Also, I don't have arbitrary rules: I just know what I am ready to pay for a given service. And the fees for incoming whatever are just a ripoff. Pure and simple. Their mere existence is insulting.
The problem is that you consider that those prices are acceptable... See: if the network owners are forced to sell bandwidth wholesale, all is fine. If not, well, "competition" is pretty much pretend competition. I know: I moved from a terrible market in Europe to Canada, where the prices are simply unacceptable. I currently refuse to give a single cent to have a (mobile) phone. And I survive just fine.
But the fact is, to be honest, I don't really want a smartphone. a 3G connection for my laptop, yes. A dumb mobile with prepaid minutes (kept valid for 6-12 months since last usage), yes. A smartphone with a data plan? Not at those rates. 15$ a month is what I am ready to pay for unlimited -- even with a cap [2]. Or else you let me pre-pay my bandwidth, and what I pay works like a tab valid for a substantial amount of time. More than that? fuck you. I pay to receive calls? fuck you. I pay more than 10c per SMS? fuck you [1]. I pay to receive SMS? go stick your head in a pig.
I have Internet at work and at home, and calls are free. A mobile would be convenient, but not enough that I have to feel dirty thinking I gave money to some telco manager.
Yes, I am a cheap bastard. You should try it too.
[1] And even that I consider an outrage seeing as SMS are free overhead from the protocol.
[2] All prices all included. You charge taxes and "fees" separately? fuck you.
You don't understand: the price of smartphones is too high in general. Only in the NA market are they subsidised as a norm and therefore common. Everywhere else, dumbphones are the norm (this is actually slowly changing as lower-cost offerings become available).
My bet is that you never bought a phone: as in, you never plonked the 6-800$ they cost to get one. You got your phone with a contract. But this is a peculiarity of a particular market, which happens to be very visible (but not very large!)
No. This is the NA perspective. Understand this: only in NA are phones subsidised as a norm. Therefore only in NA are the smartphones a dominant factor in the market. Because nowhere else are they affordable. Not that people are poorer in Europe: rather no one could afford the smartphones in the NA market if they weren't subsidised.
Nokia has the best "dumbphones" on the market. By far. Nokia has the best not-too-smartphones. The technicality of those two categories is much larger than that of the smartphones: The hardware/software interaction is very tight. The energy/CPU constraints very forbidding. This will stay a factor: those are the phones which require really good emitters/receptors and really clever energy management, and resistive colour LCDs and fast CPUs will stay a no-go for these for a long time.
Now of course, this is a market where investments are high, volume very high and margins very low. That Nokia is competitive there says a lot about how good their R&D is. Basically Nokia cornered the wrong market (for the moment). This, however, is no reason to throw the one market you are dominant in out of the window in the hope to get a slice of a completely different market your company is no good in!
There is only one market where smartphones are a cash-cow and it is the NA market. Now it happens that this is only for as long as the regulation there stays lax enough that companies are allowed to rape the consumers. Of course Nokia wants in. What does matter is that they have now established themselves as a company no independent producer will want to trust. So the main cash source from smartphones will remain out of their grasp. And when, as this must happen, the low-end catches up with the high-end (5 years or so), they will have nothing left to benefit from that.
Their CEO should be fired for extreme stupidity and shortsightedness.
Re:This is way over the top
on
Why Nokia Is Toast
·
· Score: 4, Interesting
Because they got a stupid North American as a CEO who thinks his home base is the world. Only in NA is Nokia an also-ran. Because nowhere else is it normal to get the phone for "free" with your contract. Contracts which are preposterous in the first place.
Because nowhere else are consumers ignorant enough and regulators lazy enough to allow that. So outside of NA, your iPhone is wayyy too expensive for what it is. Except if you are an asshole yuppie urbanite that is. Only is you care more about your phone looking "cool" (that is bough last month, or so) instead of having really good reception/battery life, will you buy the phones which are popular in NA.
