I wonder how many of these are upgrades. There is some evidence to indicate that people are selling their used phones. It could be that people are simply trying to get the phone while the getting is good. One reason may be that they want to maximize the chances that they can get the latest Android. If the sales are not to new users of converts from iPhone, it really does not matter.
I like the Fire because of size and price. I bought a refub for $140 as an alternative for time when the iPad was too big, such as late night reading. It was money well spent. The Fire is a well designed Android device, makes little effort to be a iPad, but is integrated well with Amazon content. I don't know if I would be interested in a small iPad.
The only problem i have with the Fire is the battery life and the choice of USB. I only charge my devices overnight, and mostly they can last all day. Yet the Fire often is not able to last all day, even if minimal use. I have seen battery reports as little as three or four hours. This is unacceptable and make the fire not suitable as a primary device. I know the issue is the wireless, but really, am I going to manually turn on the wireless as I need it and off when I don't? If they are going to have a new Fire they need to have a rated battery life of at least 10 hours, not the current 8.
Innovation is generally understood to be a signifiant and creative improvement on an existing product. So the touch tone on a phone was an innovation. The transistorization of radio was an innovation. The Apple II was an innovation. All these took an invention or process and applied them to an existing product.
The problem with innovation, or paradigm, or efficiency, in business is that it is sometimes seen as just a magical way to quickly make some money. The company is failing, we need a paradigm shift. The product is not selling, we need a innovative solution. The assembly line is not working, we need efficiency cuts. To a person who is not going to think deeply about solutions, only results, these are easy words to throw around to make it look like something is happening. If I am the boss and i am asking people to think outside the box, to put a new coat of paint on a product, to fire 10% of the line workers, then I am doing something and maybe I won't get fired myself.
Actually it is. As much as I hate to admit it, MS actually made the innovative phone. As has been noted the problem with the iPhone is that at the end of they day, it is a $2000 phone. With Android on sale at Virgin and Boost and Cricket, all one needs is $200 to start, and then scrap together $50 every month, if you can. Android also has the inexpensive unlimited data plans and tethering plans which provides cheap internet. I know many people who have android phones because it provides cheap internet to watch movies. MS and Apple does not have this.
Not all Android phones are cheap, but Android is targeting the low end of the market so it can claim high sales volume. It is also clear that, unlike MS, many Android manufacturers are not putting a lot of thought in the UI for the phone. As mentioned, most of the effort is to provide cheap cell service after the sale.
And this cannot be repeated enough. HTC is reportedly paying MS $5 largely because Android is based on Linux and MS thinks it owns Linux, even though all legal battle indicates Linux is free from such infringement. OTOH we now have a legal decision that says Apple owns these patents for about another 15 years, and HTC is now crying fowl that it is unfair they have to pay license fees? WTF!
The quality of the MS product is irrelevant. For Linux on the desktop to be competitive two things would have to happen. First MS would have to banned from making deals with OEM that made using other OS more expensive. Second Linux would have to have the ability to provide alternative revenue streams to the OEM as well as marketing support.
The reality is, at the end of the day, unless one is building a machine, MS is the cheap option. This is it's legacy. People went to MS because it was the acceptable cheap, often effectively free, option. When one buys a machine the MS is cheaper. Often software is free with a license from work. A Linux machine is often going to be no more expensive, but will require aded expense to build. And won't run MS Office.
But that is not the case. It has been a traditional in cultures that value health. For instance, we also know that there are foods that may may not be good because it is contaminated. Imagine the deaths that would be prevented if we followed slaughter practices where crap was not regularly spatter all over our meat. In any case we remove tonsils, appendixes, breasts, all the time if they become a problem. We do not say that we are just built that way.
Then of course there is evidence that circumcision can reduce the risk of STDs. This probably is no concern for a person who is monogamous for a lifetime, or celibate, but if one is thinking about a kids future, perhaps between the ages of 13-18, it may be a concern. Of course the response to this is that uncut sex is better, but without controlled studies before and after who really knows. Like size, maybe it is in the eye of the beholder.
The current situation is probably ok. Give parents information, let them decide. I mean we pay for men to have when they get old, why not give them the option to maybe a bit healthier when they are young.
When I hear that trial by jury is not needed in a particular case, what I hear is that a particular defendant has not peers. In this case Samsung is such a high elite, that it should not be subject to laws of the common person. We hear this quite a bit when an elite is torn down and forced to live by the rule of law.
There is a lot of engineering to go with the physics. For instance there two cars that both average about 35 horsepower per cylinder, or bhp, or whatever the measure is. One is a four cylinder and the is a six cylinder, and half as much the mass. In the city the six cylinder can be quite a bit worse on fuel consumption, as both cars are meant to be driven aggressively, and six cylinders is, well, six cylinders. OTOH, on the highway for a few hours, both will hover around 30 mpg, for the average of the trip. Even for short trip, say 30 minutes, the difference will only be 10-20%.
So yes there are places where added mass is a significant burden. But if we are talking about a engine to convert the potential energy of petroleum to kinetic energy of a moving car, there is a quite a bit that can be done in terms of making that more efficient.
