Smart people usually spend slack-ish time examining things they *might* want to do. It doesn't mean they *do* want to do those things, but one thing most of us know by now is whenever you're asked to do something, "in a hurry" is the default pace, and yet "slapdash" is not acceptable. So you don't want to be in a position where you use time figuring out how to use Material Design that you need for coding or testing.
And even if you don't use those little hypothetical forays, they're still valuable in understanding your competition, both weaknesses and things you can learn from them.
And yet other companies manage to stay in business without committing fraud.
The reasons for emissions regulations are so that when consumers make the cost/performance tradeoff when buying a car, they don't externalize costs -- which is an economist's way of saying make other people pay for their choices. A car would be cheaper and perform better if it didn't have a catalytic converter (just dump your partially burned hydrocarbons on everyone else), EGRs (just dump your NOx on everyone else), PCVs (spread engine oil over everyone else) and mufflers (dump your noise on everyone else).
All of that stuff you'd be dumping on everyone else costs everyone else. You can argue about precisely how much it costs them, but it is certainly not zero.
So let's turn your little rhetorical device around: How dare you fraudulently make the public subsidize your business?
Here's the thing about markets: they're not about making everyone happy. They're about efficient distribution of resources. If costs go up producers are unhappy and some of them go out of business. That makes the owners and workers unhappy, but it is a rational response to costs going up. Dumping those costs on others and pretending they don't exist isn't rational; it's hysterical.
I don't like the huge, fat watch thing either. Nor am I a fan of subdials and other complications for daily wear. And here's the thing: for the most part ostentatiously big, fat, complicated watches are a low-end phenomenon. As you go higher hundreds and then into thousands of dollars, visual complexity shrinks until you are looking at something like a Rolex Milgauss for about $5000. The Migauss is somewhat fatter than I'd prefer because it's very robust -- it's designed for every day use. For dress use, if cost were no object, I'd wear something like a Vacheron Constantin Patrimony, which is 2.6 mm thick and 20.6 mm across. It's small, but the clean design means it doesn't have to be big. For that reason I wouldn't spend the additional $10,000 for the date complication.
Smartphones haven't eliminated the usefulness of wristwatches; they've just eliminated the usefulness of all the gee-gaws on watches for purposes other than telling time. You don't need the day/date complication, and you don't need the stopwatch or countdown timer, that stuff just makes a watch complicated to operate and hard to read. All you need is the hour, minute and second hand. I also make extensive use of a rotating dive-watch bezel for timing things like runs. When I rebuild watches I sometimes replace the face to cover up the day/date complication because it just clutters the design.
That's the problem with watches: it's hard to find a thoughtfully-designed, stripped down watch for under $500. But you can find them. One of my favorite cheap watches is a Casio that costs only $15 on Amazon -- I think of it as a disposable watch. It is very, very cheap in every respect, but it tells time as well as a $5000 Rolex and has similarly clean design. The only changes I'd make would be to improve the lume and remove the day/date complication.
Anyhow, if you showed up wearing a Patrimony I'd be impressed -- not because you spent $12,000 on a watch, but that you'd spent $12,000 on a watch whose value only a serious connoisseur would recognize. If you want to impress the ignorant, go big. If you want to impress the sophisticated, go simple.
Year to year warming is dominated by statistical noise, which is what I suspect you are trying to say when you say that there was no warming between 1997 and 1998; however for what it is worth 1998 was significantly warmer than 1997, so by your definition there is "warming".
The 'warming' in 2016 is insignificant. It is as straight of a horizontal line between the two points as you can make on a graph
If you choose two points you will always get a straight line. If the end point is 2016 and the start point is any prior year in the instrumental record, the slope will be upward.
If the temperature doesn't reach 1998 or 2016 levels until the next El Nino, then there will still have been no warming.
This is what logicians call "equivocation", which is making up your own definition of a term to make your argument true. What most people understand "global warming" to be is an underlying upward trend in temperature created by increases in greenhouse gases. This is overlaid on both year-to-year variability and of course ENSO. Comparing an El Niño year to a La Niña or non-ENSO year is an apples-to-oranges comparison. If you want to compare individual years to determine whether there's an underlying warming trend, then you need to compare El Niño years to prior El Niño years, etc. Or you an take a moving average with a window that's large enough to average out any ENSO events.
