The WP7 OS is decent enough to use. But that's not the total phone experience.
To total phone experience varies a lot from person to person. But people want choice and the WP7 app store is still relatively barren compared to the mountains of refuse in google play or itunes. It's true you don't need the vast majority of the stuff in the competing stores (or even most of what's on the WP7 store) but why pick and OS without whatever app you like or that will likely miss out on it.
WP7 is a dead man walking. You know it. Nokia knows it. Everyone knows. WP8 is the real prize. But if I need a phone today I'm not waiting around. Especially since we have no idea if WP8 will actually be any good to use. And once I get into the non MS ecosystem I'd need to invest money to switch, and need to wait for a contract to expire.
There's no premium WP hardware. There's mid range, and low to mid range. And calling the 900 mid range in an era of quad core phones is being generous. All else being equal if the best phone on the market is a Galaxy SIII why would I buy a single core competitor? Especially if I have 700 or 800 dollars to spend on a phone.
People still think it's 1995 and that windows is a bug riddles mess. Because if don't know how to take care of your computer it will be a trainwreck and you don't learn you live with outdated biases.
If you want simple easy to understand you get an iphone. You pay a premium for a degree of uniformity. If you want a low end smartphone or a high end smartphone you buy android. If you know how to hack your phone and don't mind flashing roms and so on, you get an android. Where does that leave MS in the marketplace? If you have to wait for a *carrier* to approve an update to your phone then you aren't a happy customer. If you don't understand technology an iPhone doesn't have that problem, if you understand how to install a nightly ROM build android phones are at least better than waiting on the carriers. With a windows phone you're stuck waiting on the carrier, which is simply unacceptable, unless you pay the 99 dollar developer licence.
Microsoft is late to this party. Very late. Unless they can pull a magic Xbox integration plan or something awesome that ties into the desktop (your phone can remote desktop right microsoft? Right? ugh...) they have a hard time asking users to switch. My calendaring is all through google now, so I'd have to move that over. I have invested however much money in google's app store for apps I can't easily port over. There aren't any 'killer apps' for WP7 exclusively.
There's a viable strategy there. Microsoft just isn't executing, and they can't rely on momentum to keep them going. That however, could change, and especially in the business environment integration with their corporate products could really help. b
If the Swedish legal system allows it then... so what?
The Swedish legal system isn't a variant on the common law system of the US/UK/Canada etc. Nor is it obliged to be. If the UK has decided their process is fair enough to allow extradition treaties then that's pretty much the end of the discussion.
There's nothing particularly suspicious to the point of being terrifying. If their system allows that, and you think it's terrifying don't ever travel to sweden. For all it matters their system could be the Kings word is law, and he is the supreme legal authority in the country, if the UK signed a treaty agreeing that system is sufficiently fair to allow extraditions then they are bound by that agreement.
Richard At work posted a nice summary above. He's wanted for questioning in alleged criminal activity. Whether I used precisely legally correct language or not I'm not sure, least of all as it applies to a legal system that isn't my own.
From the perspective of the UK they trust the Swedish legal process (which includes the European court of human rights). If the Swedes decide to turn around and send him to guantanamo bay (specifically) the UK and the EU would lose faith in the swedish legal system and there would have to be consequences to treaties and EU membership etc.
Sending him to the US is another matter. Because again, the UK and Sweden can both extradite to the US and the same basic questions apply. If the US wanted him they'd have had as much luck in the UK as they would in sweden I would think.
From the perspective of extradition it doesn't matter. Would the questioning involve torture? No. Could he be charged with a crime that the UK recognizes? Yes. Is the punishment for said crime something the UK allows (i.e. no death penalty)? That's pretty much it.
Even if the charges are completely fabricated by someone, anyone (CIA the women in question etc.) it's absurd to think that the UK would refuse extradition to Sweden for something like this.
Would the alleged crime be illegal in the UK? Yes. Does the UK have an extradition arrangement with Sweden (in this case as part of the EU I would figure)? Yes. Would the Swedish legal system treat him appropriately from the UK perspective if convicted of this particular crime, and will he get appropriate process? Yes, but that's why they have an extradition agreement at all.
At that point he's just delaying the inevitable. If not, then you'd have to kick one or both of Sweden and the UK out of the EU for not upholding the same basic sets of rights and rules. The question of whether or not the US is fabricating the whole thing can be addressed fairly in sweden (at least the UK would consider it fair).
To show aptitude? Because it's not, as that guy was talking about, the 1980's when there weren't a wide availability of degrees. Today if you go for a fresh starter job you're competing with people who have degrees and demonstrable skills.
Sure, if you can get an entry level job you can work for minimum wage for a few years until you pick up the skills, and be at constant risk of being replaced by someone who has a degree and doesn't make mistakes you don't even know you're making.
Much beyond a BSc in something is a matter of what sort of problem you want to solve, and what sort of job you want to do. If you want to solve high risk mostly theoretical problems that will only be useful if you can get a positive result then maybe you want a PhD. If you want to just make money a PhD definitely isn't the route to go. If you want to have a job where you can't be fired after you've worked for 4 years, and where you get to meet a long string of interesting people every year, then working at a university has its perks.
Certainly compared to people I went to high school with, who didn't even try and get degrees, I'm worse off. I've had 10.5 years of school where they've been earning money. But they're making 40-50k a year. For the last 6 I was making about 20 and breaking even. But then a PhD starting salary can be 80-90 easily, and 70k if you want to be a prof. If you can't do the math to figure out what the breakeven point is then you probably shouldn't even try and get a degree.