15 years ago I knew a few senior programmers that did this. Like the current case it was internal software that would never be distributed to external customers. It all ran in house, was updated frequently, so overall quality was not as important as rapid development. Serious bugs could be recalled instantly, less serious could be rolled out in day or two. Which is to say I think pair programming, if that is what the kids are calling it now, might be very workable for certain people and certain situations, but we will have to see if it is all the rage in a few years.
I would say as soon as they went into commodity PCs they were dead. HP has traditionally been an unfocused firm, but they tended to make unique and very useful products that were very competitive. Even their printers, which are basically just repackaged cannon printers, managed to end up as unique products with very good workflow. There was nothing interesting about the commodity PC other than it was cheap. I am surrounded by HP printers and computers, but the price is so low that I can't imagine them making any money off it. Maybe printer toner, but HP has gone so crazy over the prices that it is just not cost effective to use their products.
As has been posted here many times, the life expectancy form birth has increased greatly, presumably due to better prenatal care and vaccines, while the life expectancy of an adult has not increased much at all over the past hundred years of so. So while a baby might now expect to live to 80 years old instead of just 40 max, a person who had managed to live to 20 could have expected to live to over 50, is not as good off since the life expectancy is now the mid 70's. Of course now it is more likely that a person who reaches 80 will reach 90, but it is clear that the gains on increasing life expectancy at adulthood is not so great.
It appears that we will have to use a different methodology to increase actual life expectancy, instead of just decreasing childhood deaths. The fact is, at least in the US, things are not looking grim. We are throwing billions of dollars at keeping old people alive, and maybe it has resulted in a 50% increase in life expectancy, but for what people are wanted we are going to have see gains that at least triple the current gains.
I believe that medical technology is not going to do. Attacking a cancer or a heart problem, fighting the symptoms, is a losing battle. We will have it to attack it from basic biology. Using screening and artificial incubation to determine and properly incubate the best blastocyst. Deficiencies will have to be corrected during development of the fetus and infant. At that point medicine can be used to solve any problems that develop in later life, which will be few as the person will be genetically counterindicated to such problems.
Which is to say it is much easier to be an obstructionist or a destroyer or even just copy than it is to create something innovative.
Here is my thoughts. While I am not saying anything about the products, I am always suspicious of buying products that are represented by non professional sales staff. My feeling is that if one has a product, or brand, and it is policy to just let any violent convicted criminal from off the street represent your brand or product, then what does that say about the supply chain, the quality control, the aftermarket support, of that product? It may be good, but it may not be, and clearly there is not a lot of concern beyond just regular product liability issues.
So this is what a good manager does and how a firm making innovative products should be different than Anonymous. The manager should gather a group of people and provide a structure in which each person is going to be able to maximize creativity and support from the other members while minimizing destructive interactions. This is going to make some of the members mad because they want to get their way and some people don't like it when other are doing something they don't agree with. In anonymous you get to destroy others who don't share you point of view. In a productive environment you have to assume the manager knows what is going on, or leave. The manager may not know what is going on, in which case why would one want to work at a firm with incompetent manager. Starts ones own firm.
Second, the manager will make sure people are operating a little outside of their conforts zone. That means doing a little bit to grow as a person, a designer, a software developer. Not always doing everything in the exact same way. That is how one effects change. Not by destroying things one does not like, but by supplying superior original alternatives. I am thinking the iBM selectric typewriter which replaced the traditional individual keybar with a golf ball design. Sure something like it had been though up 100 years ago, but the IBM had to push outside the confort zone to get the new typewrite out. Or Apple with the GUI interface and cartoon trash can. A toy that would never work.
Museums such as these though valuable can be a tough sell. When I am in the area, i visit the The National Museum of Nuclear Science & History. It has a similar problem in terms of audience and focus. One thing I hope the tesla works on is a good endowment. Mas I found out when a job I was at tried to donate something to the Smithsonian, they were happy to take it, but only with an endowment. Keeping artifacts safe is not cheap.
Have you ever owned a console or a game. Maybe the original Atari where one could do quite bait. But own a game? If the ROM was damaged ther was no breplacement for cost of parts. You boughts a new one at full cost or a used on. The reason you bought a console was because it was cheaper due to future profits from the ecosystem. If we have anything to blame for current walled garden, it is the console.
There is a small group of people who want to control their computer and software. Those people have a computer and run OSS and hopefully contribute if only in a small way. The rest just want to get email and look at pictures of cats on ihaschhezburger. the question is how to sell this really overly complex device to them.
Not really. In sequestion you a storing waste, letting future generations take care of the problem. Even if we use something like algae in the ocean or trees we are still just land filling. Like a landfill, the economy depends on single use cheap product that are thrown away, so instead of creating a economy that does not, we just throw things away and hope we have landfill to last.
As this indicates, I look for medium length reviews that are 2-4 stars. I assume that 1 and 5 star reviews are put up by interested agents or parties, or people who are just angry.
I look at it this way. How many people really have time to write long reviews for products they use. I am rather a verbose writer, and have put up some reviews, but they have been concise. Second, how many people are absolutely satisfied with a product. Those that are are of no use to the rest of us. Like my opinion of a retail store, I am more interested in the exceptions rather than how it deal with expected input. How does the store deal with returns and haggling over price. How does the vacuum deal with ninja lego pieces. Does the pretty metal computer get easily dented. Does the story get lame in the middle.