If you take a ten year moving average, in the last 40 years that ten year average has dropped three times: in 1975, 1993, and 2008; remained the same as the prior year once: in 2000; and has increased 36 times. If there were no underlying warming trend then the ten year moving average would be equally likely to go up or down in successive years; in fact it's ten times more likely to go up than down. 2008 by the way was an anomaly in not only was it an unusually strong La Niña, it was a rare ten year period with *four* La Niña years in it. If you take a twenty year moving average the last time that average went down was 1965.
The people who argued that there was a global warming "hiatus" after 1998, evidently. That is assuming they aren't liars.
the climate models overestimated warming by nearly 2x for the average for the last two decades and 4x for the last 15 years
Which models are you speaking of? NASA's global instrumental record data is actually quite close to the IPCC 1990 FAR model runs that correspond to the actual greenhouse emissions. You have to allow for for La Niña (2000, 2001, 2008, 2010-2012) and El Niño (1997-1998, 2014-2016), of course which deviate below and above the model predictions.
I'm sure if climate scientists were in charge of things they would "put up". But they're not; politicians are, and politicians naturally worry more about being b lamed for action more than being blamed for inacdtion. They'd rather be forced to spend a trillion dollars than choose to spend a hundred billion.
But even if you are willing to take the hit as a politician, you can't do it alone. You need to bring other politicians around, and the public around as well. If you can't take effective steps right away, you take what you can. This gets people working on CO2 reduction technologies and businesses, and builds a constituency for more steps. It's like stopping a cattle stampede. You can't make the entire herd stop and change direction at once, you get the lead cows heading in a slightly different direction.
Of course, the problem with focusing exclusively on the costs of trying to stop or (more realistically) slow climate change implicitly assumes that inaction won't cost us anything. In fact we're looking at costs either way. We're in a minimax kind of situation: how do we minimize the maximum costs?
There's also another wrinkle to this, which is that costs (and indeed profits -- every misfortune profits someone) aren't distributed evenly. The key determinant of how much you have to pay for or profit from climate change is how mobile your capital is. If you're a Bengladeshi subsistence farmer you're going to take +2C right on the chin. If you're a Wall Street bank you take your investments out of farms which are going to lose productivity in the next ten years or so shift to underwriting the opening of new farms in newly favorable places. In other words you make money going and coming. Likewise if you own multiple homes your risk from local changes is spread out. If the lion's share of your nest egg is in a house that is in the new 20 year floodplain or in the range of a newly endemic zoonosis, you're screwed.
So even if you can't avoid +2C without climate engineering (which might not be such a bad thing), getting there in ten years instead of twenty or thirty makes a huge difference. And beyond 2C, there are other benchmarks beyond that we don't want to hit in a hurry.
This is not a black-and-white situation: that we had our chance to do something and now there is nothing we can do. We had our chance to avoid this situation and now we're talking about how much time we'll have to adapt.
The "hiatus" in global warming was produced by choosing 1998 as the baseline year. Why was 1998 a good year to use as a baseline? Because it was, by far, the hottest year on record when it happened, shattering the previous record (1997) by 0.13C.
Now this is a news for nerds site, so I don't have to explain why cherrypicking an outlier as your baseline is dishonest. People who swallowed that are either dishonest or mathematical ignoramuses.
I will go out on a limb right now and say that since El Niño has passed an next year will be less warm, sometime around 2020 we'll be hearing "No significant warming since 2016."
Well, you could argue that the reason you have to push women to enter coding as a career is that they're also being pushed to aim high on the career ladder.
That was the thing that made me laugh at the whole Barbie "I Can Be a Computer Engineer" fracas. Oh, it was sexist alright -- against men. Here's how I construe that story: Barbie is an entrepreneur who obtains free commodity coding and sysadmin labor from her male pals and yet retains total ownership of the resulting intellectual property. It's a cynical way of doing business, but that girl is going places.
Here is where they'll be in ten years:
Stephen -- works as a network admin where the pay is lousy and everyone treats him like shit. Despite the fact he hates his job, he's terrified that it will be outsourced.
Brian -- works as a coder. His pay looks pretty good, until you factor in the hours he puts in to meet deadlines management pulls out of its ass, the cost of his Bay Area apartment, and the time he spends commuting on the clogged freeway. He gets through the day with Adderall he scores of the neighbor's kid and comes down every night with booze. His apartment is full of expensive sports equipment he doesn't have time to use anymore. He's gained fifty pounds since he was in High School and will gain another fifty in the next five years. Brain can live with all this, but the thing that really bothers him is that when he does a great job, nobody cares.