Even then though. Computer science isn't programming. If you're happy being an IT guy your entire career then and assembling computers and writing webpages in PHP you can get by quite well with even a 1 year college course, and that can be quite lucrative since half of those graduates are dumb as rocks.
No, a diploma or GED probably wouldn't make you better at what you do. Education is to identify and work with talent. In the 1980's we weren't identifying talent with programming particularly as far as I know.
Which again, doesn't mean you aren't successful. Hell bill gates is the most successful dropout in history. Luck and opportunity will get you a long way at making money and being successful in life no doubt. But a merit based system only lets people in who have merit. It could certainly miss some people, but the ones who make it in, do so on merit.
It's not luck. We pick out the ones with the best averages, and the best letters of recommendation and all that relatively quantitative stuff. Letters of recommendation have a blurb of fairy bullshit about how 'Sir_sri is very talented and would make a barf barf barf' the important parts are the questions that let us judge what the raw numerical stuff actually means. What quartile of your graduates is this person in, would they qualify for graduate school where you are, on a scale of 1 to X how would you rate their leadership/technical skill/research potential/work ethic etc. That in conjunction with marks is a remarkably good indicator of how capable someone is at being a scientist. Not at being a programmer, but as has been hashed out a few times here last week, comp sci trains scientists, not programmers.
I think had mozart not been exposed to keyboarding until he was 20 he would have still excelled by the time he was 25. Just as we take kids who are 17 who've never even used a computer in african countries, some of whom never even had regular electricity (especially in from the indian sub continent and china), and by the time we're done with them they actually know something about how to be a computer scientist. Education exists to identify talent and build on it, which is why a broad public education includes a diverse range of things. I would say that it hasn't always been this way. Having the good fortune to be born rich made a huge difference 70 years ago and earlier. Since then we have made a massive coordinated effort to make sure everyone gets a shot in north america and europe at least.
Luck can elevate anyone talented to riches sure. But getting a PhD is an entirely achievement and demonstrable skills driven system luck only gets you so far. It can get you into a BSc, it can make you a billionaire, but it can't have you magically outperform 75% of the other people in the same programme for four years. You can certainly be talented and successful and *not* get a PhD, but you can't get a PhD without being talented. If you are bad we have 4 years to discover that you suck, and kick you out, we have every reason to turf out people who are bad (because that would ultimately negatively impact our reputation as a school) and we have every reason to only pick the talented ones from the undergrad lot.
I really do believe, from everything I've seen, that true intellectual talent is biological. You can direct it into a particular area. But I've seen 10 year olds doing grad school level maths because they really are that smart. At 10 years old most kids are still struggling with logarithms. Or multiplication tables. "Luck" or opportunity and environment can't take an average 10 year old and have them doing partial differential equations, nor can a parent (least of all if the parent can't do it themselves). There isn't a single kid in public school in the southern populated part of canada who, at 10, is denied the chance to do PhD level maths if they're capable.
Again though, you can have talent and be successful and not earn a PhD. But if you don't have natural, above average talent in the right area you won't get a PhD in that area. I'd bomb out completely in an drama doctorate just as they would mostly bomb out of comp sci. But if Mozart was born today, and never touched a piano until he was 17 he could certainly have earned a PhD if he wanted to and understood enough of the theory (which I don't, so I'm not qualified to judge how well his work would fit in that area). Which, incidentally, is the story with a lot of the people who have PhD's in comp sci who are in their mid to late 30's, because they didn't really get home computers, and only really got access to one in university.
Very true. If you're getting a PhD you're trying to do actual science, not just be an IT guy. hell if you want to be an IT guy you don't even need a BSc.
Depends, how many hours did you work, how much experience do you have, how many hours did you have to work to get there, how much vacation do you get, what's your pension like, what's your job stress like, where do you have to live etc. etc. etc. I know lots of professors who pick up their kids at 3pm every day, take 2 months at home in the summer (they still have to work some of that, but they are at home at least) taking care of the kid. You get to meet this constant stream of interesting people in academia etc. If you go off into industry with a PhD you can easily start at 100k a year at 26 years or 27 years old, and have all the vacation time, pension plan etc.
PhD's aren't about the money, you are guaranteed enough to be reasonably successful in life, but how much effort you want to put into it is up to you.
Oh, and where would you be without a bunch of PhD nerds inventing the languages who programmed in, the IDE's you used (or the command line compilers) the OS schedulers etc. Being able to program well is a skill, but computer scientists aren't programmers. You could have made 236 being a welder for all it matters, lots of scientists need to know how to weld, lots need to know how to program, but they don't do it well.
You could well be in the top small fraction of the population intelligence wise. Which means it's unfortunate you didn't go to school, because you'd be making 350k a year not 236k. One of my buddies is about 50 years old, making about 450k a year working part time. The joys of being able to teach people how to program.
Like I said, luck and opportunity can get you into a BSc and it can get you money, but it won't get you a PhD. Maybe if you'd paid attention in school you'd be better at reading comprehension than programming, though from the sounds of things this plan worked out better for you.
As I linked http://www.electricpig.co.uk/2012/06/13/orange-san-diego-review-does-the-first-intel-android-phone-fly-or-fail/, intel have very good mobile CPU's. They don't perform as well as Tegra 3's or quad core galaxy SIII's but they're also a lot less expensive and not nearly as well invested in.
It's not really clear just how good, or bad, intel CPU's will actually be relative to ARM. And of course in this day and age overall performance is about a lot more than just the CPU, which makes testing things that much harder.
