But I thought that the standard/. line was to teach to the highest student and pull the rest along. . . ..
Actually, that's the standard teachers union line, where the fast learning kids get to teach the slower kids instead of learning farther ahead themselves. This makes them more manageable, and keeps everything on a nice grade-level basis so the teacher can read the lesson plan a week ahead of having to teach the lesson, instead of knowing the material cold. This is why it's possible for the P.E. teacher to substitute for the History teacher on occasion.
I think the standard/. line, if there was one, would be: let the faster learning kids learn at their own pace, and let the slower learning kids learn to say "would you like fries with that?" to the faster learning kids.
The newer ones were built in a much stronger regulatory climate, which is not to say a much more stringent one, but instead one in which the regulations were constantly changing during construction.
As a result, newer plants have a lot of "engineering modifications" on top of their original designs, and every one of those modifications is a potential point of failure because the system was not considered as a whole when the regulation was decided, and the minimum delta necessary to comply with the regulations is what will have been done instead. This is generally called 'regulatory hurdle jumping', and it's pretty typical of any large construction project that's actively opposed by one or more special interest groups, who will throw every obstacle they possibly can in the way in the hopes that one of them stops the project, or if not stops it, makes it economically nonviable. For example, in the San Francisco Bay area, the Bay bridge design was changed many times from the original design by Frank Lloyd Writ into some monstrosity with huge cost overruns, and then there was a curve added that wasn't there before which has resulted in hundreds of car accidents.
I'd actually be surprised if the operators of older plants actively looked for any but the most egregious problems, considering that any repairs they make will end up having to conform to current regulations, and might well result in huge numbers of changes. The resulting hodge-podge of spit an bailing wire would no doubt be significantly more dangerous than just ignoring minor issues until they became too big to ignopre.
The point is that the cost for her going back to work is rather large, compared to doing the minimum to continue to qualify for unemployment insurance.
Raising the minimum wage, as the GP to which I was replying suggested would not fix the problem. It's not a problem with the minimum wage, it's a problem with there being an economic disincentive to reenter the job market.
As to my particular relative, yes, she earned the right to the unemployment, assuming she had an inability to get a replacement job, but the job search being conducted is not a job search to find employment, it's a job search to maintain qualification.
As to your off-shoring shout, I have two things to say:
(1) it's a complete non sequitur; she works in a field that it's impossible to off-shore due to the need to maintain scheduled face-to-face contact with other people.
(2) People are being priced out of the labor market in the U.S. due to free trade agreements with countries which do not have to enforce our environmental or labor relations laws; make tariffs contingent on their complying with our laws in order to do business with us, and the cost of doing business off-shore will go up. Although probably not to the point that the U.A.W. will be able to put humans in jobs better done by robots, as they currently do at companies like G.M. and John Deere, it will be enough to move a lot of manufacturing, textile, and other blue-collar jobs back to the U.S..
I have a relative who makes $1600/month on unemployment; that's $9.23/hour, and if you factor in the income taxes she'd be paying if she were getting that after taxes from a job, she'd need a job that pays $12.47/hour. That's an annual income of $25937.60, which is 232% of what the article claims is poverty level.
That hourly rate is a break-even number for her, not including the marginal costs of having every day free except the mandated one-day-a-week interview day, which is mostly free considering these are not Google interviews she's going to. You would likely need to pay her significantly more than that to give up her 6 day weekends, since the marginal benefit of actually having to work 40 hours a week instead of interviewing once a week is pretty low in terms of the high opportunity costs.
Barring an unfortunate incident (like getting hired), she's going to be able to keep miking that cow based on state unemployment insurance plus the federal EUC unemployment extension until January 2013, which is coincidentally about when her COBRA insurance runs out, but hey, then there's the affordable healthcare act in place to catch her. After that, she will likely get a job for a short while, and then go back on unemployment/COBRA as soon as she's eligible, and then eventually she'll be able to do this without having to pay the COBRA (Hey! Pay raise!).