In all honesty the reason these commissioned reviews work is because there is a lot of crap out there that is basically the same, and all we really want is validation of the choice to buy one piece of crap over another. It is why movies are now made or broken in the first weekend due to social media. No one want to go to a movie that has been lambasted on facebook. It just is not cool.
This would only be an issue if the jury were trying to decide if the PATENTS were valid. To know for sure, we would have to see the jury instructions. Any issue, I suppose, would depend on these and there are many incredibly well paid people who are going to be looking at these closely. If there were any huge error I suspect that it would have been brought up at the time.
In the US what a jury can and cannot do is very limited. The jury picks the foreman. It makes sense that in this case a person familiar with the issue was picked. The litigating parties pick the jury. If a person who they desperately did not want get on the jury, that is their fault and they have to deal with that.
Comments made after the trial, in my experience, are pretty useless. IMHO, and from my experience, a jury is going to look at a case, decide, hopefully based on the testimony, which story smells better, and then form a narrative, again based on the testimony, that supports that decision. The deliberation is to help each juror see if that narrative fits the evidence.
To me, the purpose of a patent or copyright is give the creator or agent a fair amount of time to profit off the creation. Clearly some of this is broken, i.e. copyrights that go on forever, patents that are too general. OTOH, if a firms needs 5-10 years of production to support R&D costs, then the patent system is clearly there to allow that to happen. In the case of the iPhone this is not the most obvious or even the most wanted form. When it came out everyone said that it should have a keyboard. Fine, Samsung can create and manufacture a phone with a physical keyboard that is different from the iPhone. The critics of the iPhone were and are many. Yet when the courts say that a phone nearly identical to the iPhone cannot be manufactured by a third party, these same people complain that the courts are unfair.
So I am assuming that this proposal is meant to be tongue in cheek. While completely workable, it kind of throws the baby out with bath water, so to speak
To break it down, the climate change has to do with the production of energy, either to run our machinery or run our bodies. It is basically a result of a system that has not scaled well to out current level of consumption. For an end user solution we might help fix this problem by using less energy. This can be done by eating lower on the food chain, using more efficient appliance, such as LED for light, or releasing fewer pollutants form power generation facilites. This paper does not of these, so is not really a solution.
For a productions solution, we can change the kind of inputs we use to deliver energy to the end user. Cattle can be a source of pollutants, so maybe fish and vegetables instead. Coal can be very polluting, so maybe natural gas or nuclear or solar or wind. This paper suggests using a less polluting input, but this energy is not delivered to the end user, so is not a solution either.
So the tongue in cheek part is that we have an idea that can and will remediate the problem without solving any of the problems. It might lead to a solution, in that if we build lots of windmills for this, presumable we will have mass produced windmills we can use elsewhere. It might give us time to solve the problem, in that the "greenhouse gasses" will accumulate more slowly. One thing I must disagree with is that this plan would be favored by those who agree with human caused climate change. Quite the opposite is true. This plan is for those who climate change is a natural process. If climate change were man made, then the sensible solution would be for us to change our habits to stop it. If it is not man made, then something like this, technology to fix the problem at the atmospheric end, is the only justifiable solution.
That said I am not sure that machines like this are inevitable. There was a time when humans could just hunt and gather. At worst they could do limited agriculture. Now look at the amount of machinery the complexity of the supply chain just to get an ear of corn out of the ground. And look at flowers. We can't just keep bees around to pollinate them, they have to brought in special. And if cross pollination between orchards occur, and entire crop can be ruined. Is it inconceivable that as our population grows, as we cut down wild forest for crops of ranch land or managed timber, that the ability of the troposphere to support human life will begin to degrade. I can see atmospheric machine to insure oxygen content, CO2 content, even heat and humidity to be developed and deployed in the next few generations. Is this bad? I don't know, but it is something to think about.
First, anyone who has a password to our accounts for all practical intents and purposes owns the content. When one dies, as long as some can get onto you equipment they have access to content.
Second we really don't know where the DRM movement is going. The only thing impeding the transfer of ownership is the DRM. If there is no DRM, then pretty much no one owns it. We simply pay a sum to reward the stakeholders, and hopefully the creator.
Third, the widespread ownership of such content is relatively recent phenomena. Conservatives outlets like the WSJ want us to believe that this is the way it has always been, and will always be, but that is not true. For books, it has been at most a couple hundred years that cheap books have been available so the average person could have a big collection, and more likely a hundred is a better estimate. We probably had have large collection of vinyl for 50 years of so. Movies has only been priced to sell in the consumer market since the 80's.
So what does this mean? A changing definition of ownership. If I have an LP or a VHS or a book, I only own a copy, nothing else. If I the copy is destroyed or lost, there is not legal right for a replacement of the content. If one had money for a cassete recorder, or a copy machine or a second VCR, one could make a copy, but there are generational losses, and copying on large scales to make a backup of everything was very time consuming. WIth a CD and a computer one was able to own the content for the first time, but that has only been around for less than a generation.This kind of forms a background on why music is not copy protected as much as books and movies.