If intel just make a q6600 in a 10mm x10mm chip it would probably wipe the floor with anything built to an ARM standard. It would probably be too much power too, but when you do things like support virtualization you don't need a lot of that on a mobile. Even a half clocked q6600 would be a pretty ruthless competitor to ARM parts. And thats' not looking at what they've been doing clock for clock since the core 2 series.
But either way, the problem is that all of the work intel has done over the years has been desktop and server focused. Going back to a CPU, soldered to some fast non volatile (solid state) memory, with some ram, and a GPU of some sort isn't really an instruction set problem, it's a total system architecture thing. It's make it very hard to compare them. And then intel being at least one step ahead everyone in manufacturing would give them an advantage if they care to take advantage of it.
Some of them require surgical implantation (or they connect to something that has surgical implantation) and the custom molding is much different for a device you need for everyday use, and one you're only using for a specific scenario though.
Like everything else in medical devices, you're right, that a non certified one could be a lot less. But if a certified one fails, and as a result the user is hit by a bus you have a much different problem than if it fails and a hunter doesn't get his allotment today.
Sure, but there's still a lot of research on a automata theory and graph theory going on, it just depends on what field you land it and what problem is most needing solved where you are.
If you're making compilers for a living it's a very different job than if you're making user interface API's. And I have some friends who work for the same company, in the same building, on the same floor, where one does one, one does the other, and the skillsets required are completely different.
Comp sci grew very much out of different departments, some places (like waterloo) it's an extension of maths, some places it's physics, some places it's engineering. But you're right, as a discipline comp sci is concerned much more with what is theoretically computable and how complex that is, how you logically envision that problem and how you organize and represent information. Computer engineering is much more about the problem of building all of the components and how they get soldered together.
Though I grant there are computer scientists who do research on what is computable on real hardware only, and engineers (and physicists) who think about hardware that could be used to solve problems not normally regarded as computable or computable in a particular time. Part of doing research is that you solve a problem and what discipline it happens to be belong to is secondary.
Bullshit you aren't. If you're earning a PhD you're towards the top of the capable list of people who earned bachelors degrees. Some of the capable people will go off and get real jobs that pay 70 or 80k a year after graduation (which is now all of my former students from a course that finished at the end of 2011 who left academia), but you cannot get into a PhD programme without being well above average. Different fields have differing skill levels and outlooks, but you can't get a PhD in any of the sciences unless you have well above average reasoning and maths skills. You have be passionate about being dispassionate and you have to be able to look at evidence and analyze it properly. Those are extremely rare skills. Even amongst people with undergraduates in science or engineering.
In physics to get a graduate degree you have to be in the top 70% of graduates from a bachelors more or less, but to pass in physics at all at the undergraduate level is quite hard. You're not all that much more special than people in say, medicine or engineering but when you're in academia and everyone you see over 30 you call "doctor" you forget that only about 10% of the US population has a graduate degree, let alone a PhD.
Engineering and comp sci are a bit different. They're harder to get into to start with, but it's easier to get into grad school once you pass, because most of your compatriots like money more than they like being able to investigate some novel, as yet unsolved problem that may remain unsolvable. Why is physics easy to get into but is proportionally so hard? Because as part of the regular science faculty they don't really care. If you can get into 'science' in general you can enroll in any of the physics classes. Not enough people are interested in physics for it to be a huge problem. I'm in canada and in my graduating year there were, I think it was about 170 BSc grads in the whole country, and about 2000 in the US. But there were also about 1800 or 1900 PhD's in canada and the US. In comp sci we have about the same, today (a number of years later) number of PhD's as physics, it's up over 2000 ish but not far off. But something like 50k undergrads in comp sci in canada and the US combined.
I'll grant you, that getting a PhD puts you 'only' the top 10% or so of the population at all, and within that much of the distinction is more interest than specific skill set. But you can't get a PhD without being really good in your area, and really good in general. You can get a BSc and be mediocre, and that's as much about luck and opportunity as anything else. But once you get stuck in a room full of computer nerds universities can pick and choose who they take for PhD degrees. I know where I am they have about 300 qualified applicants a year for about 40 spots in grad school (and it costs about 100 bucks to apply so you don't just fling applications about wildly, but you that doesn't mean only 40 of those 300 will go to grad school at all).
I grant that there's a lot to be said for when you're born and luck, especially in being financially successful in life, but Academia in north america and europe are very much merit based. It may be luck and opportunity that determines which field you go in, and whether or not you end up a professor of computer science making 130k a year or bill gates making 130k an hour, but in both cases you can be in the top 1% of the population if you manage your money and don't do anything catastrophically stupid professionally.
TL:DR. I call bullshit. Luck and temporal factors will get you a bachelors and contribute to what field, and how much money you make. But to get even accepted to a PhD programme you have to be in the top quarter or so of graduates from comp sci or engineering.
Prior to the microsoft buyout that would have expected something like that. Now I would expect to see less sketchy site ads, and eventually things like trying to recognize keywords/phrases in your speech and highlighting products consistent with what you talked about. So rather than have sketchy ads you have a sketchy service.
For all of the many things wrong with microsoft, they try and bury the sketchier side of their business from public view. But if I call my girlfriend and skype to talk about dinner, and then it looks up where we're talking to each other from, and offers sites with online ordering and delivery if we're far away, or restaurants with available seating if we're close I'm going to be more than just a little worried.
