I wouldn't suggest this is accurate as fiat currencies fail all the time. The USD has already had some past failures- confederate dollar, 100% gold backed dollar, partial gold backed dollar.
Depends what you call a "failure". If we use too loosey goosey a definition, then bitcoin has already failed ten times more than the USD ever has in a much shorter time span. The worst horrors of 70s stagflation are really nothing compared to the volatility of bitcoin.
The fact is that volatility is a big negative for most people. For some sophisticated people with a largish chunk of capital that they can balance out with a long term view, maybe it hardly matters. The reason you can actually do that kind of balancing is because you have access to excellent liquid assets like the USD. Thus you are implicitly using a double standard, measuring the USD against a very high bar because you know it is real money, and measuring bitcoin against a very low bar because you know it is not.
Besides that whole issue reeking of the Trump-Russia collusion conspiracy theory for which there is still no evidence.
The fact that there are so many overt signs of dishonestly and incompetence bubbling up so early in the term is a problem owned by the Administration, not its detractors. A bit of speculation on the part of the detractors does not invalidate specific named criticisms that can be backed by concrete evidence.
Personally, I doubt actual collusion on the part of Trump himself, but I will keep an open mind to real evidence. But a proper investigation is very likely to throw mud on a lot of his friends and people in the Administration, and possibly a couple indictments to boot; it is right and proper and necessary to purse such an investigation, given just what is known in the public record.
It is not illegal for a president to do such a thing, no, it is merely breaking a solemn promise to an ally. But once we are in the game of breaking promises because we so happen to feel like it, it is difficult to care about the technical issues of the law. The low level leaker can properly assert a strong argument for "justice" as being their motivation, which is more likely to prove admirable under examination than what the president did.
It does not matter what is "right", the president gets away with it. Likewise, it does not matter what is "legal", if the leaker gets away with it. Might make right. Or whatever we get away with is what we get away with.
If investigators can find those leakers, good for them. But if not, why should I care?
With the leaks, what bothers me more isn't the stuff that got leaked out, most of it is fairly common knowledge, it just confirms what we already know. The real problem is why is such mundane stuff classified?
From the point of view of an honest gov't joe, the incentives are such that just stamping stuff secret and letting it be someone else's problem down the road is less than making the effort to fight for properly releasing most information and while keeping a very few select items secret.
Obviously sometimes these things are kept secret with clear less than noble intentions. But really it is the habit that makes such volumes and volumes of secrets easy without anyone batting an eyelash.
If we actually want different behavior, we need to explicitly fund efforts to clean this mess up. Of course, it would take courage to argue for a tiny tax rise to provide better gov't. Far easier to complain and assert that gov't cuts are the answer. Unfortunately, gov't workers put under pressure are more likely to stamp everything secret, not less, and thus the problem gets bigger instead of smaller.
Of course, a genuinely reduction in gov't power might possibly address this issue, but the 537 most important elected officials in DC are completely disinterested in taking up that fight. Keep in mind that merely a superficial reduction in gov't power could easily increase the volume of secrets, for reasons stated above.
IMO the idea of the public blockchain is very powerful, and that is an idea that will not die, until we meet our internet security apocalypse in the form of quantum computers destroy all known practical encryption.
Bitcoin itself could plausibly be replaced by a competitor that has enough of its positive points, and a different mix of negatives.
Which is to say, there is no intrinsic floor to the price of the bitcoin, which is a huge problem is you are a rational actor that views volatility negatively. Not all rational actors put a significant negative on volatility, but most of us do.
In comparison, the USD does have a practical floor -- short of an apocalyptic event, the likelihood of the USD dropping more than 50% in my lifetime is approximately zero. Of course, in any apocalyptic scenario that hammers the USD more than 50%, bitcoin is very likely to go down to exactly zero value.
There is bitcoin acceptance and there is bitcoin usage. The two are not the same, although when you a scrappy itty bitty currency fighting for recognition, the difference may not seem so important.
Bitcoin can be accepted and be beaten out by competing currencies. There will definitely be digital blockchain competitors in the future. Plus once we accept that bitcoin is a currency is suddenly is compared directly with the big boys, for both good and ill. Consider the USD has approximately 100% "acceptance" across the entire globe, yet no one assumes that global economic growth guarantees anything about the price of the USD.