So based on the bizarre, twisted, wrong NA market, the CEO changes a strategy which is _working_ (ovi store is growing tremendously -- well was until Friday -- and Qt allowed development on the entire line of phones). He pisses off his entire dev base hoping to get a new one, presumably. Because replacing a world-class API (Qt) which is truly portable with a WP-only API which can only work on hi-power-low-battery-duration devices is _stupid_. Telling devs "you know those 500 000 000 devices you targeted? They're gone" is not good. And WP phone devs are probably not going to be so eager to replace their just-shafted colleagues... I guess he doesn't even understand why the stock of his company plunged 15% in a day...
Because investors realised that the man knows nothing, and is more than just clueless: he is actively and destructively stupid.
I am sorry. This is moronic. What, pray tell, is the welfare of a state if not that of the people living in it?
And of course if your constitution finds its limits in reality, you should update/reinterpret it. Or else you deserve to live with the consequences. Unfortunately of course, this usually means that other people live with the consequences of your short-sightedness.
Hadrian. The Roman Emperor. For the standards of the time, he was amazingly not corrupt. He was effective,peace-loving, and did not insist on having his name put everywhere. The point of oversight is that you cannot count on the rulers to be a perfect bunch. Of course it can happen that they be a perfect bunch. Sure. Has happened before, will happen again.
Simply a system which expects stability through changes in power cannot count on that. Thus we have the worse system with the exception of all others: democracy. It enforces minimum standards and results in slightly above-average mediocrity. Because in that system, if it happens that the rulers be perfect, you can be sure they will be hobbled by the oversight.
But aside from a benevolent dictatorship from post-singularity AIs, I don't think a better system is possible. Better forms of the system, sure (I mean, the US is a sad example of democracy compared to, say, Sweden or Switzerland). Better system? No.
You fail at "I have a basic understanding of the world I live in 101". Go to www.gapminder.org . Watch the videos, peruse the data.
In short: the only path out of overpopulation is development. Again and again, we see that when infant mortality rates fall the families become precipitously smaller. Because all humans understand the concept of "I have a kid, he probably won't die, and if I have only one (perhaps two), he can go to school and have a life better than mine beyond my wildest dreams".
Vaccination, because it enhances child survival, is a crucial tool against overpopulation and for development.
no. the correct logical conclusion is that Hawaii was not a US state when Obama is born. Otherwise, you are making unwarranted assumptions on the direction of time's arrow. Or the existence thereof, for that matter.
Bridges are designed so failure causes excessive sagging. So it be visible to users of the bridge.
Because a bridge which fails in a progressive way is safer than one which snaps. Partly because of engineering reasons, but also because that way, the odds of something odd occurring being noticed are higher.
Yes but in the end, you vote for the government. Corporations are accountable to none but their shareholders. And even then, not so much. So on one hand you have a solution that works imperfectly (it can only work as well as the effort people put into making elected officials accountable) and on the other hand a solution which can never work (a monopoly on a critical resource is a hell of a lot of power for anyone to wield that has profit as his only motive).
People get the government they deserve at least in the medium term. If you vote for people based on the fact that they sound like they believe in lies you would like to be true, you are responsible.
Because linux users are known to be change-adverse technophobes. They cannot comprehend phrases beyond soundbites.
Actually, the KDE4 thing showed me that some linux users are indeed change-adverse technophobes. I guess they are the ones who went to linux from the olden UNIX days. They though it was because of the superior tech, but in fact it was because it allowed them to not change their habits. Some -- through some process that is not entirely clear -- came to KDE3[1]. And KDE3 was not very integrated compared to SC4. basically you used the applications and the shell was sort of hacked-together, did not do anything very clever. Now SC4 is really clever. And your old apps got rewritten, or changed. And the look changed. And actual integration (in terms of sharing information) is attempted. Akonadi, Nepomuk, this is what they are about. You want your MP3 tags known to the desktop search. You want a given file to be identified as coming from some attachment from some person whose name/contact information are known. If you tag a picture with a person you want your mailer to know this person exists when a contact is created.
