Not necessarily. The right wing of the GOP might support him, though many of them hate him for other reasons (especially the Christian Right), but the moderates and the democrats won't. He doesn't have the diplomatic skills to persuade people who don't like him to go along with his policies. The rest of the world pretty much hates you anyway, so he can't make things much worse there.
A few commentators have argued that Trump getting in would be better for the left, because it's likely to result in a backlash from the electorate and a swing back to an actual left-wing candidate, rather than a slightly-less-right candidate like Hilary next time around. In contrast, a successful Clinton presidency would just provide more support for the Democrat's slide to the right.
Exactly. Adding noise... adds noise. If you have a relatively small data set, then the edit distance between the blurred image and one or two of the originals is likely to be smaller than the others, which is what this kind of system determines. If you have a very large dataset, then you're going to end up with far more false positives.
To give a simple example, consider a data set of four people: two white, two black, and of those one each with blond hair and one with dark. You add a lot of noise, but you can still effectively identify them by averaging the colour in the top third and bottom two thirds of the image. You should get a 100% accuracy even with a lot of noise in the image. Now consider doing the same thing on a data set of 100 people in those same four categories. At best, you'll narrow it down to about a quarter of the people.
Neural networks aren't magic. They can approximate any mathematical function and they're often easier to generate than working out what the function that you actually want would look like. If there is enough information in the source data for discrimination, then a neural network can be trained to extract it and perform the classification. If there isn't, then you're out of luck.
Often; however, these things work because the blurring is not actually a very lossy transform. It's a convolution filter that only discards a very small amount of information, but does so in a way that confuses the human brain (the opposite of something like JPEG, which tries to throw away only the information that the human visual cortex doesn't use to identify the image). A number of such transforms have been shown to be either fully reversible, or partially reversible such that you can identify the original quite clearly.
I disagree. In most of the previous recent elections, there was an okay candidate and a bad candidate. This time, there are two very bad candidates. Trump is probably slightly less bad in practice, because he has fewer Washington connections and most of Congress hates him, so he'll have worse policies but less chance of getting them through. Clinton has marginally less bad policies, but is sufficiently familiar with the Washington machine that she'll probably pass a lot of them.
W wouldn't have been so bad if he hadn't been a Bush. If he'd not had the family connections with experience to help get things done, he'd probably have been an ineffectual and unmemorable president.
Given that it's going to be bad whoever wins, you may as well vote for someone you actually want to win, in the hope that next time they'll seem electable enough that people will vote for them thinking that they might actually stand a chance.
No, he's right, as long as he's talking about the people in power and not the voters. Most of the things that the Brexit crowd was complaining about were either things that were done by Westminster, or things that the EU had tried to change but been vetoed by the British government's representatives on the Council and the Commission. The people pushing for Brexit, for example, were the same ones who tried to push TTIP though and found a lot of opposition in the EU. They'll be ecstatic to be able to have an equally bad trade deal between the UK and USA and be able to keep moving capital abroad.
I'd love to know what they base it on. The typical argument is that, at a given point in its maturity, any technological civilisation will be able to produce simulations that are sufficiently real that the inhabitants can't tell that they are inside a simulation. At this point, they will do so at least once and there will be more simulated realities than real ones. Some of these simulations will be complex enough for recursive simulation, and so the number will grow. If we assume that the base reality is at least as big as ours appears to be, and has been around for as long as hours appears to have been, then there must be a great many technological civilisations (even if you assume an average of only one per galaxy, it's a huge number) that have reached the point of being able to build simulations. As such, the number of beings inside simulated realities vastly exceeds the number in the base reality and so there is a far greater probability that you are in a simulation (and probably in a recursive simulation) than that you are in the base reality.
A similar argument states that this probability is further increased because we can't yet build realistic simulations and you could significantly reduce the computational requirements of your simulation by not making its inhabitants sufficiently technologically advanced to require recursive simulation.
Interest rates are very low at the moment, so for a company or a country not to have debt is silly. If you can borrow at 2% and invest the money in improving your productivity to give 5% returns, then that's far better than paying off your loans. At the moment, as the other poster said, the interest rates for borrowing for a lot of countries are negative. If you can invest the money in infrastructure that will improve tax returns, you'd have to be insane not to borrow more and spend it in the current climate, because you're literally being given free money.