Depending on the ads they could actually be a conversation starter. "Concert tickets this friday from 9.99", "Cinema listings for tonight". There probably is a good market for advertising like that, that's time and location sensitive, but they could be very odd.
While I disagree with your assertion that ARM has an advantage by lacking 'cruft', I'd be willing to change my mind if I could find any data that supported that. An instruction set is an instruction set, supporting old instructions isn't all that hard and as long as they can be used efficiently by compilers it's not really an efficiency loss in terms of 'useless transistors' sort of thing.
It doesn't seem like intel is really far behind, they're just doing a lazy job. (http://www.electricpig.co.uk/2012/06/13/orange-san-diego-review-does-the-first-intel-android-phone-fly-or-fail/).
And ya, windows slate devices have been ugly. But macbook airs run regular old intel hardware and can boot windows. It's not up to MS to squeeze an intel mobo into a 10 inch screen. Although ya, I agree, that market was not addressed, and the fact that it hasn't been hurt microsoft a lot.
The upside of this vast hardware ecosystem is anyone can make what they want and have it work. the downside is the manufacturers seem to not be smart enough to make what people want. So strange.
- hearing aids are Class I regulated medical devices... I can only imagine the amount of bureaucracy that must be involved to obtaining that classification.
That's pretty much the only thing you've said that matters. Well that and the fact that most of them are at least partially customized to the patient. Unlike some products which are significantly cheaper in canada because of collective bargaining and our healthcare system refusing to waste money on billing the way the US does, hearing aids are about the same here.
To sell any medical device it goes through layers of scrutiny. My grandfather in india had a hearing aid where he could hear people fine, but he couldn't hear phones. (I doubted his honesty of hearing fine, but he could at least understand what I was saying from another room with a north american accent speaking english even though he spoke hindi as a first language). But it never worked over the phone. Bizarre. Shit like that wouldn't ever be tolerated by a north american consumer, or by a north american insurance system (government or private).
It also depends very much on what problem you have. Some of the cheap hearing aids do work fine if you have one type of hearing loss but not another. If you need a bone conduction hearing aid (Baha branded) you're looking at 3grand, if you need a cochlear speech processor you're taking 5k or more. The term 'hearing aid' covers fairly simplistic devices to very sophisticated ones. If you have a rare or complicated problem expect rare, expensive solutions.
We don't want to think about the microscropic price valuations. Following the price of oil is bad enough, following the price of oil, gold, nickel, iron, rice, lettuce, chicken, lines of code etc. is insane. When we set prices on our own we do so very inefficiently. That's not an insurmountable problem, but in part we collectivize some of that bargaining, the government sets the minimum wage for example, the government negotiates pay contracts for lots of services. If you think they pay to much for teachers and fire etc. you vote right with, if you think they pay too little you vote left wing. Fairly straightforward.
It's not that we don't think about it, it's that we don't think about it a lot. We hire someone else to think about it a lot.
define 'relatively minor', gold can't be created out of thin air but it can easily double supply in a decade (which would equate to 7% inflation).
From 1980 to 1995 for example gold went from just under 40 million ounces a year production to 72. (Roughly a 6%/year increase in the production of gold) http://www.goldsheetlinks.com/production.htm. That's not 6% inflation of course, we'd need to know the total gold used as currency, and population growth and so on. I don't imagine the relevant figures exist simply because no one important used the gold standard by 1980.
http://wiki.mises.org/wiki/Vellon_inflation_in_Spain gives a breakdown. Of in general what happened to them because of too much gold.
Keep in mind what the situation that first chart shows. The world produces about 2600 tonnes of gold per year, whereas http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gold_reserve gives total gold holdings world wide at just over 30 000. That works out to (presently) about 8.5% per year increase in gold, whereas the world population growth is about 1.1%. Of that produced about half is taken as jewelry, 10-12% as 'industrial' and the rest for various financial uses. So even at 25% of world gold production being for financial purposes it's still actually seeing inflation (2.1%/year), which is about the same as you're seeing with currency (the us is between 2 and 3% for the last decade average, but I don't have the number in front of me). Except that with currency you control it, with Gold you're basically handing control of US currency to Australia, south africa, peru, ghana and canada. (with russia and china also producing significant amounts of gold, but on very large populations with robust economies). Oh and the 25% assumption is bullshit, because jewelry is valuable precisely because it retains value as gold, so it can be seized or used for currency as well. The industrial uses are more consumption driven (window coatings, electrical contacts that sort of thing, and it's hard to extract the gold from your motherboard to sell in any manipulative way).
And yes, spanish bringing back gold caused significant inflation. We can argue over the precise points inflation goes from being 'small but helpful' to 'low but not problematic' to 'high and problematic' to 'extremely high and destructive'. Of course extremely high and destructive is subjective, since an inability to pay debt is destructive no matter what. If you owe 300k dollars on a house or 1 bar of gold on a house and can't pay you're bankrupt either way. With a currency you control you can gradually devalue the debt over time while you get your shit together. With gold someone else can start buying it up and contracting your supply, making it harder for you to repay. Which is what the germans are doing to greece. If you want to know what life under a gold standard would look like ask the greeks and the spanish, they are effectively trapped in a gold standard, driving prices down, debt proportionally worse, and no way out of it without someone who has money giving it to them.
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Richard_at_Work in replies above laid it out. The UK judges agree it would be a crime in the UK on all four accusations.
Also, they only really need a valid warrant, he doesn't have to be charged yet. Depends on exactly the agreement and sweden have though.
The WP7 OS is decent enough to use. But that's not the total phone experience.