This is all very hard to do right.
Also the shell cannot be assumed to be only for a desktop. maybe you have a tablet, or a convertible hybrid like the T91MT. And that means your desktop shell must be very adaptable. Is it perfect? No. But it is damn good, and wayyy better than KDE3. Except for those who only wanted a glorified application launcher/windowmanager. But is is only an accident they liked KDE3 in the first place (I expect the apps were too good to pass over).
[1] KDE 1 was a bunch of rewritten X apps. They looked and worked marginally better. KDE2 added some integration, DCOP notably. And the apps looked yet a bit better and KIO was great. KDE3 same thing. In fact, it was a simple port to start with. KDE4 is a completely different beast.
No I'm actually worried that the gov is not meddling enough. I believe that allowing private local monopolies to exist is the sign of a gov gone AWOL. And if you think that the *AA would be happy at the idea that there would be a great number of ISPs each with different policies, you are sorely mistaken.
Basically, ISPs can get away with caps, prioritising content, filtering traffic, because there is not enough competition. Who picks the ISP for mom and pop? the local geek. If he has choice, do you think the *AA-friendly ISP gets chosen?
How do you ensure the existence of a wealth of ISP? Easy: force the network owners to sell bandwidth wholesale with no strings attached. Then there will be competition to create the network, and competition between the ISPs for customers. This is how it works pretty much everywhere but the US and Canada. And guess who has the worse Internet (and telecom in general) of the developed world?
You believe in markets? So do I. You believe the market exists spontaneously and without (sometimes extensive) regulation? If so, I have a bridge on Valles Marineris to sell you.
And independently of the tech issues, you don't want a last mile for-profit monopoly. At least if the gov owns the last mile, they can enforce competition between providers by ensuring fair access.
Because the content of education should not be a political issue. The content of education should reflect the state of understanding in science/history etc.
You may debate the relative importance of various subjects.
You may debate the funding for education.
But in the end, you must demand teachers with masters degrees in their subjects.
You may mandate some set of standards. From some independent body.
But never, ever, must you allow non-specialist to dictate in any way, shape or form what contents are allowable. One cannot, and should not, vote on truth (or the approximation thereof that is science).
You realise that the functions you are asking for are OS functions, and not related to the GUI? If you want the beahviours you describe, then use FUSE -- perhaps through kio-fuse.
In dolphin, I have sftp remote locations which appear just like any other folder...
KDE does not create any folder other than the.kde[4]/ hierarchy, where it stores its settings. Gnome, on the other hand thought it good to have virtual folders that seem like they are folders -- but really reflect the UNIX filesystem in no way.
Basically, you screwed up your home with the help of GNOME, and KDE just showed you the mess you have really made.
As an aside, how anyone can live with the GTK file selector is beyond me.
basically, you agree with me (and I with you), but you don't like that I do not show enough contempt towards the literary minded.
Usually, I have huge problems interacting with them, because they (to me) make no sense. But realise this: there is another, completely different form of bullshit detector, which involves no maths at all.
People who read a lot, especially old and obscure stuff, have a perspective on the public discourse which allows them to realise that a given specious argument had already been considered bogus during the Roman Empire.
Now they will tell you that this argument is bogus because Pliny the younger made fun of it, and it will drive you mad, because the reason the argument is wrong is because it is logically flawed. But it remains that society is much better off with these guys and their bolloney detector than if they had none.
I must also add that the statistical/data driven drivel is somewhat new, and because of that, the literary (as opposed to scientifically) minded are susceptible to it. But you will _never_ convince one of them with logic. You must be able to make the esthetic argument for a proposition to have any impact at all. Personally, I usually can't.
As a final note, it is not because someone sounds sciency that he is. It is the mode of thought which counts -- I have met scientists who clearly have no sense of logic at all.
the PID algorithm is four lines of code. the RST also. But to prove the properties of either, you must understand Z-transforms (which really are Laplace transforms for sampled functions).