...One is that the tests had a cultural bias. This can be as simple as people with English as a second language not understanding the instructions, or just lack of familiarity with the types of questions being asked. Another is neglecting the contribution of environment: the testees may in fact be less intelligent, but because of impoverished childhood rather than inferior genes...
If general intelligence were really a thing with powerful correlations to all kinds of intelligence, as advertised, then we could use any kind of learning test to determine IQ. Such as....
Dancing!!!
To determine who are the Alphas, we should just line up all the 18 year olds in the gym, teach them a new dance routine, video tape it, and have judges pick out the best dancers to bless with the prizes.
Of course, such will never happen because we all know that IQ tests are culturally bias. We want them to be culturally bias, and then pretend otherwise. The process of creating an intelligence test involves making value judgements about which skills are more important than other skills, a task usually performed by PhDs with little life experience outside of academia. What a shock that skills that help academic success are declared better than others skills!
It not that I doubt that there are inheritable factors, but the field of intelligence testing has a long history of corruption by "marketing speak". I have doubts such has changed much at all.
Aside from a human likely remaining in the loop; TFA seems to overstate the urgency of the 'who screwed up?' question.
...
There's also the fact that, unless a doctor more or less straight up murders a patient; the 'blame' in a financial sense tends to get kicked up the chain to whoever allowed the doctor to practice...
Indeed.
Doctors probably get most diagnoses correct, mainly because most people are sick with common problems. When it comes to non-common causes, doctors get it wrong, probably every day. I would bet that doctors are basically making wild arsed guesses for 10% of the people who walk in the door, really nothing better than even a very crappy AI could do, and those guesses are often wrong.
Does it matter? To the patient, yes, obviously, but the majority of patients end of getting at least a bit better regardless of what the doctor does. Nobody in the medical field particularly cares about a patient suffering due to a wrong human doctor diagnoses unless that patient dies, and an autopsy shows an egregious error.
There are no consequences. There is often no "truth table" to better train your human (or AI) doctor without a corpse.
So when we consider AI doctors getting it wrong, we have to put it in the context of how human doctors are judged.
... If I remember right, the vast majority of email on her email server that ended up being classified was stuff sent to her. In that case, it would be up to the sender to use the right system based on the security level. Yes, using the State Department email servers for everything would have eliminated this risk. She was at most negligent when it came to the email server.
Of course, it is an error to set up your subordinates such that they will be in technical breach of security for what is really the minor mistake of using the wrong email address to send something they may or may not be certain contains classified info in the moment. The fact is she was highly successful in applying her strategy such that her own work was appropriately secured, even though a reasonable definition of highly successful may fall short of perfect. Wisdom informs us such was an unnecessarily complicated method was inevitably going to be imperfect, and one cannot control the minor mistakes a host of subordinates may make. Clinton was hired for skills other than being savvy in setting up work processes involving technology.
You do not need a deep state, when the voters are willing accomplices in choosing to believe that simple answers will solve a very complex problem. If you need to believe a simple answer, then you have set yourself up into being fooled that there are people in Black Hats that are the real problem.
Thus politicians, just like the voters who elected them, are easily led to believe fables told to them by the House of Saud and Israel. There is no pushback from the voting public, so why would the pols be expected to learn from their errors on this topic? The closest thing we have ever seen a pushback is when Obama beat out Clinton for the nomination, where dissatisfaction with mainstream support for oil wars in some corners of the left gave a boost to Obama to build some momentum.
Clinton was making a point in a very slightly subtle and humorous way, trusting that people would be intelligent and honest enough to understand it, rather than go apeshit in a dishonest attempt to manufacture evident of her dishonesty.
But since you did not make the grade, I will spell it out for you. Clinton does not know technology and actually avoided using it for anything that really mattered -- I got almost as much email at my work account while employed as a middling important fellow in a software company in a year as Clinton did in four at the top of a massive organization. Clinton does her real work face to face and with physical paper, so she expected that she herself would cause no security problems with her email arrangements -- such was incorrect but not crazy. Understandable, she was not willing to admit she was like a doddering grandma when it comes to all details of tech. As for wiping a drive, she has no idea how to do that even if she wanted to, which is the point of her humorous "with a cloth". She left instructions to professionals to do the right thing with the drive, and trusted they knew what to do.
