Doctors often coerce parents to choose one sex over the other, in the name of profit. Peforming those "corrective" surgeries on infants is profitable
Thankyou for the very interesting post. Just one point I'd like to comment on: doctors still perform these surgeries in countries (such as the UK) where the healthcare system is nationalised and they have long waiting lists of more than enough work to keep them employed for life - so some (perhaps not all) doctors are performing these surgeries not for 'profit' but because they believe that they are helpful (I'm not sure if they are right or wrong to believe this).
I was very amused when Hotel Tenuta di Ricavo in Chianti charged 'extra' for an espresso with breakfast, only filter coffee was included. Avoid Ricavo (and Chianti in general for that matter).
Interestingly McDonalds adapted well to the Italian breakfast and coffee- we stopped in next to Fiumicino Airport in Rome and the espresso bar was 4 people deep, all knocking back shots and taking the odd pastry.
Right... but the parent post specifically said that Google could recognise expressions of the form "1+1=?" and Bing couldn't. Both can understand "1+1".
Google doesn't recognise "1+1=?" but "5kg = ?g" does work. I didn't notice this as I've always used "5kg in g" for unit conversions on Google.
Bing understands "5 kg in lb" but is picky about missing out the space after the number and so fails with: "5kg in lb" (Google worked with both). Bing also doesn't like "5 kg in g", but understands OK if you use the whole word: "5 kg in grams".
These sort of little things make it hard to switch from Google, it just tends to work the way I except it to.
I love that mat, wish I could buy one. I did misunderstand, I thought you meant that the $15/month subscription was a locked-in contract for the wireless access or something.
Your $200 + $15/month newspaper subscription idea for the Kindle doesn't quite make sense, however. Amazon isn't taking $15 clear profit from a newspaper subscription, they are giving a significant chunk of that $15 (probably at least $10) to the newspaper.
So if Amazon is making $5/month subscription profit, then they would need you to subscribe for 5 years to make that $500 total. Longer if you take into account the reduced value of the future cash flows.
Amazon would have also significantly reduced their cash flows from customers who were willing to pay $500 up front + $15/month.
Amazon isn't going for the average customer yet, I doubt that they can produce the device cheaply enough yet- give them a few years and they probably will try for these customers.
I shouldn't have said that you couldn't afford the media, what I meant was that Amazon is trying to get the Kindle into the hands of people who are willing to pay for the media. People who currently subscribe to newspapers and buy a ton of books think that this new device is superb, being able to buy a new paperback every week instantly without wasting time going to the store to find that it has sold. Friend tells you about a cool book they read... and 60 seconds later you're reading it. If you (or I) don't care about these features then we are not in the target market.
The best business plan isn't always "get the product into the hands of as many customers as possible". I won't be buying a Kindle, but I think that they're a cool device for the purpose that they serve and I can see why other people would want them.
So take out a loan for the other $300. How does paying a bank $15 every month differ from paying Amazon $15 every month?
The price seems pretty good to me, for the largest commercial e-ink screen produced so far. I wouldn't buy one myself because I'd rather have my laptop if I'm going to lug anything around at all. My laptop was four times the price of the Kindle however (the world of high performance light weight laptops does not intersect with the crappy $500 shiny screen ones you see at Best Buy). If I didn't need the features of my laptop, or was often away from power sockets, or didn't like the weight of the laptop, the Kindle DX would look like a pretty awesome purchase to me.
You are clearly not Amazon's target market, they are trying to sell Kindles to people who want to buy e-books and subscribe to newspapers. You can't afford either the reader or the media, so why should Amazon adjust their pricing model to make sure that they can get one into your hands for you to play around with?
The problem is that the movie studios wouldn't like having their content streamed under an open protocol.
Apple streams movies at two price-points, a 24-hour (or something) rental price and a play as many times as you like price. This 'Linux interface' could easily implement a 'Save Stream' function which would allow the rental movies to be saved permanently. These movies would then show up on bittorrent very quickly.
If Apple doesn't show the studios that it is making enough of an effort to protect their content, then they won't be allowed to sell that content, simple as that.
So it's slow enough that it only flashes once- great:)
I meant that if you're looking for a page in a paper or manual, say you know it's the page with a particular table on, and is around page 100 to 110. I do this sort of stuff all the time with a PDF reader, just hit page down until I see the table that I recognise to fly past. Waiting for the display to flash and update for every page would be just painful.
I honestly loved the idea of e-ink until I tried out Sony's new reader over Christmas. I just knew instantly that I couldn't live with the slow screen updates and flashing.
Is it only me who just hates the way that e-ink displays flash black every time the whole image changes? Quickly paging through a document would be a slow, painful experience of flashing black and white text. Come back and let me know when the Kindle 5 display updates instantaneously without an ugly black flash and I'll consider it.
The stuff that passes for 'fruitcake' in the US/Canada is just sad, half the replies to this story are just stating how sucky that artificial insubstantial crap is.