You can tune your PID using Ziegler-Nicholls, and that requires absolutely no knowledge of maths. To tune it optimally, you need a very good physical model, and pretty involved maths.
So I don't know what the other guy's argument were, but you might have been both perfectly right.
Although I agree with you about MIT, this is not MIT. These teams are Swiss, and based in Zürich.
And as one guy explains below, the pencil really does fall right off when the rig is stopped. There is rubber, shaped like a cup, so lateral movements can be imparted. But try to balance a pencil in a cup, and you'll see it is just as hard as on your finger.
I disagree: innovation cannot be bought like any other type of labour. This notion rests on the idea of the "inventor" bright, lonely, exceptional.
But this is not how innovations happen. They happen more often than not in labs or at universities. Successful tech companies create campuses. These are necessary for innovation because they provide a place for bright people to meet, discuss, and for ideas to collide and evolve.
In turn, the campuses and universities do not exist in a vacuum: they are supported by the infrastructure and the societies in which they exist. Because you had broadband all your life, because your roads were good, because your schools performed well, because your electricity supply was stable you will want to build on that. Because societies are on the edge of development, this edge gets pushed by innovators.
So-called "advanced" societies do have an advantage over the "developing" ones: their infrastructure is good and reliable and established. Therefore innovation, if funded, will happen there first. But this means high taxes, lots of long-term investment, lots of public funding in education and research. Of course manufacturing will always happen mostly where it is the cheapest but even this can be compensated by innovation and excellent infrastructure.
The other route, the one with no taxes to compensate for higher costs, leads inevitably to success (aka being competitive against China) by transforming you society into one of these cheap developing ones...
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Most places in Europe are fine. Terrible is relative :)
Also, I don't have arbitrary rules: I just know what I am ready to pay for a given service. And the fees for incoming whatever are just a ripoff. Pure and simple. Their mere existence is insulting.
Never heard of them. Thanks for the pointer.
And BTW at home I have no cap (primus: not great but ok.). So I did some looking around :)
The problem is that you consider that those prices are acceptable... See: if the network owners are forced to sell bandwidth wholesale, all is fine. If not, well, "competition" is pretty much pretend competition. I know: I moved from a terrible market in Europe to Canada, where the prices are simply unacceptable. I currently refuse to give a single cent to have a (mobile) phone. And I survive just fine.
But the fact is, to be honest, I don't really want a smartphone. a 3G connection for my laptop, yes. A dumb mobile with prepaid minutes (kept valid for 6-12 months since last usage), yes. A smartphone with a data plan? Not at those rates. 15$ a month is what I am ready to pay for unlimited -- even with a cap [2]. Or else you let me pre-pay my bandwidth, and what I pay works like a tab valid for a substantial amount of time. More than that? fuck you. I pay to receive calls? fuck you. I pay more than 10c per SMS? fuck you [1]. I pay to receive SMS? go stick your head in a pig.
I have Internet at work and at home, and calls are free. A mobile would be convenient, but not enough that I have to feel dirty thinking I gave money to some telco manager.
Yes, I am a cheap bastard. You should try it too.
[1] And even that I consider an outrage seeing as SMS are free overhead from the protocol.
[2] All prices all included. You charge taxes and "fees" separately? fuck you.
You don't understand: the price of smartphones is too high in general. Only in the NA market are they subsidised as a norm and therefore common. Everywhere else, dumbphones are the norm (this is actually slowly changing as lower-cost offerings become available).
My bet is that you never bought a phone: as in, you never plonked the 6-800$ they cost to get one. You got your phone with a contract. But this is a peculiarity of a particular market, which happens to be very visible (but not very large!)
No. This is the NA perspective. Understand this: only in NA are phones subsidised as a norm. Therefore only in NA are the smartphones a dominant factor in the market. Because nowhere else are they affordable. Not that people are poorer in Europe: rather no one could afford the smartphones in the NA market if they weren't subsidised.