One may complain that one has to pay $10 a month for movies, and if one does not pay, one loses the collection, but what has one lost? What does ownership really mean in terms of real history, not that made up by the WSJ. It is true that if one has a collection of books those books could be converted to a small amount of cash. The real value of books and music, at least in my upbringing, was the culture and education they provided. This far surpassed any cash value. And think of this. I don't have the vast collection of my father's books and music because he let go of books over the years, as they are very bulky to move, and the records were destroyed in a flood. OTOH if the books and music were on Amazon, and I had his password, I would.
Some professors clearly blame "technology" for all the ills of the world. That is, they blame the greater access to smart phones to reducing attention span and limiting the ability of student to read college level texts. Before the blaming of smart phones, many blamed MTV, or action movies, then Drugs, Sex and Rock and Roll. Going back further I suppose they either did not try to educate or blame the boggie monster, or whatever. In any case these professors are crazy. In any case in the last 50 years we have probably tripled the number of people who attain bachelor degrees by the time the finish what we now call young adult hood.
Educate a third of the population instead of 10% of the population is going to have some implications. Even if one asserts that that top third is pretty much the same as the top 10% in terms of basic capabilities, we still have issues of learning style, culture, and expectations. Not everyone is going to be able to read a complex text. Does that mean they should not have access to education and as a result we lost that potential high leve contributor to society? Of course not. Just because someone can sit in a lecture does that mean they should not go to university? Again, probably not.
So if we are going to maximally educate the population, not as charity, but because it probably will result in a more productive society(unemployment for college degreed is much lower than otherwise), we have to do something different. I do not think that is 'flipping the classroom' where we give student time for projects. One reason I think college is not working is because students are no longer expected to study 2-4 hours for every hour of class. What we could do in the classroom is spending more time modeling behaviors, especially in freshman classes. Model reading for comprehension, something a kid may not know because books are not read so much. Model complex problem solving. Spend some time modeling how to form study groups to complete recitation. Definitely spend some time lecturing, because as much as people hate it, it is an efficient way to communicate information. Most people are simply not going to pay enough money to have advanced information spoon fed to them.
So it is good that professors are ok with some of this. But I am afraid many are just going give a textbook and multiple choice tests and think they are doing a better job because the students are making poster, dioramas, and putting on little content plays.
Vaccinations are required by law in most circumstances where you have groups of students. The only thing that can make it to the courts at this point is the faith based exceptions. These allow anyone who does not want to comply with the law to simply say their superstitions prevent them from complying. I wish we had a faith based exception for speeding. Officer I would like to slow down but I am late for church. The problem is that many of the judges are at least a superstitious as the populous, so there is little hope that anyone will reexamine their assumptions and reapply the logic.
To me the real problem with immunizations is that they are critical, so we have a bunch of laws around them protecting all the interested parties, which leads to situations of distrust and occasionally possible unsafe products.
For basic applications, it does not matter. But you question implies the answer you are looking for. There are perfectly good applications on *nix(openoffice, google docs, Evolution. These are not perfect replacements, and most will stay with the Ms solution because this is the familiar workflow. Change costs resources.
Likewise each OS has a specific workflow which either works or did not. Windows 3.11 with networking allowed users to fully realize much of the GUI and connectivity benefits of the Mac. Windows 95 provided the first real modern OS, separated from the legacy CL OS. MS WIndows NT was another rewrite which challenged the workflow, and many did not switch until MS Windows 2000. It did not really get fixed until WIndows XP SP3. The issue is not only does it work, but do we have trained, or cheap to train, staff to use it. Which was the issue with MS Vista, but MS WIndows 7 was not so bad.
Also realize that these apps are not what keeps people on MS Windows. My first real use of MS Windows was for a sales application, which was only possible because of MS WIndows 3.11 networks. I then set up a CMS type app that required MS OS. I have MS based machines now to run Autodesk applications. This is what really drive which MS OS that can be used. For these Apps the machine and OS is bought for the software, not the other way around. For instance, the Autodesk stuff did not run well for me on Vista. I ran it on MS WIndows XP until MS WIndow 7 was working. I suspect the new Playskool version of MS WIndows is not going to it.
Off the grid is a good idea. The camping thing can work if you have conspirators. For instance Eric Rudolph was able to evade authorities for 5 years, presuably because his murders were supported by the christian group Army of God and others who publicly supported his actions. It was a fluke he was arrested, so probably could have stayed under cover for a longer time.
When I was young and ridiculous, I had a jump bag, a passport and credit card to get out of the country and up into a remote area if anything were to happen. Of course anything involving travel across borders is much more difficult now. Two languages might provide a means of support, but always assumed I would depend on the help of others to survive.
Of course if no crime then a good lawyer and a place no one would look for you would be in order.
This is not a police department with liability issues. This is a private company who like most private companies have the ability to use people until they use them up.
But it takes two to tango. In this case I assume this guy was convinced to go to google with the promise of a large sum of money. I hope it was not just the promise of a job. Leaving a job for the promise of a future job is not so rational. So the question of fairness in this ase is how much money was paid. Since this is an unskilled position, anything over minimum wage is compensation for pain and suffering, like at the meat packing plant. so if this guy requires a year of therapy twice a week, which is expensive, but doable especially with non profit clinics with sliding scales.