Barbie -- Sold her girl-power themed indie computer game studio for millions, landing her on the cover of Time's "30 Entrepreneurs under 30" issue. She parlays this into a senior VP position at a hot social media startup, and after cashing out on the IPO joins an angel investor group. She's currently bankrolling research in parthenogenesis.
Then small companies can no longer make any IoT product.
Not necessarily. It depends on what your standards and rules are.
Sure, you could write the rules in such a way that only big companies can afford to comply with them. It doesn't mean you have to. What's more rules could actually ensure small companies could remain competitive by creating safe harbors if you do certain things. Believe me there are lawsuits coming in the future, whether there is legislative or regulatory action or no. It would go a long way toward keeping the little guy competitive if he could point to rules that he was supposed to follow and did. This would socialize the cost novel attack vectors evenly rather than distribute the costs stochastically.
Eliminating the low-hanging fruit could make IoT devices reasonably safe, and "reasonable" is a much more attainable goal than "absolutely". Everyone fails at "absolutely", but only big companies can afford to bear the cost of that failure.
As for stuff getting designed in China, it's the low prices, period. I actually evaluated some Chinese radio linked flow meters a few years ago -- they were intended for metering liquor being poured in casinos (where the "free drinks" paid for by the casinos are acdtually paid for by a subcontractor and poured by a bartender who lives on tips). We wanted to adapt them for pesticide flow metering. The guy we were working with was selling these gizmos at $200, but they arrived on his US loading dock from China all boxed and ready to ship out to customers at a wholesale price of about $3. I was astonished. That's why stuff like that doesn't get made in the first world anymore, it's the jaw-droppingly low wholesale prices. Quality wasn't great, but with a $197 margin you can afford to ship replacements out for free. Adding regulatory compliance costs to a device like that actually favors domestic producers.
It's inevitable that a certain fraction of people go off the deep edge. People are irrational, even (or perhaps mostly) people who are convinced they are entirely rational. Rationality is a fragile thing because emotion and confirmation bias are deeply woven into everyone's thinking.
For normal people are few more powerful emotional impulses than the urge to protect children. It should hardly be surprising that children come to harm from it.
Ah, but is it a parody of the copyrighted elements? That's the tack I'd take if I were Samsung's lawyer: this is not parodying Samsung's IP, it is quoting Samsung's IP in a literal, non-transformative way that is not actually parody.
Of course in my heart I'd hope to lose, but that argument is no more ridiculous than many others that have become established case law. Issues like privacy and IP are where fundamental values we have as a society cut against each other and generate innumerable weird corner cases.
It's not just how hard you check, but how incisively. It's easy to satisfy yourself that software's anticipated failure modes won't happen. What's tough is discovering ways of screwing up that have never happened before.
That's why there's no substitute for experience. This gets back to the very roots of rocket science: the path to success passes through many, many failures.
It's not only that. The problem with most theories of eugenics is that they draw from experience with agricultural breeding of domesticated species. Humans are not domesticated; we're a wild species with massive genetic diversity compared to, say, purebred Arabian horses.
This means that with us sexual reproduction still does what it is supposed to do: generate genetic diversity in offspring. Look at large families. You get some who are tall and some who are short; some who have Grandpa Joe's nose and others that have Grandpa John's jaw, others who get both or neither. Even with litter of pedigreed puppies you'll get one total loser and if you're lucky one champion; and pedigreed dog litters are much more alike than any set of human siblings. And that's just physical traits; in terms of interests, talents, and success there is massive variability among siblings, although there is some correlation, in part due to economic circumstances, upbringing and education.
Nature works this way because variability is good for the species, and that variability comes from combinations of genes being shuffled. Add to that the massive behavioral plasticity of our gigantic brains, and the idea that you can sample some of, say, Steve Jobs DNA for successful CEO markers is ludicrous. If you'd raised Jobs in a different family and sent him to a different set of schools, and didn't get him luck out by ending up close friends with Woz, then while he may well have been quite successful in some other way, he wouldn't have been the Steve Jobs we knew.
Of course, willingness to go along with the DNA test is a good test for one phenotypical trait: the willingness to put up with pseudo-scientific baloney.