To total phone experience varies a lot from person to person. But people want choice and the WP7 app store is still relatively barren compared to the mountains of refuse in google play or itunes. It's true you don't need the vast majority of the stuff in the competing stores (or even most of what's on the WP7 store) but why pick and OS without whatever app you like or that will likely miss out on it.
WP7 is a dead man walking. You know it. Nokia knows it. Everyone knows. WP8 is the real prize. But if I need a phone today I'm not waiting around. Especially since we have no idea if WP8 will actually be any good to use. And once I get into the non MS ecosystem I'd need to invest money to switch, and need to wait for a contract to expire.
There's no premium WP hardware. There's mid range, and low to mid range. And calling the 900 mid range in an era of quad core phones is being generous. All else being equal if the best phone on the market is a Galaxy SIII why would I buy a single core competitor? Especially if I have 700 or 800 dollars to spend on a phone.
People still think it's 1995 and that windows is a bug riddles mess. Because if don't know how to take care of your computer it will be a trainwreck and you don't learn you live with outdated biases.
If you want simple easy to understand you get an iphone. You pay a premium for a degree of uniformity. If you want a low end smartphone or a high end smartphone you buy android. If you know how to hack your phone and don't mind flashing roms and so on, you get an android. Where does that leave MS in the marketplace? If you have to wait for a *carrier* to approve an update to your phone then you aren't a happy customer. If you don't understand technology an iPhone doesn't have that problem, if you understand how to install a nightly ROM build android phones are at least better than waiting on the carriers. With a windows phone you're stuck waiting on the carrier, which is simply unacceptable, unless you pay the 99 dollar developer licence.
Microsoft is late to this party. Very late. Unless they can pull a magic Xbox integration plan or something awesome that ties into the desktop (your phone can remote desktop right microsoft? Right? ugh...) they have a hard time asking users to switch. My calendaring is all through google now, so I'd have to move that over. I have invested however much money in google's app store for apps I can't easily port over. There aren't any 'killer apps' for WP7 exclusively.
There's a viable strategy there. Microsoft just isn't executing, and they can't rely on momentum to keep them going. That however, could change, and especially in the business environment integration with their corporate products could really help. b
If the Swedish legal system allows it then... so what?
The Swedish legal system isn't a variant on the common law system of the US/UK/Canada etc. Nor is it obliged to be. If the UK has decided their process is fair enough to allow extradition treaties then that's pretty much the end of the discussion.
There's nothing particularly suspicious to the point of being terrifying. If their system allows that, and you think it's terrifying don't ever travel to sweden. For all it matters their system could be the Kings word is law, and he is the supreme legal authority in the country, if the UK signed a treaty agreeing that system is sufficiently fair to allow extraditions then they are bound by that agreement.
Richard At work posted a nice summary above. He's wanted for questioning in alleged criminal activity. Whether I used precisely legally correct language or not I'm not sure, least of all as it applies to a legal system that isn't my own.
They could do that. But then so could the UK.
From the perspective of the UK they trust the Swedish legal process (which includes the European court of human rights). If the Swedes decide to turn around and send him to guantanamo bay (specifically) the UK and the EU would lose faith in the swedish legal system and there would have to be consequences to treaties and EU membership etc.
Sending him to the US is another matter. Because again, the UK and Sweden can both extradite to the US and the same basic questions apply. If the US wanted him they'd have had as much luck in the UK as they would in sweden I would think.
Yes. And?
From the perspective of extradition it doesn't matter. Would the questioning involve torture? No. Could he be charged with a crime that the UK recognizes? Yes. Is the punishment for said crime something the UK allows (i.e. no death penalty)? That's pretty much it.
Even if the charges are completely fabricated by someone, anyone (CIA the women in question etc.) it's absurd to think that the UK would refuse extradition to Sweden for something like this.
Would the alleged crime be illegal in the UK? Yes.
Does the UK have an extradition arrangement with Sweden (in this case as part of the EU I would figure)? Yes.
Would the Swedish legal system treat him appropriately from the UK perspective if convicted of this particular crime, and will he get appropriate process? Yes, but that's why they have an extradition agreement at all.
At that point he's just delaying the inevitable. If not, then you'd have to kick one or both of Sweden and the UK out of the EU for not upholding the same basic sets of rights and rules. The question of whether or not the US is fabricating the whole thing can be addressed fairly in sweden (at least the UK would consider it fair).
To show aptitude? Because it's not, as that guy was talking about, the 1980's when there weren't a wide availability of degrees. Today if you go for a fresh starter job you're competing with people who have degrees and demonstrable skills.
Sure, if you can get an entry level job you can work for minimum wage for a few years until you pick up the skills, and be at constant risk of being replaced by someone who has a degree and doesn't make mistakes you don't even know you're making.
Much beyond a BSc in something is a matter of what sort of problem you want to solve, and what sort of job you want to do. If you want to solve high risk mostly theoretical problems that will only be useful if you can get a positive result then maybe you want a PhD. If you want to just make money a PhD definitely isn't the route to go. If you want to have a job where you can't be fired after you've worked for 4 years, and where you get to meet a long string of interesting people every year, then working at a university has its perks.
Certainly compared to people I went to high school with, who didn't even try and get degrees, I'm worse off. I've had 10.5 years of school where they've been earning money. But they're making 40-50k a year. For the last 6 I was making about 20 and breaking even. But then a PhD starting salary can be 80-90 easily, and 70k if you want to be a prof. If you can't do the math to figure out what the breakeven point is then you probably shouldn't even try and get a degree.