I am certain that Apple does not expect to save a dime with local manufacturing, and knows it will cost them more than a few dimes in the short run. What they hope to achieve is the saving of time in development feedback loops, and getting to final product to the most valuable market sooner. That will make Apple more profitable, even if it will not save them money per se.
Once you get past the business of running scared that a competitor will steal your customers by charging a few pennies less, you will notice that some of your products would be more profitable if only you could get the latest and greatest models into the hands of customers sooner. Fast to market not only is kinder to your capital costs, but makes you more responsive and effective at iterating your product to compete for future customers. Apple, as a company that own the most profitable swath of a very valuable luxury market, can win big by not pinching pennies, if done judiciously. Apple is hardly the only company that has noticed that a little more cost is acceptable if you can shrink the time scale of your product life cycle, and thus can compete more effectively for the more profitable premium markets.
I may have been insufficiently clear, but the idea was sketched out. You need to actually look at the total cost of normal passenger cars of various types, where the costs of the batteries are not hidden under the massive luxury premium or some other kind of subsidy.
Furthermore, I think that people are shortchanging the real competitor to pure electric passenger cars in the foreseeable future, sitting right under their nose: hybrids.
Hybrid cars are a superb technology that gain most of the advantages of batteries (regenerative breaking, power for short accelerations) and the most of the advantages of gasoline (extremely high energy density per weight for high range, already existing infrastructure). Such is not going to be easily pushed aside, until the numbers really favor pure electric. As the battery technology improves, the hybrids improve, too, even if not quite on the same curve. It will take a major leap in battery technology to make electric vehicles clearly superior for typical customers in the mainstream market (or many, many years of incremental improvements).
Will we get there? Probably. At least for passenger cars. Claims about 8 years in the future are complete balderdash IMNSHO.
In terms of non-passenger cars, there is still too much starry-eyed dreaming about electric vehicles that overlook the very real reasons fossil fuel engines are so successful. Electric vehicles will nibble at these markets over time, but there is never going a sudden shift, especially once all electric passenger vehicles are successful enough to put downward pressure on fossil fuel prices. We are not going to see lithium ion batteries power any 18 wheeler hauling ten tons of cargo through hilly countryside in my lifetime. If those big rigs go the way of the dinosaur, it will be because of a reinvention of our national transport infrastructure that is not necessarily going to be specifically tied to all electric vehicle technology. Such reinventions can happen, but it is silly to predict as much until you have seen the 21st or 22nd century equivalent of the "iron horse" actually built.
The physics is not there yet, but 5 or 10 or 15 years in the future we might well be there. Batteries are improving but the manufacturing cost of the batteries themselves still make the cost of electricity to charge them a round off error. So your numbers are incomplete and misleading, the cost of the batteries hidden by choosing a luxury vehicle as the data point.
Good point. It would be worth comparing gross revenues of various sectors of the economy and see the long term trends. I would bet that tech would weigh in quite well, especially when growth trends are considered. But the stock price is really the wrong place to look.
What's the false negative rate for people who never go to the doctor and never monitor their heart? If you are only at the doctor's office for 10 minutes a year and the doctor is only checking your heart rate for 60 seconds under regular resting conditions, then what is the chance that they will catch an abnormal heart rate that may only come up when you're exercising or sleeping?
They will put on an EKG, and usually find nothing, because many arrhythmias are in transient episodes . Then, if you are female they will decide the problem is you are too emotional, and emotional stress caused some minor heart racing. Protestations that you were calm and almost falling asleep when your heart racing strangely left you out of breath -- that is why you are scared and emotional now, will only prove to the doctor you are liar who probably needs to see a psychiatrist about anti-depressants.
No, I am not really kidding. I know more than one woman with a real medical condition this has happened to. I wish I were kidding.
Getting back to your point, yes, the false negative rate in a doctor's office is probably very high for many serious conditions.