It's all about making Europe look attractive. The results of the Brexit referendum surprised a lot of people, but shouldn't have done. One the one side you had people who hated the EU largely for emotional reasons. On the other side, you had people who had a lukewarm liking for the EU, for pragmatic reasons. Very few people on the Remain side were saying 'The EU is great!' Most were saying 'leaving the EU would be very bad!' The most honest of the lot was Jeremy Corbyn, who said 'the EU sucks, but it's better than the alternative.' To make people actively like the EU, they needed a bunch of big changes:
Replace the IMF-led punitive austerity enforcement with something that bails out citizens of countries, not banks that made bad loans. Greece should have been allowed to default, the banks that made bad loans should have taken a big loss, and then the EU should have invested in infrastructure to improve the Greek economy. Instead, Greece was forced to implement measures that caused their economy to shrink (causing less tax revenue, making them even less able to make payments) and were forced to make payments to the banks that didn't do correct risk assessment before making a loan.
Move more power to the EU Parliament and away from the Commission. This would make the whole institution more visibly democratic. Concentrating power in a small handful of people who are appointed by individual national governments just makes it easy for national governments to push unpopular measures through in their own country via the EU. The UK is very good at this and as a result triggered a lot of resentment from people who dislike EU directives and don't realise that they were proposed and pushed through by the British representatives in the Commission and the Council.
Impose the tariffs on dumped Chinese steel that the UK vetoed. With those, we wouldn't have just lost a lot of jobs in British steelmaking (which the UK government helpfully blamed on the EU, just before the referendum, in spite of being directly responsible for them.
Sort out immigration. Germany shouldn't be able to grant instant leave to remain to people who then leave Germany and spread out over the EU. Make it so you don't get the right to free settlement throughout the EU until n years after settling and the problem goes away: if Germany wants to let in a million people, Germany has to find space, jobs, and infrastructure for them for, say, five years. Then they can move on.
Stop benefit tourism. Not a big issue in reality, but a big issue in perception. Make it so that your own government pays for you, whichever country you're living in. If you're a Brit in France, Britain pays for any state benefits you receive. If you're a Romanian in Britain, Romania pays. Total cost would likely be negligible for the states involved, yet would remove one of the bit anti-EU arguments.
Sort out fiscal policy. For the Eurozone to function, there needs to be a flow of funds for infrastructure investment from the richer areas to the poorer. Without that, Germany benefits from increased exports due to an artificially devalued currency, Greece suffers from an artificially over-valued currency and you have a perpetual cycle of bailouts.
That list would be a good start and might make people a bit more enthusiastic about the EU. Instead, they announce 'look, here's some unfunded free stuff!' and hope that it works just as well as real reform. I voted against leaving the EU, but I'd have been much happier if I could have voted for staying in.
the government has no reason or motivation to control the overhead
What on earth gave you that idea? Governments have been cutting funding for all manner of things over the past decade. Oh, and government income comes from taxation, which is related to the state of the economy and improving broadband access has so far led to increases in tax revenue everywhere that it's been measured.
For Maps, I use OSMAnd~, which has offline vector maps and offline routing.
For mail, I use K9 Mail, with a few email accounts (one of which I host myself).
For SMS, I use QKSMS.
For calendars, I use Etar.
For web browsing, I use Firefox with the self-destructing cookies plugin, which is the first mobile browser I found with a sensible policy for cookies.
For the camera, I use OpenCamera.
For all SIP calls, I use CSipSimple.
For eBooks, I use FBReader
For keeping track of dead trees, I use Book Catalogue.
Looking at Google Play, it turns out that I also have the Radio Paradise app installed from the Play store. None of the other things from there are things that I remember using. I installed the Amazon app store for its free app of the day a while ago (and got Bloons TD 5 from that, which is why it's stayed installed), but pretty much everything I actually use regularly comes from F-Droid.