People who don't believe that VP picks have always been analyzed this way are naive. Lincoln picked Andrew Johnson because Johnson was from a border state (Tennessee) that could go either way. The primary goal of a VP pick is to help you win. Everything else is secondary.
The VP pick is all about picking up votes from electorate segments you might not otherwise get (Palin/women), or solidifying shaky part of your coalition (Biden/labor and left), or being young when you are old or vice versa (Quayle). Coming from a swing state or an adjacent state with major media market overlap (Edwards, Ryan, Pence, Kaine) puts you on the inside track. Naturally, sometimes those calculations go hilariously wrong.
It's safe to say that almost nobody ever picks the person they think would be the best president as their running mate; it's ways the person who would be the best running mate. The last time I think that anyone picked someone on the basis that they'd be the best president was when Bob Dole picked Jack Kemp -- who wouldn't be my choice for President, but I'm pretty sure he'd have been Dole's.
When you have a tablet, you can do things like punch in what defense the other team just used to provide statistical analysis of what the next best play is, or what kind of defense to run if your opponent is doing X often.
I'm guessing this is another case of a solution in search of a problem.
The reason this happens is that as a technologist faced with helping someone solve a problem you have no choice but to imagine what you would need to do that person's job. But if you want to have a better than random chance at success, you have to really understand the people who will use the system and what they would need.
I'm guessing Belichick of all people doesn't need a computer to give him a statistical analysis of what the best next play is or how to set up his defense -- although you or I sure as hell would. What sets Belichick apart from all the other ruthless, unprincipled, hyper-competitive control-freak coaches is that he's a smart bastard who is obsessive about research. If I had to take a wild stab at what kind of technical aids he needs during a game, the broad theme would be "communication", not "analysis".
By the way, does anyone else find it bizarre that the NFL provides stuff like computer tablets and headsets, but the teams are in charge of supplying the footballs?
Slashdot Mirror
Smart people usually spend slack-ish time examining things they *might* want to do. It doesn't mean they *do* want to do those things, but one thing most of us know by now is whenever you're asked to do something, "in a hurry" is the default pace, and yet "slapdash" is not acceptable. So you don't want to be in a position where you use time figuring out how to use Material Design that you need for coding or testing.
And even if you don't use those little hypothetical forays, they're still valuable in understanding your competition, both weaknesses and things you can learn from them.
Sure, but what is "Hyper"?
And yet other companies manage to stay in business without committing fraud.
The reasons for emissions regulations are so that when consumers make the cost/performance tradeoff when buying a car, they don't externalize costs -- which is an economist's way of saying make other people pay for their choices. A car would be cheaper and perform better if it didn't have a catalytic converter (just dump your partially burned hydrocarbons on everyone else), EGRs (just dump your NOx on everyone else), PCVs (spread engine oil over everyone else) and mufflers (dump your noise on everyone else).
All of that stuff you'd be dumping on everyone else costs everyone else. You can argue about precisely how much it costs them, but it is certainly not zero.
So let's turn your little rhetorical device around: How dare you fraudulently make the public subsidize your business?
Here's the thing about markets: they're not about making everyone happy. They're about efficient distribution of resources. If costs go up producers are unhappy and some of them go out of business. That makes the owners and workers unhappy, but it is a rational response to costs going up. Dumping those costs on others and pretending they don't exist isn't rational; it's hysterical.
Natural? Banging rocks together is natural. Keyboard command entry is civilized.
I haven't seen a meta key on a keyboard since the Reagan Administration.
Did you expect them to spy on us out of prurient interest? It's not like AT&T is an actual person...
Just joking. Of course we'll all just have to change our key bindings.
Watch collector/restorer here.
I don't like the huge, fat watch thing either. Nor am I a fan of subdials and other complications for daily wear. And here's the thing: for the most part ostentatiously big, fat, complicated watches are a low-end phenomenon. As you go higher hundreds and then into thousands of dollars, visual complexity shrinks until you are looking at something like a Rolex Milgauss for about $5000. The Migauss is somewhat fatter than I'd prefer because it's very robust -- it's designed for every day use. For dress use, if cost were no object, I'd wear something like a Vacheron Constantin Patrimony, which is 2.6 mm thick and 20.6 mm across. It's small, but the clean design means it doesn't have to be big. For that reason I wouldn't spend the additional $10,000 for the date complication.