Even then though. Computer science isn't programming. If you're happy being an IT guy your entire career then and assembling computers and writing webpages in PHP you can get by quite well with even a 1 year college course, and that can be quite lucrative since half of those graduates are dumb as rocks.
No, a diploma or GED probably wouldn't make you better at what you do. Education is to identify and work with talent. In the 1980's we weren't identifying talent with programming particularly as far as I know.
Which again, doesn't mean you aren't successful. Hell bill gates is the most successful dropout in history. Luck and opportunity will get you a long way at making money and being successful in life no doubt. But a merit based system only lets people in who have merit. It could certainly miss some people, but the ones who make it in, do so on merit.
It's not luck. We pick out the ones with the best averages, and the best letters of recommendation and all that relatively quantitative stuff. Letters of recommendation have a blurb of fairy bullshit about how 'Sir_sri is very talented and would make a barf barf barf' the important parts are the questions that let us judge what the raw numerical stuff actually means. What quartile of your graduates is this person in, would they qualify for graduate school where you are, on a scale of 1 to X how would you rate their leadership/technical skill/research potential/work ethic etc. That in conjunction with marks is a remarkably good indicator of how capable someone is at being a scientist. Not at being a programmer, but as has been hashed out a few times here last week, comp sci trains scientists, not programmers.
I think had mozart not been exposed to keyboarding until he was 20 he would have still excelled by the time he was 25. Just as we take kids who are 17 who've never even used a computer in african countries, some of whom never even had regular electricity (especially in from the indian sub continent and china), and by the time we're done with them they actually know something about how to be a computer scientist. Education exists to identify talent and build on it, which is why a broad public education includes a diverse range of things. I would say that it hasn't always been this way. Having the good fortune to be born rich made a huge difference 70 years ago and earlier. Since then we have made a massive coordinated effort to make sure everyone gets a shot in north america and europe at least.
Luck can elevate anyone talented to riches sure. But getting a PhD is an entirely achievement and demonstrable skills driven system luck only gets you so far. It can get you into a BSc, it can make you a billionaire, but it can't have you magically outperform 75% of the other people in the same programme for four years. You can certainly be talented and successful and *not* get a PhD, but you can't get a PhD without being talented. If you are bad we have 4 years to discover that you suck, and kick you out, we have every reason to turf out people who are bad (because that would ultimately negatively impact our reputation as a school) and we have every reason to only pick the talented ones from the undergrad lot.
I really do believe, from everything I've seen, that true intellectual talent is biological. You can direct it into a particular area. But I've seen 10 year olds doing grad school level maths because they really are that smart. At 10 years old most kids are still struggling with logarithms. Or multiplication tables. "Luck" or opportunity and environment can't take an average 10 year old and have them doing partial differential equations, nor can a parent (least of all if the parent can't do it themselves). There isn't a single kid in public school in the southern populated part of canada who, at 10, is denied the chance to do PhD level maths if they're capable.
Again though, you can have talent and be successful and not earn a PhD. But if you don't have natural, above average talent in the right area you won't get a PhD in that area. I'd bomb out completely in an drama doctorate just as they would mostly bomb out of comp sci. But if Mozart was born today, and never touched a piano until he was 17 he could certainly have earned a PhD if he wanted to and understood enough of the theory (which I don't, so I'm not qualified to judge how well his work would fit in that area). Which, incidentally, is the story with a lot of the people who have PhD's in comp sci who are in their mid to late 30's, because they didn't really get home computers, and only really got access to one in university.
In particular no. By the time you're at the applying for MSc level you've had all the opportunities everyone else has.
Very true. If you're getting a PhD you're trying to do actual science, not just be an IT guy. hell if you want to be an IT guy you don't even need a BSc.
Depends, how many hours did you work, how much experience do you have, how many hours did you have to work to get there, how much vacation do you get, what's your pension like, what's your job stress like, where do you have to live etc. etc. etc. I know lots of professors who pick up their kids at 3pm every day, take 2 months at home in the summer (they still have to work some of that, but they are at home at least) taking care of the kid. You get to meet this constant stream of interesting people in academia etc. If you go off into industry with a PhD you can easily start at 100k a year at 26 years or 27 years old, and have all the vacation time, pension plan etc.
PhD's aren't about the money, you are guaranteed enough to be reasonably successful in life, but how much effort you want to put into it is up to you.
Oh, and where would you be without a bunch of PhD nerds inventing the languages who programmed in, the IDE's you used (or the command line compilers) the OS schedulers etc. Being able to program well is a skill, but computer scientists aren't programmers. You could have made 236 being a welder for all it matters, lots of scientists need to know how to weld, lots need to know how to program, but they don't do it well.
You could well be in the top small fraction of the population intelligence wise. Which means it's unfortunate you didn't go to school, because you'd be making 350k a year not 236k. One of my buddies is about 50 years old, making about 450k a year working part time. The joys of being able to teach people how to program.
Like I said, luck and opportunity can get you into a BSc and it can get you money, but it won't get you a PhD. Maybe if you'd paid attention in school you'd be better at reading comprehension than programming, though from the sounds of things this plan worked out better for you.
and your evidence for that is where exactly?
As I linked http://www.electricpig.co.uk/2012/06/13/orange-san-diego-review-does-the-first-intel-android-phone-fly-or-fail/, intel have very good mobile CPU's. They don't perform as well as Tegra 3's or quad core galaxy SIII's but they're also a lot less expensive and not nearly as well invested in.