The PM only has to be a member of Parliament, not a member of the House of Commons. It used to be common for the PM to be a member of the House of Lords and it's still possible for a party to gain a majority but its leader to lose the election, then bump them up to the Lords. It's pretty difficult now because Prime Minister's Question Time would have to happen in the Lords. Winston Churchill made it politically impossible to do this in most of the first-half of the 20th century and it hasn't come up since then.
We are not going to eliminate truck drivers within 5 years
You don't need to eliminate truck drivers to eliminate most of the jobs. If you can make a truck that can drive in fully automated mode on the interstate, then you can make a truck that has a bunk for the driver to sleep in and can go 24/7, with a driver only doing the parts near built-up areas. That could easily eliminate half (possibly more than half) of truck driving jobs.
The notion that Siri is going to supplant customer service representatives in any meaningful way within 5 years is just stupid.
I take it you've not used customer support recently. Remember all of those humans who used to follow a script in call centres? Now they're tier 2 support - a chat bot is tier 1 and if you divert from the script too much it will elevate you to tier 2. Again, it doesn't have to be 100%, it even 90%. A chat bot that can help 50% of people will let you halve your workforce (and make customers happier, because 50% of them will never be waiting in a queue).
Facebook is not useless. It is doing a good job at its intended purpose: providing a mechanism for putting advertisers in touch with consumers. Just don't refer to advertising platforms as social media.
If two wolves and a sheep vote for dinner, game theory tells us that one of the wolves is going to be dinner and it's going to be the sheep's call which one. If you're a sheep, you obviously want to stay alive, so won't vote to be eaten. If you're a wolf, you want to end up in a situation tomorrow where there's one wolf and a sheep, not two wolves. Both wolves have an incentive to vote for the other wolf, the sheep gets to pick whichever wolf grants it the most concessions in exchange for its vote. As analogies go, it's a pretty poor one for making the point that its proponents think that they're making.
OSMAnd now has an iOS port, but unfortunately it doesn't yet do offline routing (and most of the places I want routing are when I'm travelling and data on roaming is expensive enough that I only want to use it as a last resort).
iOS now lets you install any apps that you compile yourself. It's not as convenient as F-Droid, but it's a step out of the walled garden. Unfortunately, such apps aren't allowed quite all of the permissions that ones from the App Store can request.
This is true, however Google does have various deals for installing the Play store. In particular, device vendors only get it for free if they bundle all of the other Google Spyware junk on the phone.
Looking at my phone now, the only app that I have installed from Google Play is the United Airlines app (easier than printing boarding passes) and that's also in the Amazon store. I'm tempted to replace the stock firmware with CyanogenMod and not install the Google apps at all.
with no way to have a usable phone and usable maps without granting google this prying eye
Install OSMAnd~ from F-Droid. Send the authors a donation (that way they get all of it, Google doesn't get a cut as they would if you bought it from the Play store). It does offline maps and offline routing, and generally has much better map data than Google Maps (amusingly, this was even true last time I visited Google and walked around outside the office that contains the HQ of the Google Map steam). OpenStreetMap has my house labelled (no, I didn't add it), Google Maps doesn't even think that the road that I live on exists.
One of my kids has a phone which doesn't even allow google play to be turned off
And if you do turn it off, the WebView and a few other security critical components of Android are now updated via Google Play, so you'll end up with an insecure system very quickly if you do turn it off.
Please mod this up. TFS repeats the intentional incorrect framing of the network neutrality debate that its opponents like to promulgate. Network neutrality is about a level playing field, not about making QoS illegal. It's completely fine for an ISP to prioritise HTTP over BitTorrent, for example, as long as HTTP is the same priority whether it's coming from some no-name blog or from Facebook.
More importantly, most useful traffic shaping is not so much about relative priorities, it's about identifying whether the traffic is latency, jitter, or bandwidth sensitive. If I'm doing VoIP, the bandwidth is tiny in comparison to pretty much anything a typical user does, but I'll notice jitter a lot and I'll notice latency. I want my ISP to treat the optimisation goals of this stream as jitter then latency then bandwidth. For normal web browsing, the priority should be latency, bandwidth, jitter (I want the page to start loading quickly, ideally I also want it to finish loading quickly, and I really don't care how bursty the packets are). For BitTorrent or big downloads (including video streams, where you can assume that it's buffered a bit on the client), you want bandwidth, latency, then jitter.