So would raising the minimum wage to $12.47/hour get her off her ass? No. It wouldn't. How high would it have to be? $12.47/hour plus however much per hour she values her free time. Consider it a discount that she would also not need to add per hour day care costs to that total minimum hourly rate, since she currently does not have children.
Now multiply her by every unemployed person who is getting government assistance of one kind or another.
PS: Based on the article, since Federal minimum wage is $7.25/hour (due to go to $9,35 this year, according to the legislation), that's $7.25 * 53 * 40 = $15,080/year, someone making minimum wage is above the individual poverty level of $11,139 by 35%, due to go to $9.35 * 52 * 40 = $19,448, or 75% above poverty level.
FWIW: If you ask me, this should be the determination of poverty level:
The part the summary left out: If you refuse to use your real name, then you can no longer reply to youtube comments. The option is disabled.
This is false, I've logged in, told it I don't want to use my real name, and am still able to comment.
He's talking about replying to comments, not making initial comments. So for example, if you post a video, and someone makes an asshat comment on it, you can't call them on it by replying, it just sits there being an asshat comment until it bothers you so badly that you relent and give out your real name.
Basically, it's a form of emotional blackmail to get you to reveal your real name, which is what they wanted in the first place....now waiting for the conspiracy theorists to will claim Google hires people to make asshat comments on videos posted by people who refuse to use their real name...
Corporations are made up of people. People have rights. Those rights cannot be taken away (being inalienable and all).
Yeah, and Soylent Green is also people. What's your point, that corporations somehow don't pasteurize, homogenize, and add high fructose corn syrup to the collective identity of the people who make them up, thus denaturing their claim on a personhood?
Let's all build SOCs for SBC hardware for cheap that are capable of 1080p H.254 decode, and then not document the graphics hardware so that no one actually uses them to ship finished machines!
Maybe at the same time we can all implement the shittiest memory bandwidth we can possibly implement so that we get crappy graphics performance on theoretically good hardware because it's impossible to use a binary blob driver due to the EXPORT_SYMBOL_GPL on the DRM interfaces, so we have to push all the graphics data across the user/kernel protection domain boundary once in full screen mode and 3 times when doing even simple 2D compositing.
Perhaps we could take a page from some vendors books and run our own hypervisor in the TZones on some ARM SOCs so that no matter how good you make your kernel and driver code, there's no way to guarantee things run in bounded time so you don't drop frames, because you have no way to predict when or why the damn code in the hypervisor will run.
Maybe we can make things worse by having a lot of crap that should be in the device tree hard-coded in board files instead. Heck, why not just have separate device trees for the boot loader and the kernel so that they can get desynchronized all the time, and if that isn't enough to make things suck, heck, why don't we make the kernel have to have board files too that go out and get values from the device tree which might as well be had-coded to run statically configured drivers, instead of just having the kernel iterate the damned device tree so it's all automatic.
Perhaps we can also avoid coming up with an ISA, and instead make everything similar enough to be tempting, but dissimilar enough so that it's hard to replace our chip with someone else's chip so we don't have to compete on our ability to deliver superior products (and hope Microsoft doesn't invent one and shove it down our collective throats with Windows 8).
Yeah, I'm sure the price of the thing is really an issue, like everyone's claiming. Yeah, that's gotta be why there's not wide adoption of ARM. It could not possibly be any other reason.
Give all the IP4 addresses away to China and other countries where botnets tend to originate most often, and make then NAT to get on the IP6 network the rest of us will live on when we don't own any of the IP4 space any more.
Unless you are an anal meta-administrator attempting to keep yourself employed, or a repressive government trying to keep your people firmly under your jackboot, everything should be done via stateless autoconfiguration.
Personally, I know I will not miss having to set up tons of hardware that's too stupid to assign its own address correctly.
