I think a front facing camera was probably just too awkward to use. If you're sitting with your legs crossed resting the tablet on your knee a front facing camera isn't going to be showing your face. People will get a good look at your shirt though. If you have it laying down at a usable angle on a desk (say 30 degrees inclined) you're going to get a shot of the celling. I imagine this is something you'd see in the form of a third party accessory with a movable camera.
Bluetooth doesn't have the bandwidth, and while Apple has a program for approving attached accessories, only a handful have made it to the public: Apple strangled a lot of products in their cribs.
Yup, the device is designed to have "no particular orientation", so the dock connector can be on top. I wouldn't be surprised to see a dock-connector iSight at some point.
"while it is funny to talk about how unlikely these events are ..."
individually the scenarios may be highly improbable - but as a category, aren't there more ways a mechanical failure point could play out at the macroscopic level, than ways the particle collision event could spontaneously "mis-manifest"?
"The universe is not going to reach out across 10^52-ish planck instants to do something like drop bread on a machine weeks before it would be brought up"
a universe could reach out two weeks before, or a week plus 1 femto second, or it may drop cheese instead of bread, etc. - aren't there more histories like this across all the many-worlds, than ones involving last-moment quantum weirdness?
"individually the scenarios may be highly improbable - but as a category, aren't there more ways a mechanical failure point could play out at the macroscopic level, than ways the particle collision event could spontaneously "mis-manifest"?"
There are a lot more ways that a mechanical failure could manifest, yes, but it is simply drowned in the histories in which they don't manifest. Another one of those 10^100^100 sorts of numbers when we're talking at the quantum scale.
Whereas even if everything goes perfectly fine, Higgs production is expected to be a low probability event, and just having it "not happen" is way, way, way, way (and so on) way less "probability work", to coin an ill-defined phrase that has tantalizing mathematical overtones.
I didn't just make up the 10^52-ish number, I actually looked it up and tried to make it plausible. That's an awfully large branching factor for the universe to be reaching out to have an effect (ponder those 52 zeros for a moment; even if you drop half of them we're still well into la-la land) whereas as perverse as "a bird dropped a bit of bread on an exposed component" may seem, it is, frankly, well within normal human experience with probabilities, as is someone making the requisite design errors to permit that.
(I am just making up the 10^100^100 number. The probabilities are well beyond my intuition to guess at besides "effectively impossible by any reasonable definition of the term.")
I mean, I'm enjoying these articles and I enjoyed the linked article, but they are jokes. At least, I know the linked article is a joke and I hope the physicists saying these are actually possibly being caused by the Higgs are joking as they also ought to be able to do this analysis... although you just never know. The human tendency to anthropomorphize everything, to see "the universe will cause an improbable event to manifest" in terms of "humans will see something humanly absurd happen in a macroscopic scale" (noting humanly absurd != improbable) is very, very strong.
(Note that I do not consider the idea that the universe will somehow cancel any production of Higgs as a joke; that's perfectly respectable physics. I just consider it a joke that it would manifest in some macroscopic way weeks before the event.)
it isn't sweet, since there are likely more unpleasant than pleasant ways of remaining conscious.
"The Sibyl of Cumae, who led Aeneas on his journey to the underworld, for which he collected the Golden Bough, was the most famous prophetess of the ancient world. Beloved of Apollo, she was given anything she might desire. She asked for eternal life. Sadly, Apollo granted her wish, for she had forgotten to ask for eternal youth. Now dried, dessicated, and shrunken, she is carried in a cricket cage, and when the boys ask her what she desires, she says: 'I want to die.'" http://www.history-of-culture.org/Lectures/Part_2/22302.htm
https://vimeo.com/699396
implementing it was kind of my new language self challenge, so i ended up putting it in the appstore while learning objective-c:
http://itunes.apple.com/us/app/rgb-petri/id423126001?mt=8&ls...