Smartphones haven't eliminated the usefulness of wristwatches; they've just eliminated the usefulness of all the gee-gaws on watches for purposes other than telling time. You don't need the day/date complication, and you don't need the stopwatch or countdown timer, that stuff just makes a watch complicated to operate and hard to read. All you need is the hour, minute and second hand. I also make extensive use of a rotating dive-watch bezel for timing things like runs. When I rebuild watches I sometimes replace the face to cover up the day/date complication because it just clutters the design.
That's the problem with watches: it's hard to find a thoughtfully-designed, stripped down watch for under $500. But you can find them. One of my favorite cheap watches is a Casio that costs only $15 on Amazon -- I think of it as a disposable watch. It is very, very cheap in every respect, but it tells time as well as a $5000 Rolex and has similarly clean design. The only changes I'd make would be to improve the lume and remove the day/date complication.
Anyhow, if you showed up wearing a Patrimony I'd be impressed -- not because you spent $12,000 on a watch, but that you'd spent $12,000 on a watch whose value only a serious connoisseur would recognize. If you want to impress the ignorant, go big. If you want to impress the sophisticated, go simple.
From 1997 to 1998 there is no warming..
Year to year warming is dominated by statistical noise, which is what I suspect you are trying to say when you say that there was no warming between 1997 and 1998; however for what it is worth 1998 was significantly warmer than 1997, so by your definition there is "warming".
The 'warming' in 2016 is insignificant. It is as straight of a horizontal line between the two points as you can make on a graph
If you choose two points you will always get a straight line. If the end point is 2016 and the start point is any prior year in the instrumental record, the slope will be upward.
If the temperature doesn't reach 1998 or 2016 levels until the next El Nino, then there will still have been no warming.
This is what logicians call "equivocation", which is making up your own definition of a term to make your argument true. What most people understand "global warming" to be is an underlying upward trend in temperature created by increases in greenhouse gases. This is overlaid on both year-to-year variability and of course ENSO. Comparing an El Niño year to a La Niña or non-ENSO year is an apples-to-oranges comparison. If you want to compare individual years to determine whether there's an underlying warming trend, then you need to compare El Niño years to prior El Niño years, etc. Or you an take a moving average with a window that's large enough to average out any ENSO events.
If you take a ten year moving average, in the last 40 years that ten year average has dropped three times: in 1975, 1993, and 2008; remained the same as the prior year once: in 2000; and has increased 36 times. If there were no underlying warming trend then the ten year moving average would be equally likely to go up or down in successive years; in fact it's ten times more likely to go up than down. 2008 by the way was an anomaly in not only was it an unusually strong La Niña, it was a rare ten year period with *four* La Niña years in it. If you take a twenty year moving average the last time that average went down was 1965.
Who cares about a single year ...
The people who argued that there was a global warming "hiatus" after 1998, evidently. That is assuming they aren't liars.
the climate models overestimated warming by nearly 2x for the average for the last two decades and 4x for the last 15 years
Which models are you speaking of? NASA's global instrumental record data is actually quite close to the IPCC 1990 FAR model runs that correspond to the actual greenhouse emissions. You have to allow for for La Niña (2000, 2001, 2008, 2010-2012) and El Niño (1997-1998, 2014-2016), of course which deviate below and above the model predictions.
I'm sure if climate scientists were in charge of things they would "put up". But they're not; politicians are, and politicians naturally worry more about being b lamed for action more than being blamed for inacdtion. They'd rather be forced to spend a trillion dollars than choose to spend a hundred billion.
But even if you are willing to take the hit as a politician, you can't do it alone. You need to bring other politicians around, and the public around as well. If you can't take effective steps right away, you take what you can. This gets people working on CO2 reduction technologies and businesses, and builds a constituency for more steps. It's like stopping a cattle stampede. You can't make the entire herd stop and change direction at once, you get the lead cows heading in a slightly different direction.
Of course, the problem with focusing exclusively on the costs of trying to stop or (more realistically) slow climate change implicitly assumes that inaction won't cost us anything. In fact we're looking at costs either way. We're in a minimax kind of situation: how do we minimize the maximum costs?