All that's really needed is a mechanism for identifying which of these three characteristics is most important for your packets. Three bits per packet would be enough to identify all of the possible priority orderings, have a 'don't care' mode and leave one value for future use. I think that there are even enough available values in the DSCP field to express all of these, and DSCP also expresses more (for example, it's better to drop this packet than delay it), though it falls into the trap of trusting the sender and providing things that say 'I am important, give me all the things' rather than 'given the choice between these things, I prefer this one'.
To disprove someone else....your own theory must first be correct!
Nope, to disprove someone else you must present an experiment that has results that diverge from the predictions made by the other guy's model. You don't have to explain it yourself, that's the next step along the scientific method.
The problem for the food industry is that you have to keep slowly increasing the amount of sugar. If your competitor makes things slightly sweeter than you, then they taste a lot nicer to someone who is used to your product so you have to add more sugar to retain your customers. The downside of this (from the food maker's perspective) is that someone who is not accustomed to that level of sugar finds it disgusting. I haven't been able to eat mass produced cakes for a few years, because I only ever ate them occasionally and they're now so sweet that I find they taste horrible. In the last year, I've heard more people complaining about the same thing. Unless children grow up eating them, they'll find it hard to start in later life.
In real science, on the other hand, you actively try to disprove your theory
Real scientists are humans, and so tend not to do this too much. Instead, they actively try to disprove other people's theories. If you can come up with a proof that a theory that's the core of the a field's orthodoxy is wrong, then that's one of the fastest ways to a Nobel Prize.
Most of those countries are in Africa, and they're paying by phone because the banks made it very hard for poor people to have bank accounts. There was a gap in the market and phones provided the hardware for doing it. We aren't doing it, because banks have been giving us (more or less) the service we want, so we've not had a market for a disruptive technology.
You get 1 and 2 from the EMV protocol anyway. About 5-6 years ago, a number of banks trialled cards that protected against 3 as well: the card had its own display and a button, you inserted it into the device, read the amount, and pressed the button if it showed the amount you expected. They didn't deploy them widely, because the reduction in fraud was negligible and so there was no benefit. If hacked EMV terminals become common, then they might revisit it. As to 4, the point of two-factor auth is that you need to compromise both factors, so it doesn't gain you much if you can steal the PIN, unless you can also steal the card.
The vast majority of my credit card transactions are under £30, which means that all I need to do is tap the card on the device and it's done. Most of the time is spent looking at the terminal and checking that the amount is correct. For the rest, I pop the card in, enter a short PIN, and it's done. This process takes about 2-5 seconds. I can honestly say that I've never been in a situation where it's mattered to me that something that I do at most a couple of times in a day takes 5 seconds instead of 0.5 seconds.
That said, it sounds like the USA bodged the EMV rollout and bought a bunch of second-hand terminals that the rest of the world upgraded years ago, so it takes longer for you.
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Not necessarily. The right wing of the GOP might support him, though many of them hate him for other reasons (especially the Christian Right), but the moderates and the democrats won't. He doesn't have the diplomatic skills to persuade people who don't like him to go along with his policies. The rest of the world pretty much hates you anyway, so he can't make things much worse there.
A few commentators have argued that Trump getting in would be better for the left, because it's likely to result in a backlash from the electorate and a swing back to an actual left-wing candidate, rather than a slightly-less-right candidate like Hilary next time around. In contrast, a successful Clinton presidency would just provide more support for the Democrat's slide to the right.
Exactly. Adding noise... adds noise. If you have a relatively small data set, then the edit distance between the blurred image and one or two of the originals is likely to be smaller than the others, which is what this kind of system determines. If you have a very large dataset, then you're going to end up with far more false positives.
To give a simple example, consider a data set of four people: two white, two black, and of those one each with blond hair and one with dark. You add a lot of noise, but you can still effectively identify them by averaging the colour in the top third and bottom two thirds of the image. You should get a 100% accuracy even with a lot of noise in the image. Now consider doing the same thing on a data set of 100 people in those same four categories. At best, you'll narrow it down to about a quarter of the people.