I think the cautionary tale here is that money for nothing does not exist. It is easy to promise a job, then just say metrics have not been met when it comes time to give the job. In an economy where people with low skills or high supply scales are not getting jobs, such scams are easy. That google would resort to such 'scams' for jobs that are difficult to fill is not surprising. This is nothing new. I once had an employee leave a job in a firm where pay was high and most position in management were filled from within. This person left to work minimum wage at a fast food place. They said that within a year she would be manager. Of course they did not say that it would require 60+ hour weeks which meant no time with her kid.
Also, the military is as guilty as anyone. Years of research has shown that a soldier should not be on the front line for more than a month or two. Any longer than this significant psychological damage occurs. Of course the military ignores this data. What saves the soldier is an unlimited amount of tax dollars going to compensate for the military commands incompetence.
so, like 3.5 kilograms of plutonium on the rover. If we can reprocess and use the fuel in robots launched into space, then that would be a good thing. The whole problem with reprocessing is what to do with the products, other than making bombs. Because there was not much use, it really makes more sense to just make the product difficult to use.
The only thing to fear is the explosion of the plutonium in atmosphere. The plutonium will be dispersed, humans will breath it, and it will remain in the tissue for a lifetime emitting alpha particles. But how likely is this. If we look at a long life vehicle, the Atlas, it appears that the vehicle failed about 5% in atmosphere. This means that we can expect 1 out 20 failures. When we begin major explorations, we probably can expect a failure every few years.
But failure in atmosphere is not necessarily critical because the plutonium is in a explosion proof unbreakable container. It should never fail, but NASA also said the shuttle would never fail and would have a turn around time measured in weeks. So there is really no way to say how dangerous these launches are. If this becomes SOP there will be launch failures, and even if the plutonium failure is 1%, something the shuttle does not achieve, a conservative estimate would put total failure on the order of 1 in 1000. This would indicate we might expect 1 failure in an agressive generation of launches, which would contaminate an uncontrolled area and uncontrolled number of people with potentially lethal doses of Uranium. There is every reason to believe this would never happen, but it is one of those things that could be politically troublesome to the space program.
Well first the rocket must fail in the atmosphere. The only problem is that these robots fail, they are not even human spec, so after a while one will fail. For example, the Atlas Centaur had a failure rate of 10%, so we can assume a failure every 10 launches. The plutonium is supposed to be an unbreakable container, but nothing is perfect. The question is what is the real failure rate of the plutonium container, and what portion of the rocket failures would occur in the atmosphere.
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I wonder how many of these are upgrades. There is some evidence to indicate that people are selling their used phones. It could be that people are simply trying to get the phone while the getting is good. One reason may be that they want to maximize the chances that they can get the latest Android. If the sales are not to new users of converts from iPhone, it really does not matter.
The only problem i have with the Fire is the battery life and the choice of USB. I only charge my devices overnight, and mostly they can last all day. Yet the Fire often is not able to last all day, even if minimal use. I have seen battery reports as little as three or four hours. This is unacceptable and make the fire not suitable as a primary device. I know the issue is the wireless, but really, am I going to manually turn on the wireless as I need it and off when I don't? If they are going to have a new Fire they need to have a rated battery life of at least 10 hours, not the current 8.
The problem with innovation, or paradigm, or efficiency, in business is that it is sometimes seen as just a magical way to quickly make some money. The company is failing, we need a paradigm shift. The product is not selling, we need a innovative solution. The assembly line is not working, we need efficiency cuts. To a person who is not going to think deeply about solutions, only results, these are easy words to throw around to make it look like something is happening. If I am the boss and i am asking people to think outside the box, to put a new coat of paint on a product, to fire 10% of the line workers, then I am doing something and maybe I won't get fired myself.
Not all Android phones are cheap, but Android is targeting the low end of the market so it can claim high sales volume. It is also clear that, unlike MS, many Android manufacturers are not putting a lot of thought in the UI for the phone. As mentioned, most of the effort is to provide cheap cell service after the sale.
And this cannot be repeated enough. HTC is reportedly paying MS $5 largely because Android is based on Linux and MS thinks it owns Linux, even though all legal battle indicates Linux is free from such infringement. OTOH we now have a legal decision that says Apple owns these patents for about another 15 years, and HTC is now crying fowl that it is unfair they have to pay license fees? WTF!
The reality is, at the end of the day, unless one is building a machine, MS is the cheap option. This is it's legacy. People went to MS because it was the acceptable cheap, often effectively free, option. When one buys a machine the MS is cheaper. Often software is free with a license from work. A Linux machine is often going to be no more expensive, but will require aded expense to build. And won't run MS Office.
Then of course there is evidence that circumcision can reduce the risk of STDs. This probably is no concern for a person who is monogamous for a lifetime, or celibate, but if one is thinking about a kids future, perhaps between the ages of 13-18, it may be a concern. Of course the response to this is that uncut sex is better, but without controlled studies before and after who really knows. Like size, maybe it is in the eye of the beholder.