There's also another wrinkle to this, which is that costs (and indeed profits -- every misfortune profits someone) aren't distributed evenly. The key determinant of how much you have to pay for or profit from climate change is how mobile your capital is. If you're a Bengladeshi subsistence farmer you're going to take +2C right on the chin. If you're a Wall Street bank you take your investments out of farms which are going to lose productivity in the next ten years or so shift to underwriting the opening of new farms in newly favorable places. In other words you make money going and coming. Likewise if you own multiple homes your risk from local changes is spread out. If the lion's share of your nest egg is in a house that is in the new 20 year floodplain or in the range of a newly endemic zoonosis, you're screwed.
So even if you can't avoid +2C without climate engineering (which might not be such a bad thing), getting there in ten years instead of twenty or thirty makes a huge difference. And beyond 2C, there are other benchmarks beyond that we don't want to hit in a hurry.
This is not a black-and-white situation: that we had our chance to do something and now there is nothing we can do. We had our chance to avoid this situation and now we're talking about how much time we'll have to adapt.
The "hiatus" in global warming was produced by choosing 1998 as the baseline year. Why was 1998 a good year to use as a baseline? Because it was, by far, the hottest year on record when it happened, shattering the previous record (1997) by 0.13C.
Now this is a news for nerds site, so I don't have to explain why cherrypicking an outlier as your baseline is dishonest. People who swallowed that are either dishonest or mathematical ignoramuses.
I will go out on a limb right now and say that since El Niño has passed an next year will be less warm, sometime around 2020 we'll be hearing "No significant warming since 2016."
Yep, and as we all know global warming stopped in 1998.
Well, you could argue that the reason you have to push women to enter coding as a career is that they're also being pushed to aim high on the career ladder.
That was the thing that made me laugh at the whole Barbie "I Can Be a Computer Engineer" fracas. Oh, it was sexist alright -- against men. Here's how I construe that story: Barbie is an entrepreneur who obtains free commodity coding and sysadmin labor from her male pals and yet retains total ownership of the resulting intellectual property. It's a cynical way of doing business, but that girl is going places.
Here is where they'll be in ten years:
Stephen -- works as a network admin where the pay is lousy and everyone treats him like shit. Despite the fact he hates his job, he's terrified that it will be outsourced.
Brian -- works as a coder. His pay looks pretty good, until you factor in the hours he puts in to meet deadlines management pulls out of its ass, the cost of his Bay Area apartment, and the time he spends commuting on the clogged freeway. He gets through the day with Adderall he scores of the neighbor's kid and comes down every night with booze. His apartment is full of expensive sports equipment he doesn't have time to use anymore. He's gained fifty pounds since he was in High School and will gain another fifty in the next five years. Brain can live with all this, but the thing that really bothers him is that when he does a great job, nobody cares.
Barbie -- Sold her girl-power themed indie computer game studio for millions, landing her on the cover of Time's "30 Entrepreneurs under 30" issue. She parlays this into a senior VP position at a hot social media startup, and after cashing out on the IPO joins an angel investor group. She's currently bankrolling research in parthenogenesis.
Then small companies can no longer make any IoT product.
Not necessarily. It depends on what your standards and rules are.
Sure, you could write the rules in such a way that only big companies can afford to comply with them. It doesn't mean you have to. What's more rules could actually ensure small companies could remain competitive by creating safe harbors if you do certain things. Believe me there are lawsuits coming in the future, whether there is legislative or regulatory action or no. It would go a long way toward keeping the little guy competitive if he could point to rules that he was supposed to follow and did. This would socialize the cost novel attack vectors evenly rather than distribute the costs stochastically.
Eliminating the low-hanging fruit could make IoT devices reasonably safe, and "reasonable" is a much more attainable goal than "absolutely". Everyone fails at "absolutely", but only big companies can afford to bear the cost of that failure.
As for stuff getting designed in China, it's the low prices, period. I actually evaluated some Chinese radio linked flow meters a few years ago -- they were intended for metering liquor being poured in casinos (where the "free drinks" paid for by the casinos are acdtually paid for by a subcontractor and poured by a bartender who lives on tips). We wanted to adapt them for pesticide flow metering. The guy we were working with was selling these gizmos at $200, but they arrived on his US loading dock from China all boxed and ready to ship out to customers at a wholesale price of about $3. I was astonished. That's why stuff like that doesn't get made in the first world anymore, it's the jaw-droppingly low wholesale prices. Quality wasn't great, but with a $197 margin you can afford to ship replacements out for free.
Adding regulatory compliance costs to a device like that actually favors domestic producers.