Nokia has the best "dumbphones" on the market. By far. Nokia has the best not-too-smartphones. The technicality of those two categories is much larger than that of the smartphones: The hardware/software interaction is very tight. The energy/CPU constraints very forbidding. This will stay a factor: those are the phones which require really good emitters/receptors and really clever energy management, and resistive colour LCDs and fast CPUs will stay a no-go for these for a long time.
Now of course, this is a market where investments are high, volume very high and margins very low. That Nokia is competitive there says a lot about how good their R&D is. Basically Nokia cornered the wrong market (for the moment). This, however, is no reason to throw the one market you are dominant in out of the window in the hope to get a slice of a completely different market your company is no good in!
There is only one market where smartphones are a cash-cow and it is the NA market. Now it happens that this is only for as long as the regulation there stays lax enough that companies are allowed to rape the consumers. Of course Nokia wants in. What does matter is that they have now established themselves as a company no independent producer will want to trust. So the main cash source from smartphones will remain out of their grasp. And when, as this must happen, the low-end catches up with the high-end (5 years or so), they will have nothing left to benefit from that.
Their CEO should be fired for extreme stupidity and shortsightedness.
Because they got a stupid North American as a CEO who thinks his home base is the world. Only in NA is Nokia an also-ran. Because nowhere else is it normal to get the phone for "free" with your contract. Contracts which are preposterous in the first place.
Because nowhere else are consumers ignorant enough and regulators lazy enough to allow that. So outside of NA, your iPhone is wayyy too expensive for what it is. Except if you are an asshole yuppie urbanite that is. Only is you care more about your phone looking "cool" (that is bough last month, or so) instead of having really good reception/battery life, will you buy the phones which are popular in NA.
So based on the bizarre, twisted, wrong NA market, the CEO changes a strategy which is _working_ (ovi store is growing tremendously -- well was until Friday -- and Qt allowed development on the entire line of phones). He pisses off his entire dev base hoping to get a new one, presumably. Because replacing a world-class API (Qt) which is truly portable with a WP-only API which can only work on hi-power-low-battery-duration devices is _stupid_. Telling devs "you know those 500 000 000 devices you targeted? They're gone" is not good. And WP phone devs are probably not going to be so eager to replace their just-shafted colleagues... I guess he doesn't even understand why the stock of his company plunged 15% in a day...
Because investors realised that the man knows nothing, and is more than just clueless: he is actively and destructively stupid.
I am sorry. This is moronic. What, pray tell, is the welfare of a state if not that of the people living in it?
And of course if your constitution finds its limits in reality, you should update/reinterpret it. Or else you deserve to live with the consequences. Unfortunately of course, this usually means that other people live with the consequences of your short-sightedness.
Hadrian. The Roman Emperor. For the standards of the time, he was amazingly not corrupt. He was effective,peace-loving, and did not insist on having his name put everywhere. The point of oversight is that you cannot count on the rulers to be a perfect bunch. Of course it can happen that they be a perfect bunch. Sure. Has happened before, will happen again.
Simply a system which expects stability through changes in power cannot count on that. Thus we have the worse system with the exception of all others: democracy. It enforces minimum standards and results in slightly above-average mediocrity. Because in that system, if it happens that the rulers be perfect, you can be sure they will be hobbled by the oversight.
But aside from a benevolent dictatorship from post-singularity AIs, I don't think a better system is possible. Better forms of the system, sure (I mean, the US is a sad example of democracy compared to, say, Sweden or Switzerland). Better system? No.
You fail at "I have a basic understanding of the world I live in 101". Go to www.gapminder.org . Watch the videos, peruse the data.
In short: the only path out of overpopulation is development. Again and again, we see that when infant mortality rates fall the families become precipitously smaller. Because all humans understand the concept of "I have a kid, he probably won't die, and if I have only one (perhaps two), he can go to school and have a life better than mine beyond my wildest dreams".