The real answer is that the doctor should put you on a heart monitor for two weeks, such mobile devices exist now that are accurate and not expensive. I would never trust an Apple Watch, but I would take a warning from such a device as worthy of further investigation.
Depends what we mean by "fail". If we choose a loosey goosey enough definition, say, one when we can always beg for a longer timeline, then doesn't Agile almost always succeed, too? Whether anything is wrong with any or every methodology becomes unfalsifiable.
The pedigree of traditional methodologies is known: they were adopted from the construction industry, where delays could happen, but the expectation was that nothing novel or requiring great intelligence would be required to finish the project once work had begun. Software engineering as practiced in the industry does not live up the standards of a mature field like civil engineering. In the real world, big companies do sometimes write 9 figure checks for major computer system overhauls that end of delivering almost nothing -- this kind of thing gets swept under the rug as sundry ongoing improvements. But if a city spent $100 million for a completed bridge but had nothing to show for it but a few pretty posts, I think that would make national headlines.
If you have a governance system whereby individual liberty is the crowning jewel, it leads to social constructs that function for everyone equally. We don't have this anymore. People can riot and prevent others from speaking freely, and that is now "acceptable" and not squashed by police.
First of all, that terrible situation you describe has always been the norm in the USA. For most of our history, it was open season on "uppity" people with an unfashionable amount of melanin who opened their mouth, and the police backed the terrorists who used mayhem and murder to stop their speech. Now that a very few white people are suffering 1% of the pain that minorities were expected to smile and get along through since forever, the problem that the state does not constantly adequately intervene to protect unpopular opinions is suddenly an existential crisis.
Agile as practiced is an excuse. Terrible idea to give management an excuse to just 'fake it'.
Agile is built on the assumption you have a group of reasonably competent people who are willing to be reasonably honest with themselves and each other. When that is not the case, Agile fails; but that is not really a big deal as a practical matter, because the non-Agile approaches also fail under those conditions.
Every process philosophy X falls back on "You did not fail because of X. You failed because you did not X hard enough!" Insert: "Agile", "Waterfall", whatever.
What actually matters is if you have enough insight to recognize something more Waterfall is more likely to succeed by critical measures on this particular project than Agile, and vice versa. There are, for example, important technically difficult architectural decisions that do not benefit from slicing and dicing something big and hard into little increments of work to put on many 3X5 cards taped to a team process whiteboard.
The system would have to have a model of group-allegiance and group-think and group-speak etc. so that it could properly discount it.
Not only would it need to have an excellent model of group-* bias, but this AI will have to be smart enough to detect the AIs designed to fool it with manufactured data that appears to have little group bias.
Our computers today are 1000 times more powerful and solve the same problems as before. So what has changed? Our efficiency in coding as dropped and we are not using the resources at hand to make better solutions but sloppier ones that require less effort on our part but more computational overhead.
We have become lazy and complacent and we call it progress. Until our programs can optimize to the level that we can generate by hand, I would not deem to consider our current state of programming languages an improvement in anything other than readability.
While I agree with your criticisms of TFA, I think it not quite correct to assume that "require less effort on our part" or "readability" are unimportant pieces of the picture. As I see it, software has multiple kinds of unavoidable costs: cost to design, cost to implement/code, cost to test, cost to maintain, cost in hardware resources to run.
Using a high-level language may increase the last cost, while reducing all the other kinds of cost. That may well be the wise tradeoff.
Of course, that sounds good until you have unacceptably bad performance and no one in the room has a clue how to fix it, other than wait for the hardware fairy to make the stuff faster.
Pretending she could easily have done better does not prove anything.
She was hired with fanfare, as if she would walk on water and send Yahoo stock back into the stratosphere. That is the song and dance for 99% of new CEOs put in such positions. Was she supposed to run with a different script?
I do not think it is fair to say she did a bad job, unless you really believe it would be easy for the Board to hire someone else who would have done substantially better. Most CEOs in similar situations do no better, after all. Yahoo was not an easy company to save.
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I wouldn't suggest this is accurate as fiat currencies fail all the time. The USD has already had some past failures- confederate dollar, 100% gold backed dollar, partial gold backed dollar.