This stuff was the ultimate fruit cake, German Stollen:
Stollen > British Fruitcake > North American Fruitcake
The Romans certainly had the engineering ability to connect their empire with a series of semaphore towers; the only thing wanting was the idea. You can imagine how history would have been different if it had occurred to them.
Yes, IP over Flag Semaphore would have quickly become bogged down with people downloading mosaics over bittorrent.
I was always under the impression that "monopolies are bad", at least that's what we learned in 10th grade social studies, and yet here you are saying a monopoly is a good idea. I have to disagree. The U.S. Mail monopoly is a bad idea
The issue is a little more complicated than you were taught in '10th grade'. It would be slightly more accurate to say "unregulated monopolies are bad". Monopolies are very important in areas where the social good is best served by them, such as natural monopolies. Some industries, such as the delivery of utilities to your home, cannot support competition. Instead we tend to ensure that those industries are either owned or regulated by the government.
A friend of the family has a son who's autistic. [...] His mom swears up and down that she can trace the changes in him to the very day he got his 18 month MMR. Even if it's anecdotal, a story like that puts the fear into you when you have your own baby.
No, a story like that makes me question how the parents could have possibly detected autism before that age. Most diagnoses are made at around 3-5 years of age, and some specialists claim to be able to detect autism in children as young as 18 months.
I suspect that this is a contributing factor behind this myth- the age that autism detected correlates pretty well with the age that vaccines are given, but of course this doesn't imply causation.
That was my first thought- quite bizarre to conclude that people "can't tell the difference" based on a phone survey.
I'm pretty sure that unless these people are visually deficient they would be able to tell the difference between HD and SD in a side-by-side or alternating comparison.
Maybe 18% of people think that their fancy new widescreen TV looks better than the crappy wood-paneled 70's CRT monster they just got rid of, no matter what it's showing.
Maybe 18% of people didn't really understand exactly what the question meant.
A recent survey in The Economist suggested this might be true. Instead of just repeating the old "boys are better at maths, girls are better at reading" fact, it showed that boys are not much better better than girls at maths, while girls are much better at reading, and girls improve relative to boys in both subjects as the gender gap closes:
People didn't have the same concept of time in the olden days, two events in the same century seemed practically simultaneous to them. They also walked very quickly, talked in funny voices, and could only see in black and white.
Slashdot Mirror
Thankyou for the very interesting post. Just one point I'd like to comment on: doctors still perform these surgeries in countries (such as the UK) where the healthcare system is nationalised and they have long waiting lists of more than enough work to keep them employed for life - so some (perhaps not all) doctors are performing these surgeries not for 'profit' but because they believe that they are helpful (I'm not sure if they are right or wrong to believe this).
I was very amused when Hotel Tenuta di Ricavo in Chianti charged 'extra' for an espresso with breakfast, only filter coffee was included. Avoid Ricavo (and Chianti in general for that matter).
Interestingly McDonalds adapted well to the Italian breakfast and coffee- we stopped in next to Fiumicino Airport in Rome and the espresso bar was 4 people deep, all knocking back shots and taking the odd pastry.
Umm... it was the "2 second rule" http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Two-second_rule_(road)
Right... but the parent post specifically said that Google could recognise expressions of the form "1+1=?" and Bing couldn't. Both can understand "1+1".
Google doesn't recognise "1+1=?" but "5kg = ?g" does work. I didn't notice this as I've always used "5kg in g" for unit conversions on Google.
Bing understands "5 kg in lb" but is picky about missing out the space after the number and so fails with: "5kg in lb" (Google worked with both). Bing also doesn't like "5 kg in g", but understands OK if you use the whole word: "5 kg in grams".
These sort of little things make it hard to switch from Google, it just tends to work the way I except it to.
I love that mat, wish I could buy one. I did misunderstand, I thought you meant that the $15/month subscription was a locked-in contract for the wireless access or something.
Your $200 + $15/month newspaper subscription idea for the Kindle doesn't quite make sense, however. Amazon isn't taking $15 clear profit from a newspaper subscription, they are giving a significant chunk of that $15 (probably at least $10) to the newspaper.
So if Amazon is making $5/month subscription profit, then they would need you to subscribe for 5 years to make that $500 total. Longer if you take into account the reduced value of the future cash flows.
Amazon would have also significantly reduced their cash flows from customers who were willing to pay $500 up front + $15/month.
Amazon isn't going for the average customer yet, I doubt that they can produce the device cheaply enough yet- give them a few years and they probably will try for these customers.
I shouldn't have said that you couldn't afford the media, what I meant was that Amazon is trying to get the Kindle into the hands of people who are willing to pay for the media. People who currently subscribe to newspapers and buy a ton of books think that this new device is superb, being able to buy a new paperback every week instantly without wasting time going to the store to find that it has sold. Friend tells you about a cool book they read... and 60 seconds later you're reading it. If you (or I) don't care about these features then we are not in the target market.