The current situation is probably ok. Give parents information, let them decide. I mean we pay for men to have when they get old, why not give them the option to maybe a bit healthier when they are young.
When I hear that trial by jury is not needed in a particular case, what I hear is that a particular defendant has not peers. In this case Samsung is such a high elite, that it should not be subject to laws of the common person. We hear this quite a bit when an elite is torn down and forced to live by the rule of law.
So yes there are places where added mass is a significant burden. But if we are talking about a engine to convert the potential energy of petroleum to kinetic energy of a moving car, there is a quite a bit that can be done in terms of making that more efficient.
15 years ago I knew a few senior programmers that did this. Like the current case it was internal software that would never be distributed to external customers. It all ran in house, was updated frequently, so overall quality was not as important as rapid development. Serious bugs could be recalled instantly, less serious could be rolled out in day or two. Which is to say I think pair programming, if that is what the kids are calling it now, might be very workable for certain people and certain situations, but we will have to see if it is all the rage in a few years.
I would say as soon as they went into commodity PCs they were dead. HP has traditionally been an unfocused firm, but they tended to make unique and very useful products that were very competitive. Even their printers, which are basically just repackaged cannon printers, managed to end up as unique products with very good workflow. There was nothing interesting about the commodity PC other than it was cheap. I am surrounded by HP printers and computers, but the price is so low that I can't imagine them making any money off it. Maybe printer toner, but HP has gone so crazy over the prices that it is just not cost effective to use their products.
It appears that we will have to use a different methodology to increase actual life expectancy, instead of just decreasing childhood deaths. The fact is, at least in the US, things are not looking grim. We are throwing billions of dollars at keeping old people alive, and maybe it has resulted in a 50% increase in life expectancy, but for what people are wanted we are going to have see gains that at least triple the current gains.
I believe that medical technology is not going to do. Attacking a cancer or a heart problem, fighting the symptoms, is a losing battle. We will have it to attack it from basic biology. Using screening and artificial incubation to determine and properly incubate the best blastocyst. Deficiencies will have to be corrected during development of the fetus and infant. At that point medicine can be used to solve any problems that develop in later life, which will be few as the person will be genetically counterindicated to such problems.
Here is my thoughts. While I am not saying anything about the products, I am always suspicious of buying products that are represented by non professional sales staff. My feeling is that if one has a product, or brand, and it is policy to just let any violent convicted criminal from off the street represent your brand or product, then what does that say about the supply chain, the quality control, the aftermarket support, of that product? It may be good, but it may not be, and clearly there is not a lot of concern beyond just regular product liability issues.
So this is what a good manager does and how a firm making innovative products should be different than Anonymous. The manager should gather a group of people and provide a structure in which each person is going to be able to maximize creativity and support from the other members while minimizing destructive interactions. This is going to make some of the members mad because they want to get their way and some people don't like it when other are doing something they don't agree with. In anonymous you get to destroy others who don't share you point of view. In a productive environment you have to assume the manager knows what is going on, or leave. The manager may not know what is going on, in which case why would one want to work at a firm with incompetent manager. Starts ones own firm.
Second, the manager will make sure people are operating a little outside of their conforts zone. That means doing a little bit to grow as a person, a designer, a software developer. Not always doing everything in the exact same way. That is how one effects change. Not by destroying things one does not like, but by supplying superior original alternatives. I am thinking the iBM selectric typewriter which replaced the traditional individual keybar with a golf ball design. Sure something like it had been though up 100 years ago, but the IBM had to push outside the confort zone to get the new typewrite out. Or Apple with the GUI interface and cartoon trash can. A toy that would never work.
Museums such as these though valuable can be a tough sell. When I am in the area, i visit the The National Museum of Nuclear Science & History. It has a similar problem in terms of audience and focus. One thing I hope the tesla works on is a good endowment. Mas I found out when a job I was at tried to donate something to the Smithsonian, they were happy to take it, but only with an endowment. Keeping artifacts safe is not cheap.
There is a small group of people who want to control their computer and software. Those people have a computer and run OSS and hopefully contribute if only in a small way. The rest just want to get email and look at pictures of cats on ihaschhezburger. the question is how to sell this really overly complex device to them.
Not really. In sequestion you a storing waste, letting future generations take care of the problem. Even if we use something like algae in the ocean or trees we are still just land filling. Like a landfill, the economy depends on single use cheap product that are thrown away, so instead of creating a economy that does not, we just throw things away and hope we have landfill to last.
I look at it this way. How many people really have time to write long reviews for products they use. I am rather a verbose writer, and have put up some reviews, but they have been concise. Second, how many people are absolutely satisfied with a product. Those that are are of no use to the rest of us. Like my opinion of a retail store, I am more interested in the exceptions rather than how it deal with expected input. How does the store deal with returns and haggling over price. How does the vacuum deal with ninja lego pieces. Does the pretty metal computer get easily dented. Does the story get lame in the middle.
In all honesty the reason these commissioned reviews work is because there is a lot of crap out there that is basically the same, and all we really want is validation of the choice to buy one piece of crap over another. It is why movies are now made or broken in the first weekend due to social media. No one want to go to a movie that has been lambasted on facebook. It just is not cool.