It's inevitable that a certain fraction of people go off the deep edge. People are irrational, even (or perhaps mostly) people who are convinced they are entirely rational. Rationality is a fragile thing because emotion and confirmation bias are deeply woven into everyone's thinking.
For normal people are few more powerful emotional impulses than the urge to protect children. It should hardly be surprising that children come to harm from it.
Ah, but is it a parody of the copyrighted elements? That's the tack I'd take if I were Samsung's lawyer: this is not parodying Samsung's IP, it is quoting Samsung's IP in a literal, non-transformative way that is not actually parody.
Of course in my heart I'd hope to lose, but that argument is no more ridiculous than many others that have become established case law. Issues like privacy and IP are where fundamental values we have as a society cut against each other and generate innumerable weird corner cases.
It's not just how hard you check, but how incisively. It's easy to satisfy yourself that software's anticipated failure modes won't happen. What's tough is discovering ways of screwing up that have never happened before.
That's why there's no substitute for experience. This gets back to the very roots of rocket science: the path to success passes through many, many failures.
And what does victory in a war against a broad category of religions look like?
It's not only that. The problem with most theories of eugenics is that they draw from experience with agricultural breeding of domesticated species. Humans are not domesticated; we're a wild species with massive genetic diversity compared to, say, purebred Arabian horses.
This means that with us sexual reproduction still does what it is supposed to do: generate genetic diversity in offspring. Look at large families. You get some who are tall and some who are short; some who have Grandpa Joe's nose and others that have Grandpa John's jaw, others who get both or neither. Even with litter of pedigreed puppies you'll get one total loser and if you're lucky one champion; and pedigreed dog litters are much more alike than any set of human siblings. And that's just physical traits; in terms of interests, talents, and success there is massive variability among siblings, although there is some correlation, in part due to economic circumstances, upbringing and education.
Nature works this way because variability is good for the species, and that variability comes from combinations of genes being shuffled. Add to that the massive behavioral plasticity of our gigantic brains, and the idea that you can sample some of, say, Steve Jobs DNA for successful CEO markers is ludicrous. If you'd raised Jobs in a different family and sent him to a different set of schools, and didn't get him luck out by ending up close friends with Woz, then while he may well have been quite successful in some other way, he wouldn't have been the Steve Jobs we knew.
Of course, willingness to go along with the DNA test is a good test for one phenotypical trait: the willingness to put up with pseudo-scientific baloney.
People who don't believe that VP picks have always been analyzed this way are naive. Lincoln picked Andrew Johnson because Johnson was from a border state (Tennessee) that could go either way. The primary goal of a VP pick is to help you win. Everything else is secondary.
The VP pick is all about picking up votes from electorate segments you might not otherwise get (Palin/women), or solidifying shaky part of your coalition (Biden/labor and left), or being young when you are old or vice versa (Quayle). Coming from a swing state or an adjacent state with major media market overlap (Edwards, Ryan, Pence, Kaine) puts you on the inside track. Naturally, sometimes those calculations go hilariously wrong.
It's safe to say that almost nobody ever picks the person they think would be the best president as their running mate; it's ways the person who would be the best running mate. The last time I think that anyone picked someone on the basis that they'd be the best president was when Bob Dole picked Jack Kemp -- who wouldn't be my choice for President, but I'm pretty sure he'd have been Dole's.
Pssst! Sanders is a Jew.
When you have a tablet, you can do things like punch in what defense the other team just used to provide statistical analysis of what the next best play is, or what kind of defense to run if your opponent is doing X often.
I'm guessing this is another case of a solution in search of a problem.
The reason this happens is that as a technologist faced with helping someone solve a problem you have no choice but to imagine what you would need to do that person's job. But if you want to have a better than random chance at success, you have to really understand the people who will use the system and what they would need.
I'm guessing Belichick of all people doesn't need a computer to give him a statistical analysis of what the best next play is or how to set up his defense -- although you or I sure as hell would. What sets Belichick apart from all the other ruthless, unprincipled, hyper-competitive control-freak coaches is that he's a smart bastard who is obsessive about research. If I had to take a wild stab at what kind of technical aids he needs during a game, the broad theme would be "communication", not "analysis".
By the way, does anyone else find it bizarre that the NFL provides stuff like computer tablets and headsets, but the teams are in charge of supplying the footballs?
Word mean precisely what people agree them to mean, and that changes over time. Now go get grandpa his bourbon before he gets cranky.