It's not really clear just how good, or bad, intel CPU's will actually be relative to ARM. And of course in this day and age overall performance is about a lot more than just the CPU, which makes testing things that much harder.
If intel just make a q6600 in a 10mm x10mm chip it would probably wipe the floor with anything built to an ARM standard. It would probably be too much power too, but when you do things like support virtualization you don't need a lot of that on a mobile. Even a half clocked q6600 would be a pretty ruthless competitor to ARM parts. And thats' not looking at what they've been doing clock for clock since the core 2 series.
But either way, the problem is that all of the work intel has done over the years has been desktop and server focused. Going back to a CPU, soldered to some fast non volatile (solid state) memory, with some ram, and a GPU of some sort isn't really an instruction set problem, it's a total system architecture thing. It's make it very hard to compare them. And then intel being at least one step ahead everyone in manufacturing would give them an advantage if they care to take advantage of it.
Some of them require surgical implantation (or they connect to something that has surgical implantation) and the custom molding is much different for a device you need for everyday use, and one you're only using for a specific scenario though.
Like everything else in medical devices, you're right, that a non certified one could be a lot less. But if a certified one fails, and as a result the user is hit by a bus you have a much different problem than if it fails and a hunter doesn't get his allotment today.
Sure, but there's still a lot of research on a automata theory and graph theory going on, it just depends on what field you land it and what problem is most needing solved where you are.
If you're making compilers for a living it's a very different job than if you're making user interface API's. And I have some friends who work for the same company, in the same building, on the same floor, where one does one, one does the other, and the skillsets required are completely different.
Comp sci grew very much out of different departments, some places (like waterloo) it's an extension of maths, some places it's physics, some places it's engineering. But you're right, as a discipline comp sci is concerned much more with what is theoretically computable and how complex that is, how you logically envision that problem and how you organize and represent information. Computer engineering is much more about the problem of building all of the components and how they get soldered together.
Though I grant there are computer scientists who do research on what is computable on real hardware only, and engineers (and physicists) who think about hardware that could be used to solve problems not normally regarded as computable or computable in a particular time. Part of doing research is that you solve a problem and what discipline it happens to be belong to is secondary.
Bullshit you aren't. If you're earning a PhD you're towards the top of the capable list of people who earned bachelors degrees. Some of the capable people will go off and get real jobs that pay 70 or 80k a year after graduation (which is now all of my former students from a course that finished at the end of 2011 who left academia), but you cannot get into a PhD programme without being well above average. Different fields have differing skill levels and outlooks, but you can't get a PhD in any of the sciences unless you have well above average reasoning and maths skills. You have be passionate about being dispassionate and you have to be able to look at evidence and analyze it properly. Those are extremely rare skills. Even amongst people with undergraduates in science or engineering.
In physics to get a graduate degree you have to be in the top 70% of graduates from a bachelors more or less, but to pass in physics at all at the undergraduate level is quite hard. You're not all that much more special than people in say, medicine or engineering but when you're in academia and everyone you see over 30 you call "doctor" you forget that only about 10% of the US population has a graduate degree, let alone a PhD.
Engineering and comp sci are a bit different. They're harder to get into to start with, but it's easier to get into grad school once you pass, because most of your compatriots like money more than they like being able to investigate some novel, as yet unsolved problem that may remain unsolvable. Why is physics easy to get into but is proportionally so hard? Because as part of the regular science faculty they don't really care. If you can get into 'science' in general you can enroll in any of the physics classes. Not enough people are interested in physics for it to be a huge problem. I'm in canada and in my graduating year there were, I think it was about 170 BSc grads in the whole country, and about 2000 in the US. But there were also about 1800 or 1900 PhD's in canada and the US. In comp sci we have about the same, today (a number of years later) number of PhD's as physics, it's up over 2000 ish but not far off. But something like 50k undergrads in comp sci in canada and the US combined.
I'll grant you, that getting a PhD puts you 'only' the top 10% or so of the population at all, and within that much of the distinction is more interest than specific skill set. But you can't get a PhD without being really good in your area, and really good in general. You can get a BSc and be mediocre, and that's as much about luck and opportunity as anything else. But once you get stuck in a room full of computer nerds universities can pick and choose who they take for PhD degrees. I know where I am they have about 300 qualified applicants a year for about 40 spots in grad school (and it costs about 100 bucks to apply so you don't just fling applications about wildly, but you that doesn't mean only 40 of those 300 will go to grad school at all).
I grant that there's a lot to be said for when you're born and luck, especially in being financially successful in life, but Academia in north america and europe are very much merit based. It may be luck and opportunity that determines which field you go in, and whether or not you end up a professor of computer science making 130k a year or bill gates making 130k an hour, but in both cases you can be in the top 1% of the population if you manage your money and don't do anything catastrophically stupid professionally.
TL:DR. I call bullshit. Luck and temporal factors will get you a bachelors and contribute to what field, and how much money you make. But to get even accepted to a PhD programme you have to be in the top quarter or so of graduates from comp sci or engineering.
They aren't there yet to be sure. I'm thinking more longer term plan than whomever is stupid enough to pay for ads in this plan at the moment.
Prior to the microsoft buyout that would have expected something like that. Now I would expect to see less sketchy site ads, and eventually things like trying to recognize keywords/phrases in your speech and highlighting products consistent with what you talked about. So rather than have sketchy ads you have a sketchy service.