At least when it comes to the table space, there's the iPad, and then there's the wannabes. This would probably not be an issue, except they disallow other browsers to use their own JavaSCript rendering engine, and instead they have to wrap a UIWebView in their browser. THis has two effects: (1) you don't get high performance JavaScript, and (2) they disable JIT'ing in a wrapped view, so the performance is never comparable to Safaru.
Admittedly, this comes about from the technical chicken-and-egg problem of JIT'ing an extended UIWebView, vs. not having full support for emerging HTML5 standards (pick one) and Apple's inability to do proxy code signing on scripts like this, necessitating disabling the JIT'ing. They can't trust that the wrapped UIWebView isn't being used to run interpreted programs not explicitly approved by Apple for use on the device.
But you can argue that this is in fact a wielding of monopolistic power in the tablet space effectively causing harm to browser competitors to Safari.
I'm also kind of waiting to see if there's going to be a UUNet-style "your filters aren't good enough for me" lawsuit from some irate parent should anything "dirty" get through to their Child's iPod Touch. It'd be logical, given that Apple has elected to content filter the store, and is therefore arguably operating in loco parentis when it comes to protecting kids from the evil applications on the Internet. Should be fun if someone tries to apply the UUNet content filtering decisions to the App Store.
Mac OS X != iOS, as much as the Lion releases appear to want you to believe it. The actual bot lockdown on these things was Samsung's, which is why the same buffer overflow attack for the check code worked around it for the initial jail-breaks.
Technically, there's really nothing preventing you from jail-breaking these devices and running your own OS in place of iOS, other than the alternatives out there so far pretty much suck so there's not a huge incentive for capable hackers to do it. The graphics and I/O stacks on Linux for the Apple hardware are generally pretty low performing compared to Apple's stack, and they're pretty poor performing compared to the Raspberry Pi stack, since they generally try to avoid binary-only drivers in kernel space, and that costs memory bandwidth doing double-crossing of the protection domain boundary. The primary reason anyone does it is to run unapproved applications, which typically includes doing data tethering without paying the phone company for the more expensive fixed-cap tethering plans.
The problem with the Windows UEFI is that they are trying to put together an ISA for ARM, like in the Intel architecture PC industry, and then lock everyone else out of the hardware. They'd happily do that on Intel, too, if they thought they could get away with it.
For things like cell phones, where there's incredible regulation on Software Defined Radios, which then varies from country to country, that's really a matter of "you lock your baseband to the particular hardware and vice versa, or you don't get to ship your phone". The iPod Touch and the non-cell enabled iPad are less arguable, as are the putative ARM-based Windows 8 netbooks which in theory won't be unlockable. Well, at least not without using a dediprog to reflash the firmware after opening it up and violating the warranty. That assumes someone with enough clue is willing to spend some quality time with IDA pro and some serious compute cycles to get some matching hashes and/or looking for bugs in the implementation.
That's an interesting statistic. You know that France has a higher suicide rate than all of those place, with the possible exception of Somalia, which we can make up things about because we lack the data for either one of those stats there:
That particular decision is also the reason it's so hard to revoke a corporate charter in California (the corporate equivalent of a death penalty on the "person").
They use a Qualcomm Snapdragon single core chip which uses TZones in order to implement the moral equivalent of a hypervisor to run the baseband firmware on the same processor they use to run the UI.
Since there are four published exploits for the TZone model, letting people unlock the phones would let them have access to the baseband software, and through that, the ability to modify the SDR (Software Defined Radio) to operate outside of FCC/pick_your_country's_regulator spectrum.
Since the regulators have a gentleman's agreement to allow licensing of SDRs only as combined software/hardware blobs, this tends to piss them off and revoke licensing.
The newer Sony dual-core phones are permitted to be unlocked for developers because they avoid this vulnerability.
The typo issue is only part of the QWERTY benefit.
It also places the keys you are most likely to type next, at least in English, on different hands, which if you can do different things with your hands, also makes for faster typing (some people can't; tends to make them bad piano players).