Depends what you call a "failure". If we use too loosey goosey a definition, then bitcoin has already failed ten times more than the USD ever has in a much shorter time span. The worst horrors of 70s stagflation are really nothing compared to the volatility of bitcoin.
The fact is that volatility is a big negative for most people. For some sophisticated people with a largish chunk of capital that they can balance out with a long term view, maybe it hardly matters. The reason you can actually do that kind of balancing is because you have access to excellent liquid assets like the USD. Thus you are implicitly using a double standard, measuring the USD against a very high bar because you know it is real money, and measuring bitcoin against a very low bar because you know it is not.
Besides that whole issue reeking of the Trump-Russia collusion conspiracy theory for which there is still no evidence.
The fact that there are so many overt signs of dishonestly and incompetence bubbling up so early in the term is a problem owned by the Administration, not its detractors. A bit of speculation on the part of the detractors does not invalidate specific named criticisms that can be backed by concrete evidence.
Personally, I doubt actual collusion on the part of Trump himself, but I will keep an open mind to real evidence. But a proper investigation is very likely to throw mud on a lot of his friends and people in the Administration, and possibly a couple indictments to boot; it is right and proper and necessary to purse such an investigation, given just what is known in the public record.
It is not illegal for a president to do such a thing, no, it is merely breaking a solemn promise to an ally. But once we are in the game of breaking promises because we so happen to feel like it, it is difficult to care about the technical issues of the law. The low level leaker can properly assert a strong argument for "justice" as being their motivation, which is more likely to prove admirable under examination than what the president did.
It does not matter what is "right", the president gets away with it. Likewise, it does not matter what is "legal", if the leaker gets away with it. Might make right. Or whatever we get away with is what we get away with.
If investigators can find those leakers, good for them. But if not, why should I care?
With the leaks, what bothers me more isn't the stuff that got leaked out, most of it is fairly common knowledge, it just confirms what we already know. The real problem is why is such mundane stuff classified?
From the point of view of an honest gov't joe, the incentives are such that just stamping stuff secret and letting it be someone else's problem down the road is less than making the effort to fight for properly releasing most information and while keeping a very few select items secret.
Obviously sometimes these things are kept secret with clear less than noble intentions. But really it is the habit that makes such volumes and volumes of secrets easy without anyone batting an eyelash.
If we actually want different behavior, we need to explicitly fund efforts to clean this mess up. Of course, it would take courage to argue for a tiny tax rise to provide better gov't. Far easier to complain and assert that gov't cuts are the answer. Unfortunately, gov't workers put under pressure are more likely to stamp everything secret, not less, and thus the problem gets bigger instead of smaller.
Of course, a genuinely reduction in gov't power might possibly address this issue, but the 537 most important elected officials in DC are completely disinterested in taking up that fight. Keep in mind that merely a superficial reduction in gov't power could easily increase the volume of secrets, for reasons stated above.
IMO the idea of the public blockchain is very powerful, and that is an idea that will not die, until we meet our internet security apocalypse in the form of quantum computers destroy all known practical encryption.
Bitcoin itself could plausibly be replaced by a competitor that has enough of its positive points, and a different mix of negatives.
False equivalence. There is no perfect "currency", but all currencies being imperfect does not make them all the "same" in any meaningful way.
Which is to say, there is no intrinsic floor to the price of the bitcoin, which is a huge problem is you are a rational actor that views volatility negatively. Not all rational actors put a significant negative on volatility, but most of us do.
In comparison, the USD does have a practical floor -- short of an apocalyptic event, the likelihood of the USD dropping more than 50% in my lifetime is approximately zero. Of course, in any apocalyptic scenario that hammers the USD more than 50%, bitcoin is very likely to go down to exactly zero value.
There is bitcoin acceptance and there is bitcoin usage. The two are not the same, although when you a scrappy itty bitty currency fighting for recognition, the difference may not seem so important.
Bitcoin can be accepted and be beaten out by competing currencies. There will definitely be digital blockchain competitors in the future. Plus once we accept that bitcoin is a currency is suddenly is compared directly with the big boys, for both good and ill. Consider the USD has approximately 100% "acceptance" across the entire globe, yet no one assumes that global economic growth guarantees anything about the price of the USD.
