause in the first place.

"The clathrate gun hypothesis is the popular name given to the hypothesis that increases in sea temperatures (and/or drops in sea levels) can trigger the sudden release of methane from methane clathrate compounds buried in seabeds and that are contained within seabed permafrost which, because the methane itself is a powerful greenhouse gas, leads to further temperature rise and further methane clathrate destabilization – in effect initiating a runaway process as irreversible, once started, as the firing of a gun.

In its original form, the hypothesis proposed that the "clathrate gun" could cause abrupt runaway warming on a timescale less than a human lifetime, and was responsible for warming events in and at the end of the last glacial maximum. This is now thought to be unlikely."

Basically substitute "highly unlikely random cataclysmic event transpires" for "clathrate gun fires" and you get the sentiment of the post :)

They're more concerned about profits and selling units instead of "the stuff you've got is good enough".

News at 11!

Just to set things in perspective.