It additionally has the benefit of allowing matrix keyboards take less expensive electronics by reducing the ghost key suppression to unlikely intersections of keys (three keys have to have one pair share a row and one pair a column and all three be down at the same time to trigger ghosting). The alternative would be frequency keying or split row matrices or diodes on each key to allow row/column major scanning and detection.
The June 2012 changes to the EPAT verification criteria require them to permit on-site compliance audits by third parties.
I'm thinking someone with a long history of working for Samsung has enough familiarity with the electronics industry to be a qualified third party auditor, then quit the auditing company and go back to work for Samsung.
This seems to be an attempt to look in Apple's manufacturing shorts to see how their assembly lines are run.
Rail needs either distance or population density
on
The 300 km/h Superbus
·
· Score: 1
Rail needs either distance or population density to be economically viable. Given that 50% of the U.S. population lives within 50 miles of a coast, yeah, it works in densely populated areas, but for example the rail in the middle of nowhere they plan here in California isn't going to see a lot of ridership.
Even if it's economically viable, it does give a nice single choke-point where people without individual transport can have their mobility drastically reduced if someone in power thinks it's in their best interests to shut peoples travel down. We've several dry runs for this already, for example on the airport closures after 9/11, or the closure of the only two roads in and out of New Orleans to only emergency traffic, effectively forcing 60,000 people to stay put in flood conditions, or the BART shutdown of cell service in an attempt to squelch civil disobedience.
Slashdot Mirror
But I thought that the standard /. line was to teach to the highest student and pull the rest along. . . . .
Actually, that's the standard teachers union line, where the fast learning kids get to teach the slower kids instead of learning farther ahead themselves. This makes them more manageable, and keeps everything on a nice grade-level basis so the teacher can read the lesson plan a week ahead of having to teach the lesson, instead of knowing the material cold. This is why it's possible for the P.E. teacher to substitute for the History teacher on occasion.
I think the standard /. line, if there was one, would be: let the faster learning kids learn at their own pace, and let the slower learning kids learn to say "would you like fries with that?" to the faster learning kids.
The newer ones were built in a much stronger regulatory climate, which is not to say a much more stringent one, but instead one in which the regulations were constantly changing during construction.
As a result, newer plants have a lot of "engineering modifications" on top of their original designs, and every one of those modifications is a potential point of failure because the system was not considered as a whole when the regulation was decided, and the minimum delta necessary to comply with the regulations is what will have been done instead. This is generally called 'regulatory hurdle jumping', and it's pretty typical of any large construction project that's actively opposed by one or more special interest groups, who will throw every obstacle they possibly can in the way in the hopes that one of them stops the project, or if not stops it, makes it economically nonviable. For example, in the San Francisco Bay area, the Bay bridge design was changed many times from the original design by Frank Lloyd Writ into some monstrosity with huge cost overruns, and then there was a curve added that wasn't there before which has resulted in hundreds of car accidents.
I'd actually be surprised if the operators of older plants actively looked for any but the most egregious problems, considering that any repairs they make will end up having to conform to current regulations, and might well result in huge numbers of changes. The resulting hodge-podge of spit an bailing wire would no doubt be significantly more dangerous than just ignoring minor issues until they became too big to ignopre.
By "watch out for the drunks", you are referring to the bus drivers, right?
"Remember, don't drink and drive!
Ride the Bus, and leave the drinking to us!"
Yeah, bombing them with those'd be a great idea.
I can just see Ron Jeremy accepting his Mother Teresa Award...
For the Rubberband man!
The point is that the cost for her going back to work is rather large, compared to doing the minimum to continue to qualify for unemployment insurance.
Raising the minimum wage, as the GP to which I was replying suggested would not fix the problem. It's not a problem with the minimum wage, it's a problem with there being an economic disincentive to reenter the job market.