...One is that the tests had a cultural bias. This can be as simple as people with English as a second language not understanding the instructions, or just lack of familiarity with the types of questions being asked. Another is neglecting the contribution of environment: the testees may in fact be less intelligent, but because of impoverished childhood rather than inferior genes...
If general intelligence were really a thing with powerful correlations to all kinds of intelligence, as advertised, then we could use any kind of learning test to determine IQ. Such as....
Dancing!!!
To determine who are the Alphas, we should just line up all the 18 year olds in the gym, teach them a new dance routine, video tape it, and have judges pick out the best dancers to bless with the prizes.
Of course, such will never happen because we all know that IQ tests are culturally bias. We want them to be culturally bias, and then pretend otherwise. The process of creating an intelligence test involves making value judgements about which skills are more important than other skills, a task usually performed by PhDs with little life experience outside of academia. What a shock that skills that help academic success are declared better than others skills!
It not that I doubt that there are inheritable factors, but the field of intelligence testing has a long history of corruption by "marketing speak". I have doubts such has changed much at all.
Speed completion is also strongly related to familiarity with similar questions/problems, and thus cannot be separated from culture.
Aside from a human likely remaining in the loop; TFA seems to overstate the urgency of the 'who screwed up?' question.
...
There's also the fact that, unless a doctor more or less straight up murders a patient; the 'blame' in a financial sense tends to get kicked up the chain to whoever allowed the doctor to practice...
Indeed.
Doctors probably get most diagnoses correct, mainly because most people are sick with common problems. When it comes to non-common causes, doctors get it wrong, probably every day. I would bet that doctors are basically making wild arsed guesses for 10% of the people who walk in the door, really nothing better than even a very crappy AI could do, and those guesses are often wrong.
Does it matter? To the patient, yes, obviously, but the majority of patients end of getting at least a bit better regardless of what the doctor does. Nobody in the medical field particularly cares about a patient suffering due to a wrong human doctor diagnoses unless that patient dies, and an autopsy shows an egregious error. There are no consequences. There is often no "truth table" to better train your human (or AI) doctor without a corpse.
So when we consider AI doctors getting it wrong, we have to put it in the context of how human doctors are judged.
... If I remember right, the vast majority of email on her email server that ended up being classified was stuff sent to her. In that case, it would be up to the sender to use the right system based on the security level. Yes, using the State Department email servers for everything would have eliminated this risk. She was at most negligent when it came to the email server.
Of course, it is an error to set up your subordinates such that they will be in technical breach of security for what is really the minor mistake of using the wrong email address to send something they may or may not be certain contains classified info in the moment. The fact is she was highly successful in applying her strategy such that her own work was appropriately secured, even though a reasonable definition of highly successful may fall short of perfect. Wisdom informs us such was an unnecessarily complicated method was inevitably going to be imperfect, and one cannot control the minor mistakes a host of subordinates may make. Clinton was hired for skills other than being savvy in setting up work processes involving technology.
You do not need a deep state, when the voters are willing accomplices in choosing to believe that simple answers will solve a very complex problem. If you need to believe a simple answer, then you have set yourself up into being fooled that there are people in Black Hats that are the real problem.
Thus politicians, just like the voters who elected them, are easily led to believe fables told to them by the House of Saud and Israel. There is no pushback from the voting public, so why would the pols be expected to learn from their errors on this topic? The closest thing we have ever seen a pushback is when Obama beat out Clinton for the nomination, where dissatisfaction with mainstream support for oil wars in some corners of the left gave a boost to Obama to build some momentum.
Clinton was making a point in a very slightly subtle and humorous way, trusting that people would be intelligent and honest enough to understand it, rather than go apeshit in a dishonest attempt to manufacture evident of her dishonesty.
