jim bell <jdb10987@yahoo.com> wrote:
>> There's another set of possibilities.  Usually, a person has 10
>> fingers.  They can presumably be scanned in two different axes (or
>> more), and in two different directions, each.   With some additional
>> software,

>    People could do lots of different things...if they owned their
>   phones. But the phones are owned by apple. The phone users are
>   owned by apple too, and by the US government.

Not MY phone, which is an Android.  I have detested Apple ever since the very early 1980s, when they had a nasty legal habit of suing anybody who tried to make an add-on card for the Apple II computer.  (Which didn't have a SHIFT key, which is why for a long time you could tell a person on the BBS's had an Apple BECAUSE THEY ALWAYS TYPED IN ALL CAPS!!!).   Who forgets to add a shift key?

The one really great thing Apple ever did was to choose the Motorola 68000 microprocessor for their Macintosh computer, which had a 24-bit linear memory address space  (later increased to 32 bits), unlike the foolish 80X86 series, which had a botch called "segmentation".  (Although, I have long maintained that there would be nothing wrong with segmentation, as long as the individual segments could be made as large as any program and/or data that you could ever want to use.  The 8086/88 only allowed segments 64Kbytes in length.  Sure, later iterations allowed larger segment sizes, but by that point the limitation had been locked into software!  A segment size of 4 gigabytes (2**32) would have been just great.

Whatever happened to the R4000???  https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/R4000