Vaccination, because it enhances child survival, is a crucial tool against overpopulation and for development.
no. the correct logical conclusion is that Hawaii was not a US state when Obama is born. Otherwise, you are making unwarranted assumptions on the direction of time's arrow. Or the existence thereof, for that matter.
Bridges are designed so failure causes excessive sagging. So it be visible to users of the bridge.
Because a bridge which fails in a progressive way is safer than one which snaps. Partly because of engineering reasons, but also because that way, the odds of something odd occurring being noticed are higher.
Yes but in the end, you vote for the government. Corporations are accountable to none but their shareholders. And even then, not so much. So on one hand you have a solution that works imperfectly (it can only work as well as the effort people put into making elected officials accountable) and on the other hand a solution which can never work (a monopoly on a critical resource is a hell of a lot of power for anyone to wield that has profit as his only motive).
People get the government they deserve at least in the medium term. If you vote for people based on the fact that they sound like they believe in lies you would like to be true, you are responsible.
Because linux users are known to be change-adverse technophobes. They cannot comprehend phrases beyond soundbites.
Actually, the KDE4 thing showed me that some linux users are indeed change-adverse technophobes. I guess they are the ones who went to linux from the olden UNIX days. They though it was because of the superior tech, but in fact it was because it allowed them to not change their habits. Some -- through some process that is not entirely clear -- came to KDE3[1]. And KDE3 was not very integrated compared to SC4. basically you used the applications and the shell was sort of hacked-together, did not do anything very clever. Now SC4 is really clever. And your old apps got rewritten, or changed. And the look changed. And actual integration (in terms of sharing information) is attempted. Akonadi, Nepomuk, this is what they are about. You want your MP3 tags known to the desktop search. You want a given file to be identified as coming from some attachment from some person whose name/contact information are known. If you tag a picture with a person you want your mailer to know this person exists when a contact is created.
This is all very hard to do right.
Also the shell cannot be assumed to be only for a desktop. maybe you have a tablet, or a convertible hybrid like the T91MT. And that means your desktop shell must be very adaptable. Is it perfect? No. But it is damn good, and wayyy better than KDE3. Except for those who only wanted a glorified application launcher/windowmanager. But is is only an accident they liked KDE3 in the first place (I expect the apps were too good to pass over).
[1] KDE 1 was a bunch of rewritten X apps. They looked and worked marginally better. KDE2 added some integration, DCOP notably. And the apps looked yet a bit better and KIO was great. KDE3 same thing. In fact, it was a simple port to start with. KDE4 is a completely different beast.
No I'm actually worried that the gov is not meddling enough. I believe that allowing private local monopolies to exist is the sign of a gov gone AWOL. And if you think that the *AA would be happy at the idea that there would be a great number of ISPs each with different policies, you are sorely mistaken.
Basically, ISPs can get away with caps, prioritising content, filtering traffic, because there is not enough competition. Who picks the ISP for mom and pop? the local geek. If he has choice, do you think the *AA-friendly ISP gets chosen?
How do you ensure the existence of a wealth of ISP? Easy: force the network owners to sell bandwidth wholesale with no strings attached. Then there will be competition to create the network, and competition between the ISPs for customers. This is how it works pretty much everywhere but the US and Canada. And guess who has the worse Internet (and telecom in general) of the developed world?
You believe in markets? So do I. You believe the market exists spontaneously and without (sometimes extensive) regulation? If so, I have a bridge on Valles Marineris to sell you.
And independently of the tech issues, you don't want a last mile for-profit monopoly. At least if the gov owns the last mile, they can enforce competition between providers by ensuring fair access.
Because the content of education should not be a political issue. The content of education should reflect the state of understanding in science/history etc.
You may debate the relative importance of various subjects.
You may debate the funding for education.
But in the end, you must demand teachers with masters degrees in their subjects.