As to my particular relative, yes, she earned the right to the unemployment, assuming she had an inability to get a replacement job, but the job search being conducted is not a job search to find employment, it's a job search to maintain qualification.
As to your off-shoring shout, I have two things to say:
(1) it's a complete non sequitur; she works in a field that it's impossible to off-shore due to the need to maintain scheduled face-to-face contact with other people.
(2) People are being priced out of the labor market in the U.S. due to free trade agreements with countries which do not have to enforce our environmental or labor relations laws; make tariffs contingent on their complying with our laws in order to do business with us, and the cost of doing business off-shore will go up. Although probably not to the point that the U.A.W. will be able to put humans in jobs better done by robots, as they currently do at companies like G.M. and John Deere, it will be enough to move a lot of manufacturing, textile, and other blue-collar jobs back to the U.S..
I have a relative who makes $1600/month on unemployment; that's $9.23/hour, and if you factor in the income taxes she'd be paying if she were getting that after taxes from a job, she'd need a job that pays $12.47/hour. That's an annual income of $25937.60, which is 232% of what the article claims is poverty level.
That hourly rate is a break-even number for her, not including the marginal costs of having every day free except the mandated one-day-a-week interview day, which is mostly free considering these are not Google interviews she's going to. You would likely need to pay her significantly more than that to give up her 6 day weekends, since the marginal benefit of actually having to work 40 hours a week instead of interviewing once a week is pretty low in terms of the high opportunity costs.
Barring an unfortunate incident (like getting hired), she's going to be able to keep miking that cow based on state unemployment insurance plus the federal EUC unemployment extension until January 2013, which is coincidentally about when her COBRA insurance runs out, but hey, then there's the affordable healthcare act in place to catch her. After that, she will likely get a job for a short while, and then go back on unemployment/COBRA as soon as she's eligible, and then eventually she'll be able to do this without having to pay the COBRA (Hey! Pay raise!).
So would raising the minimum wage to $12.47/hour get her off her ass? No. It wouldn't. How high would it have to be? $12.47/hour plus however much per hour she values her free time. Consider it a discount that she would also not need to add per hour day care costs to that total minimum hourly rate, since she currently does not have children.
Now multiply her by every unemployed person who is getting government assistance of one kind or another.
PS: Based on the article, since Federal minimum wage is $7.25/hour (due to go to $9,35 this year, according to the legislation), that's $7.25 * 53 * 40 = $15,080/year, someone making minimum wage is above the individual poverty level of $11,139 by 35%, due to go to $9.35 * 52 * 40 = $19,448, or 75% above poverty level.
FWIW: If you ask me, this should be the determination of poverty level:
#define poverty_level ((minimum_wage * hours_per_week * weeks_per_year) - $1)
which would cut out a lot of the bullshit posturing.
The part the summary left out: If you refuse to use your real name, then you can no longer reply to youtube comments. The option is disabled.
This is false, I've logged in, told it I don't want to use my real name, and am still able to comment.
He's talking about replying to comments, not making initial comments. So for example, if you post a video, and someone makes an asshat comment on it, you can't call them on it by replying, it just sits there being an asshat comment until it bothers you so badly that you relent and give out your real name.
Basically, it's a form of emotional blackmail to get you to reveal your real name, which is what they wanted in the first place. ...now waiting for the conspiracy theorists to will claim Google hires people to make asshat comments on videos posted by people who refuse to use their real name...
All of those who left on sea voyages on the 1600s are dead.
Corporations are made up of people. People have rights. Those rights cannot be taken away (being inalienable and all).
Yeah, and Soylent Green is also people. What's your point, that corporations somehow don't pasteurize, homogenize, and add high fructose corn syrup to the collective identity of the people who make them up, thus denaturing their claim on a personhood?
Let's all build SOCs for SBC hardware for cheap that are capable of 1080p H.254 decode, and then not document the graphics hardware so that no one actually uses them to ship finished machines!