Neural networks aren't magic. They can approximate any mathematical function and they're often easier to generate than working out what the function that you actually want would look like. If there is enough information in the source data for discrimination, then a neural network can be trained to extract it and perform the classification. If there isn't, then you're out of luck.
Often; however, these things work because the blurring is not actually a very lossy transform. It's a convolution filter that only discards a very small amount of information, but does so in a way that confuses the human brain (the opposite of something like JPEG, which tries to throw away only the information that the human visual cortex doesn't use to identify the image). A number of such transforms have been shown to be either fully reversible, or partially reversible such that you can identify the original quite clearly.
I disagree. In most of the previous recent elections, there was an okay candidate and a bad candidate. This time, there are two very bad candidates. Trump is probably slightly less bad in practice, because he has fewer Washington connections and most of Congress hates him, so he'll have worse policies but less chance of getting them through. Clinton has marginally less bad policies, but is sufficiently familiar with the Washington machine that she'll probably pass a lot of them.
W wouldn't have been so bad if he hadn't been a Bush. If he'd not had the family connections with experience to help get things done, he'd probably have been an ineffectual and unmemorable president.
Given that it's going to be bad whoever wins, you may as well vote for someone you actually want to win, in the hope that next time they'll seem electable enough that people will vote for them thinking that they might actually stand a chance.
No, he's right, as long as he's talking about the people in power and not the voters. Most of the things that the Brexit crowd was complaining about were either things that were done by Westminster, or things that the EU had tried to change but been vetoed by the British government's representatives on the Council and the Commission. The people pushing for Brexit, for example, were the same ones who tried to push TTIP though and found a lot of opposition in the EU. They'll be ecstatic to be able to have an equally bad trade deal between the UK and USA and be able to keep moving capital abroad.
I'd love to know what they base it on. The typical argument is that, at a given point in its maturity, any technological civilisation will be able to produce simulations that are sufficiently real that the inhabitants can't tell that they are inside a simulation. At this point, they will do so at least once and there will be more simulated realities than real ones. Some of these simulations will be complex enough for recursive simulation, and so the number will grow. If we assume that the base reality is at least as big as ours appears to be, and has been around for as long as hours appears to have been, then there must be a great many technological civilisations (even if you assume an average of only one per galaxy, it's a huge number) that have reached the point of being able to build simulations. As such, the number of beings inside simulated realities vastly exceeds the number in the base reality and so there is a far greater probability that you are in a simulation (and probably in a recursive simulation) than that you are in the base reality.
A similar argument states that this probability is further increased because we can't yet build realistic simulations and you could significantly reduce the computational requirements of your simulation by not making its inhabitants sufficiently technologically advanced to require recursive simulation.
Interest rates are very low at the moment, so for a company or a country not to have debt is silly. If you can borrow at 2% and invest the money in improving your productivity to give 5% returns, then that's far better than paying off your loans. At the moment, as the other poster said, the interest rates for borrowing for a lot of countries are negative. If you can invest the money in infrastructure that will improve tax returns, you'd have to be insane not to borrow more and spend it in the current climate, because you're literally being given free money.
It's all about making Europe look attractive. The results of the Brexit referendum surprised a lot of people, but shouldn't have done. One the one side you had people who hated the EU largely for emotional reasons. On the other side, you had people who had a lukewarm liking for the EU, for pragmatic reasons. Very few people on the Remain side were saying 'The EU is great!' Most were saying 'leaving the EU would be very bad!' The most honest of the lot was Jeremy Corbyn, who said 'the EU sucks, but it's better than the alternative.' To make people actively like the EU, they needed a bunch of big changes:
That list would be a good start and might make people a bit more enthusiastic about the EU. Instead, they announce 'look, here's some unfunded free stuff!' and hope that it works just as well as real reform. I voted against leaving the EU, but I'd have been much happier if I could have voted for staying in.
the government has no reason or motivation to control the overhead
What on earth gave you that idea? Governments have been cutting funding for all manner of things over the past decade. Oh, and government income comes from taxation, which is related to the state of the economy and improving broadband access has so far led to increases in tax revenue everywhere that it's been measured.