In the US what a jury can and cannot do is very limited. The jury picks the foreman. It makes sense that in this case a person familiar with the issue was picked. The litigating parties pick the jury. If a person who they desperately did not want get on the jury, that is their fault and they have to deal with that.
Comments made after the trial, in my experience, are pretty useless. IMHO, and from my experience, a jury is going to look at a case, decide, hopefully based on the testimony, which story smells better, and then form a narrative, again based on the testimony, that supports that decision. The deliberation is to help each juror see if that narrative fits the evidence.
To me, the purpose of a patent or copyright is give the creator or agent a fair amount of time to profit off the creation. Clearly some of this is broken, i.e. copyrights that go on forever, patents that are too general. OTOH, if a firms needs 5-10 years of production to support R&D costs, then the patent system is clearly there to allow that to happen. In the case of the iPhone this is not the most obvious or even the most wanted form. When it came out everyone said that it should have a keyboard. Fine, Samsung can create and manufacture a phone with a physical keyboard that is different from the iPhone. The critics of the iPhone were and are many. Yet when the courts say that a phone nearly identical to the iPhone cannot be manufactured by a third party, these same people complain that the courts are unfair.
To break it down, the climate change has to do with the production of energy, either to run our machinery or run our bodies. It is basically a result of a system that has not scaled well to out current level of consumption. For an end user solution we might help fix this problem by using less energy. This can be done by eating lower on the food chain, using more efficient appliance, such as LED for light, or releasing fewer pollutants form power generation facilites. This paper does not of these, so is not really a solution.
For a productions solution, we can change the kind of inputs we use to deliver energy to the end user. Cattle can be a source of pollutants, so maybe fish and vegetables instead. Coal can be very polluting, so maybe natural gas or nuclear or solar or wind. This paper suggests using a less polluting input, but this energy is not delivered to the end user, so is not a solution either.
So the tongue in cheek part is that we have an idea that can and will remediate the problem without solving any of the problems. It might lead to a solution, in that if we build lots of windmills for this, presumable we will have mass produced windmills we can use elsewhere. It might give us time to solve the problem, in that the "greenhouse gasses" will accumulate more slowly. One thing I must disagree with is that this plan would be favored by those who agree with human caused climate change. Quite the opposite is true. This plan is for those who climate change is a natural process. If climate change were man made, then the sensible solution would be for us to change our habits to stop it. If it is not man made, then something like this, technology to fix the problem at the atmospheric end, is the only justifiable solution.
That said I am not sure that machines like this are inevitable. There was a time when humans could just hunt and gather. At worst they could do limited agriculture. Now look at the amount of machinery the complexity of the supply chain just to get an ear of corn out of the ground. And look at flowers. We can't just keep bees around to pollinate them, they have to brought in special. And if cross pollination between orchards occur, and entire crop can be ruined. Is it inconceivable that as our population grows, as we cut down wild forest for crops of ranch land or managed timber, that the ability of the troposphere to support human life will begin to degrade. I can see atmospheric machine to insure oxygen content, CO2 content, even heat and humidity to be developed and deployed in the next few generations. Is this bad? I don't know, but it is something to think about.
Second we really don't know where the DRM movement is going. The only thing impeding the transfer of ownership is the DRM. If there is no DRM, then pretty much no one owns it. We simply pay a sum to reward the stakeholders, and hopefully the creator.
Third, the widespread ownership of such content is relatively recent phenomena. Conservatives outlets like the WSJ want us to believe that this is the way it has always been, and will always be, but that is not true. For books, it has been at most a couple hundred years that cheap books have been available so the average person could have a big collection, and more likely a hundred is a better estimate. We probably had have large collection of vinyl for 50 years of so. Movies has only been priced to sell in the consumer market since the 80's.
So what does this mean? A changing definition of ownership. If I have an LP or a VHS or a book, I only own a copy, nothing else. If I the copy is destroyed or lost, there is not legal right for a replacement of the content. If one had money for a cassete recorder, or a copy machine or a second VCR, one could make a copy, but there are generational losses, and copying on large scales to make a backup of everything was very time consuming. WIth a CD and a computer one was able to own the content for the first time, but that has only been around for less than a generation.This kind of forms a background on why music is not copy protected as much as books and movies.
One may complain that one has to pay $10 a month for movies, and if one does not pay, one loses the collection, but what has one lost? What does ownership really mean in terms of real history, not that made up by the WSJ. It is true that if one has a collection of books those books could be converted to a small amount of cash. The real value of books and music, at least in my upbringing, was the culture and education they provided. This far surpassed any cash value. And think of this. I don't have the vast collection of my father's books and music because he let go of books over the years, as they are very bulky to move, and the records were destroyed in a flood. OTOH if the books and music were on Amazon, and I had his password, I would.
Educate a third of the population instead of 10% of the population is going to have some implications. Even if one asserts that that top third is pretty much the same as the top 10% in terms of basic capabilities, we still have issues of learning style, culture, and expectations. Not everyone is going to be able to read a complex text. Does that mean they should not have access to education and as a result we lost that potential high leve contributor to society? Of course not. Just because someone can sit in a lecture does that mean they should not go to university? Again, probably not.