Maybe at the same time we can all implement the shittiest memory bandwidth we can possibly implement so that we get crappy graphics performance on theoretically good hardware because it's impossible to use a binary blob driver due to the EXPORT_SYMBOL_GPL on the DRM interfaces, so we have to push all the graphics data across the user/kernel protection domain boundary once in full screen mode and 3 times when doing even simple 2D compositing.
Perhaps we could take a page from some vendors books and run our own hypervisor in the TZones on some ARM SOCs so that no matter how good you make your kernel and driver code, there's no way to guarantee things run in bounded time so you don't drop frames, because you have no way to predict when or why the damn code in the hypervisor will run.
Maybe we can make things worse by having a lot of crap that should be in the device tree hard-coded in board files instead. Heck, why not just have separate device trees for the boot loader and the kernel so that they can get desynchronized all the time, and if that isn't enough to make things suck, heck, why don't we make the kernel have to have board files too that go out and get values from the device tree which might as well be had-coded to run statically configured drivers, instead of just having the kernel iterate the damned device tree so it's all automatic.
Perhaps we can also avoid coming up with an ISA, and instead make everything similar enough to be tempting, but dissimilar enough so that it's hard to replace our chip with someone else's chip so we don't have to compete on our ability to deliver superior products (and hope Microsoft doesn't invent one and shove it down our collective throats with Windows 8).
Yeah, I'm sure the price of the thing is really an issue, like everyone's claiming. Yeah, that's gotta be why there's not wide adoption of ARM. It could not possibly be any other reason.
Someone clicked on the icon in the top-right corner and clicked "mute this application".
...you must install iTunes and the following optional QuickTime components: X, Y, Z, Q, ...
Sorry, it looks like your platform is not supported. Please try again with the latest version of Mac OS X or Windows.
Give all the IP4 addresses away to China and other countries where botnets tend to originate most often, and make then NAT to get on the IP6 network the rest of us will live on when we don't own any of the IP4 space any more.
Unless you are an anal meta-administrator attempting to keep yourself employed, or a repressive government trying to keep your people firmly under your jackboot, everything should be done via stateless autoconfiguration.
Personally, I know I will not miss having to set up tons of hardware that's too stupid to assign its own address correctly.
And whoever heard of an Islamic Militant holding a grudge?
At least when it comes to the table space, there's the iPad, and then there's the wannabes. This would probably not be an issue, except they disallow other browsers to use their own JavaSCript rendering engine, and instead they have to wrap a UIWebView in their browser. THis has two effects: (1) you don't get high performance JavaScript, and (2) they disable JIT'ing in a wrapped view, so the performance is never comparable to Safaru.
Admittedly, this comes about from the technical chicken-and-egg problem of JIT'ing an extended UIWebView, vs. not having full support for emerging HTML5 standards (pick one) and Apple's inability to do proxy code signing on scripts like this, necessitating disabling the JIT'ing. They can't trust that the wrapped UIWebView isn't being used to run interpreted programs not explicitly approved by Apple for use on the device.
But you can argue that this is in fact a wielding of monopolistic power in the tablet space effectively causing harm to browser competitors to Safari.
I'm also kind of waiting to see if there's going to be a UUNet-style "your filters aren't good enough for me" lawsuit from some irate parent should anything "dirty" get through to their Child's iPod Touch. It'd be logical, given that Apple has elected to content filter the store, and is therefore arguably operating in loco parentis when it comes to protecting kids from the evil applications on the Internet. Should be fun if someone tries to apply the UUNet content filtering decisions to the App Store.
Mac OS X != iOS, as much as the Lion releases appear to want you to believe it. The actual bot lockdown on these things was Samsung's, which is why the same buffer overflow attack for the check code worked around it for the initial jail-breaks.