For Maps, I use OSMAnd~, which has offline vector maps and offline routing.
For mail, I use K9 Mail, with a few email accounts (one of which I host myself).
For SMS, I use QKSMS.
For calendars, I use Etar.
For web browsing, I use Firefox with the self-destructing cookies plugin, which is the first mobile browser I found with a sensible policy for cookies.
For the camera, I use OpenCamera.
For all SIP calls, I use CSipSimple.
For eBooks, I use FBReader
For keeping track of dead trees, I use Book Catalogue.
Looking at Google Play, it turns out that I also have the Radio Paradise app installed from the Play store. None of the other things from there are things that I remember using. I installed the Amazon app store for its free app of the day a while ago (and got Bloons TD 5 from that, which is why it's stayed installed), but pretty much everything I actually use regularly comes from F-Droid.
The PM only has to be a member of Parliament, not a member of the House of Commons. It used to be common for the PM to be a member of the House of Lords and it's still possible for a party to gain a majority but its leader to lose the election, then bump them up to the Lords. It's pretty difficult now because Prime Minister's Question Time would have to happen in the Lords. Winston Churchill made it politically impossible to do this in most of the first-half of the 20th century and it hasn't come up since then.
Our third party self destructed a couple of years ago and our second party is in process of self destruction.
We are not going to eliminate truck drivers within 5 years
You don't need to eliminate truck drivers to eliminate most of the jobs. If you can make a truck that can drive in fully automated mode on the interstate, then you can make a truck that has a bunk for the driver to sleep in and can go 24/7, with a driver only doing the parts near built-up areas. That could easily eliminate half (possibly more than half) of truck driving jobs.
The notion that Siri is going to supplant customer service representatives in any meaningful way within 5 years is just stupid.
I take it you've not used customer support recently. Remember all of those humans who used to follow a script in call centres? Now they're tier 2 support - a chat bot is tier 1 and if you divert from the script too much it will elevate you to tier 2. Again, it doesn't have to be 100%, it even 90%. A chat bot that can help 50% of people will let you halve your workforce (and make customers happier, because 50% of them will never be waiting in a queue).
Facebook is not useless. It is doing a good job at its intended purpose: providing a mechanism for putting advertisers in touch with consumers. Just don't refer to advertising platforms as social media.
If two wolves and a sheep vote for dinner, game theory tells us that one of the wolves is going to be dinner and it's going to be the sheep's call which one. If you're a sheep, you obviously want to stay alive, so won't vote to be eaten. If you're a wolf, you want to end up in a situation tomorrow where there's one wolf and a sheep, not two wolves. Both wolves have an incentive to vote for the other wolf, the sheep gets to pick whichever wolf grants it the most concessions in exchange for its vote. As analogies go, it's a pretty poor one for making the point that its proponents think that they're making.
OSMAnd now has an iOS port, but unfortunately it doesn't yet do offline routing (and most of the places I want routing are when I'm travelling and data on roaming is expensive enough that I only want to use it as a last resort).
iOS now lets you install any apps that you compile yourself. It's not as convenient as F-Droid, but it's a step out of the walled garden. Unfortunately, such apps aren't allowed quite all of the permissions that ones from the App Store can request.
Google doesn't charge money for Android
This is true, however Google does have various deals for installing the Play store. In particular, device vendors only get it for free if they bundle all of the other Google Spyware junk on the phone.
Looking at my phone now, the only app that I have installed from Google Play is the United Airlines app (easier than printing boarding passes) and that's also in the Amazon store. I'm tempted to replace the stock firmware with CyanogenMod and not install the Google apps at all.
with no way to have a usable phone and usable maps without granting google this prying eye
Install OSMAnd~ from F-Droid. Send the authors a donation (that way they get all of it, Google doesn't get a cut as they would if you bought it from the Play store). It does offline maps and offline routing, and generally has much better map data than Google Maps (amusingly, this was even true last time I visited Google and walked around outside the office that contains the HQ of the Google Map steam). OpenStreetMap has my house labelled (no, I didn't add it), Google Maps doesn't even think that the road that I live on exists.