For all of the many things wrong with microsoft, they try and bury the sketchier side of their business from public view. But if I call my girlfriend and skype to talk about dinner, and then it looks up where we're talking to each other from, and offers sites with online ordering and delivery if we're far away, or restaurants with available seating if we're close I'm going to be more than just a little worried.
Depending on the ads they could actually be a conversation starter. "Concert tickets this friday from 9.99", "Cinema listings for tonight". There probably is a good market for advertising like that, that's time and location sensitive, but they could be very odd.
While I disagree with your assertion that ARM has an advantage by lacking 'cruft', I'd be willing to change my mind if I could find any data that supported that. An instruction set is an instruction set, supporting old instructions isn't all that hard and as long as they can be used efficiently by compilers it's not really an efficiency loss in terms of 'useless transistors' sort of thing.
It doesn't seem like intel is really far behind, they're just doing a lazy job. (http://www.electricpig.co.uk/2012/06/13/orange-san-diego-review-does-the-first-intel-android-phone-fly-or-fail/).
And ya, windows slate devices have been ugly. But macbook airs run regular old intel hardware and can boot windows. It's not up to MS to squeeze an intel mobo into a 10 inch screen. Although ya, I agree, that market was not addressed, and the fact that it hasn't been hurt microsoft a lot.
The upside of this vast hardware ecosystem is anyone can make what they want and have it work. the downside is the manufacturers seem to not be smart enough to make what people want. So strange.
edit: Driving wages down, not prices. Prices are fixed in euros for imports.
- hearing aids are Class I regulated medical devices... I can only imagine the amount of bureaucracy that must be involved to obtaining that classification.
That's pretty much the only thing you've said that matters. Well that and the fact that most of them are at least partially customized to the patient. Unlike some products which are significantly cheaper in canada because of collective bargaining and our healthcare system refusing to waste money on billing the way the US does, hearing aids are about the same here.
To sell any medical device it goes through layers of scrutiny. My grandfather in india had a hearing aid where he could hear people fine, but he couldn't hear phones. (I doubted his honesty of hearing fine, but he could at least understand what I was saying from another room with a north american accent speaking english even though he spoke hindi as a first language). But it never worked over the phone. Bizarre. Shit like that wouldn't ever be tolerated by a north american consumer, or by a north american insurance system (government or private).
It also depends very much on what problem you have. Some of the cheap hearing aids do work fine if you have one type of hearing loss but not another. If you need a bone conduction hearing aid (Baha branded) you're looking at 3grand, if you need a cochlear speech processor you're taking 5k or more. The term 'hearing aid' covers fairly simplistic devices to very sophisticated ones. If you have a rare or complicated problem expect rare, expensive solutions.
We don't want to think about the microscropic price valuations. Following the price of oil is bad enough, following the price of oil, gold, nickel, iron, rice, lettuce, chicken, lines of code etc. is insane. When we set prices on our own we do so very inefficiently. That's not an insurmountable problem, but in part we collectivize some of that bargaining, the government sets the minimum wage for example, the government negotiates pay contracts for lots of services. If you think they pay to much for teachers and fire etc. you vote right with, if you think they pay too little you vote left wing. Fairly straightforward.
It's not that we don't think about it, it's that we don't think about it a lot. We hire someone else to think about it a lot.
define 'relatively minor', gold can't be created out of thin air but it can easily double supply in a decade (which would equate to 7% inflation).
From 1980 to 1995 for example gold went from just under 40 million ounces a year production to 72. (Roughly a 6%/year increase in the production of gold) http://www.goldsheetlinks.com/production.htm. That's not 6% inflation of course, we'd need to know the total gold used as currency, and population growth and so on. I don't imagine the relevant figures exist simply because no one important used the gold standard by 1980.
http://wiki.mises.org/wiki/Vellon_inflation_in_Spain gives a breakdown. Of in general what happened to them because of too much gold.
Keep in mind what the situation that first chart shows. The world produces about 2600 tonnes of gold per year, whereas http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gold_reserve gives total gold holdings world wide at just over 30 000. That works out to (presently) about 8.5% per year increase in gold, whereas the world population growth is about 1.1%. Of that produced about half is taken as jewelry, 10-12% as 'industrial' and the rest for various financial uses. So even at 25% of world gold production being for financial purposes it's still actually seeing inflation (2.1%/year), which is about the same as you're seeing with currency (the us is between 2 and 3% for the last decade average, but I don't have the number in front of me). Except that with currency you control it, with Gold you're basically handing control of US currency to Australia, south africa, peru, ghana and canada. (with russia and china also producing significant amounts of gold, but on very large populations with robust economies). Oh and the 25% assumption is bullshit, because jewelry is valuable precisely because it retains value as gold, so it can be seized or used for currency as well. The industrial uses are more consumption driven (window coatings, electrical contacts that sort of thing, and it's hard to extract the gold from your motherboard to sell in any manipulative way).
And yes, spanish bringing back gold caused significant inflation. We can argue over the precise points inflation goes from being 'small but helpful' to 'low but not problematic' to 'high and problematic' to 'extremely high and destructive'. Of course extremely high and destructive is subjective, since an inability to pay debt is destructive no matter what. If you owe 300k dollars on a house or 1 bar of gold on a house and can't pay you're bankrupt either way. With a currency you control you can gradually devalue the debt over time while you get your shit together. With gold someone else can start buying it up and contracting your supply, making it harder for you to repay. Which is what the germans are doing to greece. If you want to know what life under a gold standard would look like ask the greeks and the spanish, they are effectively trapped in a gold standard, driving prices down, debt proportionally worse, and no way out of it without someone who has money giving it to them.