But since you did not make the grade, I will spell it out for you. Clinton does not know technology and actually avoided using it for anything that really mattered -- I got almost as much email at my work account while employed as a middling important fellow in a software company in a year as Clinton did in four at the top of a massive organization. Clinton does her real work face to face and with physical paper, so she expected that she herself would cause no security problems with her email arrangements -- such was incorrect but not crazy. Understandable, she was not willing to admit she was like a doddering grandma when it comes to all details of tech. As for wiping a drive, she has no idea how to do that even if she wanted to, which is the point of her humorous "with a cloth". She left instructions to professionals to do the right thing with the drive, and trusted they knew what to do.
I am certain that Apple does not expect to save a dime with local manufacturing, and knows it will cost them more than a few dimes in the short run. What they hope to achieve is the saving of time in development feedback loops, and getting to final product to the most valuable market sooner. That will make Apple more profitable, even if it will not save them money per se.
Once you get past the business of running scared that a competitor will steal your customers by charging a few pennies less, you will notice that some of your products would be more profitable if only you could get the latest and greatest models into the hands of customers sooner. Fast to market not only is kinder to your capital costs, but makes you more responsive and effective at iterating your product to compete for future customers. Apple, as a company that own the most profitable swath of a very valuable luxury market, can win big by not pinching pennies, if done judiciously. Apple is hardly the only company that has noticed that a little more cost is acceptable if you can shrink the time scale of your product life cycle, and thus can compete more effectively for the more profitable premium markets.
I may have been insufficiently clear, but the idea was sketched out. You need to actually look at the total cost of normal passenger cars of various types, where the costs of the batteries are not hidden under the massive luxury premium or some other kind of subsidy.
Furthermore, I think that people are shortchanging the real competitor to pure electric passenger cars in the foreseeable future, sitting right under their nose: hybrids.
Hybrid cars are a superb technology that gain most of the advantages of batteries (regenerative breaking, power for short accelerations) and the most of the advantages of gasoline (extremely high energy density per weight for high range, already existing infrastructure). Such is not going to be easily pushed aside, until the numbers really favor pure electric. As the battery technology improves, the hybrids improve, too, even if not quite on the same curve. It will take a major leap in battery technology to make electric vehicles clearly superior for typical customers in the mainstream market (or many, many years of incremental improvements).
Will we get there? Probably. At least for passenger cars. Claims about 8 years in the future are complete balderdash IMNSHO.
In terms of non-passenger cars, there is still too much starry-eyed dreaming about electric vehicles that overlook the very real reasons fossil fuel engines are so successful. Electric vehicles will nibble at these markets over time, but there is never going a sudden shift, especially once all electric passenger vehicles are successful enough to put downward pressure on fossil fuel prices. We are not going to see lithium ion batteries power any 18 wheeler hauling ten tons of cargo through hilly countryside in my lifetime. If those big rigs go the way of the dinosaur, it will be because of a reinvention of our national transport infrastructure that is not necessarily going to be specifically tied to all electric vehicle technology. Such reinventions can happen, but it is silly to predict as much until you have seen the 21st or 22nd century equivalent of the "iron horse" actually built.
The physics is not there yet, but 5 or 10 or 15 years in the future we might well be there. Batteries are improving but the manufacturing cost of the batteries themselves still make the cost of electricity to charge them a round off error. So your numbers are incomplete and misleading, the cost of the batteries hidden by choosing a luxury vehicle as the data point.
Good point. It would be worth comparing gross revenues of various sectors of the economy and see the long term trends. I would bet that tech would weigh in quite well, especially when growth trends are considered. But the stock price is really the wrong place to look.
What's the false negative rate for people who never go to the doctor and never monitor their heart? If you are only at the doctor's office for 10 minutes a year and the doctor is only checking your heart rate for 60 seconds under regular resting conditions, then what is the chance that they will catch an abnormal heart rate that may only come up when you're exercising or sleeping?
They will put on an EKG, and usually find nothing, because many arrhythmias are in transient episodes . Then, if you are female they will decide the problem is you are too emotional, and emotional stress caused some minor heart racing. Protestations that you were calm and almost falling asleep when your heart racing strangely left you out of breath -- that is why you are scared and emotional now, will only prove to the doctor you are liar who probably needs to see a psychiatrist about anti-depressants.
No, I am not really kidding. I know more than one woman with a real medical condition this has happened to. I wish I were kidding.