One of my kids has a phone which doesn't even allow google play to be turned off
And if you do turn it off, the WebView and a few other security critical components of Android are now updated via Google Play, so you'll end up with an insecure system very quickly if you do turn it off.
Please mod this up. TFS repeats the intentional incorrect framing of the network neutrality debate that its opponents like to promulgate. Network neutrality is about a level playing field, not about making QoS illegal. It's completely fine for an ISP to prioritise HTTP over BitTorrent, for example, as long as HTTP is the same priority whether it's coming from some no-name blog or from Facebook.
More importantly, most useful traffic shaping is not so much about relative priorities, it's about identifying whether the traffic is latency, jitter, or bandwidth sensitive. If I'm doing VoIP, the bandwidth is tiny in comparison to pretty much anything a typical user does, but I'll notice jitter a lot and I'll notice latency. I want my ISP to treat the optimisation goals of this stream as jitter then latency then bandwidth. For normal web browsing, the priority should be latency, bandwidth, jitter (I want the page to start loading quickly, ideally I also want it to finish loading quickly, and I really don't care how bursty the packets are). For BitTorrent or big downloads (including video streams, where you can assume that it's buffered a bit on the client), you want bandwidth, latency, then jitter.
All that's really needed is a mechanism for identifying which of these three characteristics is most important for your packets. Three bits per packet would be enough to identify all of the possible priority orderings, have a 'don't care' mode and leave one value for future use. I think that there are even enough available values in the DSCP field to express all of these, and DSCP also expresses more (for example, it's better to drop this packet than delay it), though it falls into the trap of trusting the sender and providing things that say 'I am important, give me all the things' rather than 'given the choice between these things, I prefer this one'.
To disprove someone else....your own theory must first be correct!
Nope, to disprove someone else you must present an experiment that has results that diverge from the predictions made by the other guy's model. You don't have to explain it yourself, that's the next step along the scientific method.
The problem for the food industry is that you have to keep slowly increasing the amount of sugar. If your competitor makes things slightly sweeter than you, then they taste a lot nicer to someone who is used to your product so you have to add more sugar to retain your customers. The downside of this (from the food maker's perspective) is that someone who is not accustomed to that level of sugar finds it disgusting. I haven't been able to eat mass produced cakes for a few years, because I only ever ate them occasionally and they're now so sweet that I find they taste horrible. In the last year, I've heard more people complaining about the same thing. Unless children grow up eating them, they'll find it hard to start in later life.
In real science, on the other hand, you actively try to disprove your theory
Real scientists are humans, and so tend not to do this too much. Instead, they actively try to disprove other people's theories. If you can come up with a proof that a theory that's the core of the a field's orthodoxy is wrong, then that's one of the fastest ways to a Nobel Prize.
Most of those countries are in Africa, and they're paying by phone because the banks made it very hard for poor people to have bank accounts. There was a gap in the market and phones provided the hardware for doing it. We aren't doing it, because banks have been giving us (more or less) the service we want, so we've not had a market for a disruptive technology.
You get 1 and 2 from the EMV protocol anyway. About 5-6 years ago, a number of banks trialled cards that protected against 3 as well: the card had its own display and a button, you inserted it into the device, read the amount, and pressed the button if it showed the amount you expected. They didn't deploy them widely, because the reduction in fraud was negligible and so there was no benefit. If hacked EMV terminals become common, then they might revisit it. As to 4, the point of two-factor auth is that you need to compromise both factors, so it doesn't gain you much if you can steal the PIN, unless you can also steal the card.
The vast majority of my credit card transactions are under £30, which means that all I need to do is tap the card on the device and it's done. Most of the time is spent looking at the terminal and checking that the amount is correct. For the rest, I pop the card in, enter a short PIN, and it's done. This process takes about 2-5 seconds. I can honestly say that I've never been in a situation where it's mattered to me that something that I do at most a couple of times in a day takes 5 seconds instead of 0.5 seconds.
That said, it sounds like the USA bodged the EMV rollout and bought a bunch of second-hand terminals that the rest of the world upgraded years ago, so it takes longer for you.