You may mandate some set of standards. From some independent body.
But never, ever, must you allow non-specialist to dictate in any way, shape or form what contents are allowable. One cannot, and should not, vote on truth (or the approximation thereof that is science).
College level?? In Europe, teachers have usually masters in their field. At least at the high school level...
I use kdevelop day in and day out. And it is good. Navigation through the code, semantic highlighting, good autocompletion.
Now I don't use a debugger -- cout and valgrind are my tools of choice. So I can't comment on the integration of that.
You realise that the functions you are asking for are OS functions, and not related to the GUI? If you want the beahviours you describe, then use FUSE -- perhaps through kio-fuse.
In dolphin, I have sftp remote locations which appear just like any other folder...
Bullshit.
KDE does not create any folder other than the .kde[4]/ hierarchy, where it stores its settings. Gnome, on the other hand thought it good to have virtual folders that seem like they are folders -- but really reflect the UNIX filesystem in no way.
Basically, you screwed up your home with the help of GNOME, and KDE just showed you the mess you have really made.
As an aside, how anyone can live with the GTK file selector is beyond me.
basically, you agree with me (and I with you), but you don't like that I do not show enough contempt towards the literary minded.
Usually, I have huge problems interacting with them, because they (to me) make no sense. But realise this: there is another, completely different form of bullshit detector, which involves no maths at all.
People who read a lot, especially old and obscure stuff, have a perspective on the public discourse which allows them to realise that a given specious argument had already been considered bogus during the Roman Empire.
Now they will tell you that this argument is bogus because Pliny the younger made fun of it, and it will drive you mad, because the reason the argument is wrong is because it is logically flawed. But it remains that society is much better off with these guys and their bolloney detector than if they had none.
I must also add that the statistical/data driven drivel is somewhat new, and because of that, the literary (as opposed to scientifically) minded are susceptible to it. But you will _never_ convince one of them with logic. You must be able to make the esthetic argument for a proposition to have any impact at all. Personally, I usually can't.
As a final note, it is not because someone sounds sciency that he is. It is the mode of thought which counts -- I have met scientists who clearly have no sense of logic at all.
the PID algorithm is four lines of code. the RST also. But to prove the properties of either, you must understand Z-transforms (which really are Laplace transforms for sampled functions).
You can tune your PID using Ziegler-Nicholls, and that requires absolutely no knowledge of maths. To tune it optimally, you need a very good physical model, and pretty involved maths.
So I don't know what the other guy's argument were, but you might have been both perfectly right.
Although I agree with you about MIT, this is not MIT. These teams are Swiss, and based in Zürich.
And as one guy explains below, the pencil really does fall right off when the rig is stopped. There is rubber, shaped like a cup, so lateral movements can be imparted. But try to balance a pencil in a cup, and you'll see it is just as hard as on your finger.
I disagree: innovation cannot be bought like any other type of labour. This notion rests on the idea of the "inventor" bright, lonely, exceptional.
But this is not how innovations happen. They happen more often than not in labs or at universities. Successful tech companies create campuses. These are necessary for innovation because they provide a place for bright people to meet, discuss, and for ideas to collide and evolve.
In turn, the campuses and universities do not exist in a vacuum: they are supported by the infrastructure and the societies in which they exist. Because you had broadband all your life, because your roads were good, because your schools performed well, because your electricity supply was stable you will want to build on that. Because societies are on the edge of development, this edge gets pushed by innovators.
So-called "advanced" societies do have an advantage over the "developing" ones: their infrastructure is good and reliable and established. Therefore innovation, if funded, will happen there first. But this means high taxes, lots of long-term investment, lots of public funding in education and research. Of course manufacturing will always happen mostly where it is the cheapest but even this can be compensated by innovation and excellent infrastructure.
The other route, the one with no taxes to compensate for higher costs, leads inevitably to success (aka being competitive against China) by transforming you society into one of these cheap developing ones...