Technically, there's really nothing preventing you from jail-breaking these devices and running your own OS in place of iOS, other than the alternatives out there so far pretty much suck so there's not a huge incentive for capable hackers to do it. The graphics and I/O stacks on Linux for the Apple hardware are generally pretty low performing compared to Apple's stack, and they're pretty poor performing compared to the Raspberry Pi stack, since they generally try to avoid binary-only drivers in kernel space, and that costs memory bandwidth doing double-crossing of the protection domain boundary. The primary reason anyone does it is to run unapproved applications, which typically includes doing data tethering without paying the phone company for the more expensive fixed-cap tethering plans.
The problem with the Windows UEFI is that they are trying to put together an ISA for ARM, like in the Intel architecture PC industry, and then lock everyone else out of the hardware. They'd happily do that on Intel, too, if they thought they could get away with it.
For things like cell phones, where there's incredible regulation on Software Defined Radios, which then varies from country to country, that's really a matter of "you lock your baseband to the particular hardware and vice versa, or you don't get to ship your phone". The iPod Touch and the non-cell enabled iPad are less arguable, as are the putative ARM-based Windows 8 netbooks which in theory won't be unlockable. Well, at least not without using a dediprog to reflash the firmware after opening it up and violating the warranty. That assumes someone with enough clue is willing to spend some quality time with IDA pro and some serious compute cycles to get some matching hashes and/or looking for bugs in the implementation.
That's an interesting statistic. You know that France has a higher suicide rate than all of those place, with the possible exception of Somalia, which we can make up things about because we lack the data for either one of those stats there:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_suicide_rate
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Santa_Clara_County_v._Southern_Pacific_Railroad
That particular decision is also the reason it's so hard to revoke a corporate charter in California (the corporate equivalent of a death penalty on the "person").
It's called an open proxy scan, you dipshit. It's intentional.
He just admitted to running Skype. It's kind of a given.
They use a Qualcomm Snapdragon single core chip which uses TZones in order to implement the moral equivalent of a hypervisor to run the baseband firmware on the same processor they use to run the UI.
Since there are four published exploits for the TZone model, letting people unlock the phones would let them have access to the baseband software, and through that, the ability to modify the SDR (Software Defined Radio) to operate outside of FCC/pick_your_country's_regulator spectrum.
Since the regulators have a gentleman's agreement to allow licensing of SDRs only as combined software/hardware blobs, this tends to piss them off and revoke licensing.
The newer Sony dual-core phones are permitted to be unlocked for developers because they avoid this vulnerability.
The typo issue is only part of the QWERTY benefit.
It also places the keys you are most likely to type next, at least in English, on different hands, which if you can do different things with your hands, also makes for faster typing (some people can't; tends to make them bad piano players).
It additionally has the benefit of allowing matrix keyboards take less expensive electronics by reducing the ghost key suppression to unlikely intersections of keys (three keys have to have one pair share a row and one pair a column and all three be down at the same time to trigger ghosting). The alternative would be frequency keying or split row matrices or diodes on each key to allow row/column major scanning and detection.
The June 2012 changes to the EPAT verification criteria require them to permit on-site compliance audits by third parties.
I'm thinking someone with a long history of working for Samsung has enough familiarity with the electronics industry to be a qualified third party auditor, then quit the auditing company and go back to work for Samsung.
This seems to be an attempt to look in Apple's manufacturing shorts to see how their assembly lines are run.
Rail needs either distance or population density to be economically viable. Given that 50% of the U.S. population lives within 50 miles of a coast, yeah, it works in densely populated areas, but for example the rail in the middle of nowhere they plan here in California isn't going to see a lot of ridership.
Even if it's economically viable, it does give a nice single choke-point where people without individual transport can have their mobility drastically reduced if someone in power thinks it's in their best interests to shut peoples travel down. We've several dry runs for this already, for example on the airport closures after 9/11, or the closure of the only two roads in and out of New Orleans to only emergency traffic, effectively forcing 60,000 people to stay put in flood conditions, or the BART shutdown of cell service in an attempt to squelch civil disobedience.