So if we are going to maximally educate the population, not as charity, but because it probably will result in a more productive society(unemployment for college degreed is much lower than otherwise), we have to do something different. I do not think that is 'flipping the classroom' where we give student time for projects. One reason I think college is not working is because students are no longer expected to study 2-4 hours for every hour of class. What we could do in the classroom is spending more time modeling behaviors, especially in freshman classes. Model reading for comprehension, something a kid may not know because books are not read so much. Model complex problem solving. Spend some time modeling how to form study groups to complete recitation. Definitely spend some time lecturing, because as much as people hate it, it is an efficient way to communicate information. Most people are simply not going to pay enough money to have advanced information spoon fed to them.
So it is good that professors are ok with some of this. But I am afraid many are just going give a textbook and multiple choice tests and think they are doing a better job because the students are making poster, dioramas, and putting on little content plays.
To me the real problem with immunizations is that they are critical, so we have a bunch of laws around them protecting all the interested parties, which leads to situations of distrust and occasionally possible unsafe products.
Likewise each OS has a specific workflow which either works or did not. Windows 3.11 with networking allowed users to fully realize much of the GUI and connectivity benefits of the Mac. Windows 95 provided the first real modern OS, separated from the legacy CL OS. MS WIndows NT was another rewrite which challenged the workflow, and many did not switch until MS Windows 2000. It did not really get fixed until WIndows XP SP3. The issue is not only does it work, but do we have trained, or cheap to train, staff to use it. Which was the issue with MS Vista, but MS WIndows 7 was not so bad.
Also realize that these apps are not what keeps people on MS Windows. My first real use of MS Windows was for a sales application, which was only possible because of MS WIndows 3.11 networks. I then set up a CMS type app that required MS OS. I have MS based machines now to run Autodesk applications. This is what really drive which MS OS that can be used. For these Apps the machine and OS is bought for the software, not the other way around. For instance, the Autodesk stuff did not run well for me on Vista. I ran it on MS WIndows XP until MS WIndow 7 was working. I suspect the new Playskool version of MS WIndows is not going to it.
When I was young and ridiculous, I had a jump bag, a passport and credit card to get out of the country and up into a remote area if anything were to happen. Of course anything involving travel across borders is much more difficult now. Two languages might provide a means of support, but always assumed I would depend on the help of others to survive.
Of course if no crime then a good lawyer and a place no one would look for you would be in order.
But it takes two to tango. In this case I assume this guy was convinced to go to google with the promise of a large sum of money. I hope it was not just the promise of a job. Leaving a job for the promise of a future job is not so rational. So the question of fairness in this ase is how much money was paid. Since this is an unskilled position, anything over minimum wage is compensation for pain and suffering, like at the meat packing plant. so if this guy requires a year of therapy twice a week, which is expensive, but doable especially with non profit clinics with sliding scales.
I think the cautionary tale here is that money for nothing does not exist. It is easy to promise a job, then just say metrics have not been met when it comes time to give the job. In an economy where people with low skills or high supply scales are not getting jobs, such scams are easy. That google would resort to such 'scams' for jobs that are difficult to fill is not surprising. This is nothing new. I once had an employee leave a job in a firm where pay was high and most position in management were filled from within. This person left to work minimum wage at a fast food place. They said that within a year she would be manager. Of course they did not say that it would require 60+ hour weeks which meant no time with her kid.
Also, the military is as guilty as anyone. Years of research has shown that a soldier should not be on the front line for more than a month or two. Any longer than this significant psychological damage occurs. Of course the military ignores this data. What saves the soldier is an unlimited amount of tax dollars going to compensate for the military commands incompetence.
The only thing to fear is the explosion of the plutonium in atmosphere. The plutonium will be dispersed, humans will breath it, and it will remain in the tissue for a lifetime emitting alpha particles. But how likely is this. If we look at a long life vehicle, the Atlas, it appears that the vehicle failed about 5% in atmosphere. This means that we can expect 1 out 20 failures. When we begin major explorations, we probably can expect a failure every few years. But failure in atmosphere is not necessarily critical because the plutonium is in a explosion proof unbreakable container. It should never fail, but NASA also said the shuttle would never fail and would have a turn around time measured in weeks. So there is really no way to say how dangerous these launches are. If this becomes SOP there will be launch failures, and even if the plutonium failure is 1%, something the shuttle does not achieve, a conservative estimate would put total failure on the order of 1 in 1000. This would indicate we might expect 1 failure in an agressive generation of launches, which would contaminate an uncontrolled area and uncontrolled number of people with potentially lethal doses of Uranium. There is every reason to believe this would never happen, but it is one of those things that could be politically troublesome to the space program. Well first the rocket must fail in the atmosphere. The only problem is that these robots fail, they are not even human spec, so after a while one will fail. For example, the Atlas Centaur had a failure rate of 10%, so we can assume a failure every 10 launches. The plutonium is supposed to be an unbreakable container, but nothing is perfect. The question is what is the real failure rate of the plutonium container, and what portion of the rocket failures would occur in the atmosphere.