Getting back to your point, yes, the false negative rate in a doctor's office is probably very high for many serious conditions.
The real answer is that the doctor should put you on a heart monitor for two weeks, such mobile devices exist now that are accurate and not expensive. I would never trust an Apple Watch, but I would take a warning from such a device as worthy of further investigation.
Depends what we mean by "fail". If we choose a loosey goosey enough definition, say, one when we can always beg for a longer timeline, then doesn't Agile almost always succeed, too? Whether anything is wrong with any or every methodology becomes unfalsifiable.
The pedigree of traditional methodologies is known: they were adopted from the construction industry, where delays could happen, but the expectation was that nothing novel or requiring great intelligence would be required to finish the project once work had begun. Software engineering as practiced in the industry does not live up the standards of a mature field like civil engineering. In the real world, big companies do sometimes write 9 figure checks for major computer system overhauls that end of delivering almost nothing -- this kind of thing gets swept under the rug as sundry ongoing improvements. But if a city spent $100 million for a completed bridge but had nothing to show for it but a few pretty posts, I think that would make national headlines.
If you have a governance system whereby individual liberty is the crowning jewel, it leads to social constructs that function for everyone equally. We don't have this anymore. People can riot and prevent others from speaking freely, and that is now "acceptable" and not squashed by police.
First of all, that terrible situation you describe has always been the norm in the USA. For most of our history, it was open season on "uppity" people with an unfashionable amount of melanin who opened their mouth, and the police backed the terrorists who used mayhem and murder to stop their speech. Now that a very few white people are suffering 1% of the pain that minorities were expected to smile and get along through since forever, the problem that the state does not constantly adequately intervene to protect unpopular opinions is suddenly an existential crisis.
Agile as practiced is an excuse. Terrible idea to give management an excuse to just 'fake it'.
Agile is built on the assumption you have a group of reasonably competent people who are willing to be reasonably honest with themselves and each other. When that is not the case, Agile fails; but that is not really a big deal as a practical matter, because the non-Agile approaches also fail under those conditions.
Every process philosophy X falls back on "You did not fail because of X. You failed because you did not X hard enough!" Insert: "Agile", "Waterfall", whatever.
What actually matters is if you have enough insight to recognize something more Waterfall is more likely to succeed by critical measures on this particular project than Agile, and vice versa. There are, for example, important technically difficult architectural decisions that do not benefit from slicing and dicing something big and hard into little increments of work to put on many 3X5 cards taped to a team process whiteboard.
The system would have to have a model of group-allegiance and group-think and group-speak etc. so that it could properly discount it.
Not only would it need to have an excellent model of group-* bias, but this AI will have to be smart enough to detect the AIs designed to fool it with manufactured data that appears to have little group bias.
Our computers today are 1000 times more powerful and solve the same problems as before. So what has changed? Our efficiency in coding as dropped and we are not using the resources at hand to make better solutions but sloppier ones that require less effort on our part but more computational overhead. We have become lazy and complacent and we call it progress. Until our programs can optimize to the level that we can generate by hand, I would not deem to consider our current state of programming languages an improvement in anything other than readability.
While I agree with your criticisms of TFA, I think it not quite correct to assume that "require less effort on our part" or "readability" are unimportant pieces of the picture. As I see it, software has multiple kinds of unavoidable costs: cost to design, cost to implement/code, cost to test, cost to maintain, cost in hardware resources to run.
Using a high-level language may increase the last cost, while reducing all the other kinds of cost. That may well be the wise tradeoff.
Of course, that sounds good until you have unacceptably bad performance and no one in the room has a clue how to fix it, other than wait for the hardware fairy to make the stuff faster.
Pretending she could easily have done better does not prove anything.
She was hired with fanfare, as if she would walk on water and send Yahoo stock back into the stratosphere. That is the song and dance for 99% of new CEOs put in such positions. Was she supposed to run with a different script?
I do not think it is fair to say she did a bad job, unless you really believe it would be easy for the Board to hire someone else who would have done substantially better. Most CEOs in similar situations do no better, after all. Yahoo was not an easy company to save.