The best business plan isn't always "get the product into the hands of as many customers as possible". I won't be buying a Kindle, but I think that they're a cool device for the purpose that they serve and I can see why other people would want them.
So take out a loan for the other $300. How does paying a bank $15 every month differ from paying Amazon $15 every month?
The price seems pretty good to me, for the largest commercial e-ink screen produced so far. I wouldn't buy one myself because I'd rather have my laptop if I'm going to lug anything around at all. My laptop was four times the price of the Kindle however (the world of high performance light weight laptops does not intersect with the crappy $500 shiny screen ones you see at Best Buy). If I didn't need the features of my laptop, or was often away from power sockets, or didn't like the weight of the laptop, the Kindle DX would look like a pretty awesome purchase to me.
You are clearly not Amazon's target market, they are trying to sell Kindles to people who want to buy e-books and subscribe to newspapers. You can't afford either the reader or the media, so why should Amazon adjust their pricing model to make sure that they can get one into your hands for you to play around with?
The problem is that the movie studios wouldn't like having their content streamed under an open protocol.
Apple streams movies at two price-points, a 24-hour (or something) rental price and a play as many times as you like price. This 'Linux interface' could easily implement a 'Save Stream' function which would allow the rental movies to be saved permanently. These movies would then show up on bittorrent very quickly.
If Apple doesn't show the studios that it is making enough of an effort to protect their content, then they won't be allowed to sell that content, simple as that.
So it's slow enough that it only flashes once- great :)
I meant that if you're looking for a page in a paper or manual, say you know it's the page with a particular table on, and is around page 100 to 110. I do this sort of stuff all the time with a PDF reader, just hit page down until I see the table that I recognise to fly past. Waiting for the display to flash and update for every page would be just painful.
I honestly loved the idea of e-ink until I tried out Sony's new reader over Christmas. I just knew instantly that I couldn't live with the slow screen updates and flashing.
Is it only me who just hates the way that e-ink displays flash black every time the whole image changes? Quickly paging through a document would be a slow, painful experience of flashing black and white text. Come back and let me know when the Kindle 5 display updates instantaneously without an ugly black flash and I'll consider it.
... GTA also taught him that you can drive through lampposts, notice that he avoided the trees.
Since when did /. (or indeed ./ ) have to stick to articles "related to IT"?
The stuff that passes for 'fruitcake' in the US/Canada is just sad, half the replies to this story are just stating how sucky that artificial insubstantial crap is.
This stuff was the ultimate fruit cake, German Stollen:
Stollen > British Fruitcake > North American Fruitcake
If they're watching movies all day long, just fire them. No need to re-orient their monitors.
Yes, and these 'friends' might be less reluctant than you think to screw you over to save themselves if the shit hits the fan.
The Romans certainly had the engineering ability to connect their empire with a series of semaphore towers; the only thing wanting was the idea. You can imagine how history would have been different if it had occurred to them.
Yes, IP over Flag Semaphore would have quickly become bogged down with people downloading mosaics over bittorrent.
The issue is a little more complicated than you were taught in '10th grade'. It would be slightly more accurate to say "unregulated monopolies are bad". Monopolies are very important in areas where the social good is best served by them, such as natural monopolies. Some industries, such as the delivery of utilities to your home, cannot support competition. Instead we tend to ensure that those industries are either owned or regulated by the government.
where Slashdot links to articles in The Sun!!?
No, a story like that makes me question how the parents could have possibly detected autism before that age. Most diagnoses are made at around 3-5 years of age, and some specialists claim to be able to detect autism in children as young as 18 months.
I suspect that this is a contributing factor behind this myth- the age that autism detected correlates pretty well with the age that vaccines are given, but of course this doesn't imply causation.
Couldn't tell, or care, whether their TV was DLP, LCD, DVI, HDMI, HDCP, or HD.
That was my first thought- quite bizarre to conclude that people "can't tell the difference" based on a phone survey.
I'm pretty sure that unless these people are visually deficient they would be able to tell the difference between HD and SD in a side-by-side or alternating comparison.
Maybe 18% of people think that their fancy new widescreen TV looks better than the crappy wood-paneled 70's CRT monster they just got rid of, no matter what it's showing.
Maybe 18% of people didn't really understand exactly what the question meant.
No, it's called a Vaporator, and it was invented by George Lucas in the 70's: http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/8/83/Luke-Treadwell_close_large.jpg
A recent survey in The Economist suggested this might be true. Instead of just repeating the old "boys are better at maths, girls are better at reading" fact, it showed that boys are not much better better than girls at maths, while girls are much better at reading, and girls improve relative to boys in both subjects as the gender gap closes:
http://www.economist.com/daily/chartgallery/displaystory.cfm?story_id=11481914
At least they'll still need us to reproduce... for now anyway...
People didn't have the same concept of time in the olden days, two events in the same century seemed practically simultaneous to them. They also walked very quickly, talked in funny voices, and could only see in black and white.
So they have find his wallet, and a plane with his tail number, hmm it sound like there's a change it could be him...