Well, a 3.5 to 7 pound weight loss over 12 weeks isn't such a bad result. You can't just diet, you have to change lifestyle. TFA seemed kind of whiny, like one expects to magically melt the pounds off if you run around a while. Even moderate physical activity only burns a couple of hundred calories per hour - that's one brownie.
Well so you already know what the article is talking about, but it's contrary to a lot of people's beliefs. There are a lot of people who are under the impression that overweight people are all necessarily lazy slobs who won't even engage in minimal exercise, since if they would just go for a walk once in a while instead of sitting around, all those pounds would just melt off. So the message here is, it's not quite that simple.
However, when you say it's about "minimizing calories and maximizing physical work," I think you might be missing the point here. It's not so simple. Calories in - calories out =/= weight gained. It also matters what you eat. It matters what kind of exercise you do, when you exercise. Your state of mind matters-- people who are depressed or stressed out apparently put on more weight and even put in weight in different places than people who are happy and relaxed. I've always heard (though haven't read from about any actual studies) that your body will burn more energy to maintain existing muscle, so the idea might be not just to burn calories but to build muscle.
I know there has been years of teaching kids about how the human body is just a simple machine that turns calories into energy and stores any excess as fat, but it's just not that simple. The human body is tremendously complex. There's evidence that if you simply minimize calories, your body goes into starvation mode and tries to use less and less energy. It's much better to eat *good* foods with moderate serving sizes and make sure you're getting good nutrition. Start an exercise routine that includes aerobic stuff and muscle building. Make sure you're getting enough sleep and relax (good exercise actually helps you relax). Get your body in good working order.
Part of my point is that I think it's a mistake to believe the "next step up from the wiimote" = no controller. The wiimote gave some feedback both in terms of sound and vibration, and also allowed relatively good control of some things with relatively subtle movement. Yes, people got up and jumped around and looked like idiots, but if you wanted to you could play Wii Sports sitting comfortably on your couch, barely moving around.
You can make things easier to control and more immersive through other techniques. For now, I don't think getting rid of the controller will be more than a poorly supported gimmick.
Yeah, maybe I'm wrong here, but I feel like this idea is about as overhyped as the idea of replacing your keyboard and mouse with a touchscreen.
First, people have to realize that it won't be like sci-fi level virtual reality. You'll still be looking at a TV, so it won't be completely immersive. Just measuring body movement without a controller means no haptics or force feedback. Plus, game designers still aren't good a providing real freedom in games to "do what you want". Hell, even sandbox games usually only allow you a couple of pre-prepared actions in a walled-off world. Grand Theft Auto is nice enough not to have you running into invisible walls around their world, but they instead put you on an island in the middle of an infinite ocean.
So the things people imagine don't quite work out. People imagine a sword fighting game, but forget that you won't feel the other fighter's block. People imagine a game where you can have realistic interactions, where refined and specific movements can make a meaningful difference in what happens in the game, but instead you're limited to a vocabulary of a couple gestures.
Maybe these things are a stepping stone to something more, but I doubt I'll be ditching my controller anytime soon. There are probably also other techniques that are both easier to pull off and more effective at creating immersion. For example, imagine playing a FPS with a high-quality Wii-remote-like device and 3D head tracking.
And if you poll, you'll consume so much battery that the iPhone won't make it through a working day....And SMS does require special handling since the target may not be awake when you need to push it out.
So this stuff isn't really my area of expertise, but insofar as the problem is in the polling/pushing over IP, doesn't it make sense to come up with a generalized solution that can be used freely for things other than SMS? There are lots of things that people want some kind of "push" technology for, including emails, IM, social networking updates, and even file changes. Doesn't it make sense to just make a standard for pushing whatever data needs to be pushed rather than coming up with something special for voice and SMS?
Why stop there? Mount a small LCD to it, throw in a small HDD, and call it a mouseputer.
Keep going. Replace the keyboard with a touchscreen, put a mic and speaker in it, and wifi/3G networking. Then put the CPU in it and let it run independent of a computer.
Yeah, I don't know for sure whether it's actually a good idea to use hydrogen peroxide for any of these purposes, but it's something I've heard from various people. I've also heard "starve a cold and feed a fever", and I've been told that if you have acid reflux you should drink more milk, but apparently neither of those are good advice.
You take a little bit (maybe a teaspoon?) of the hydrogen peroxide solution you get at the drug store, and pour it in your ear while you're laying down. Let it sit for a few minutes. It will bubble and I think it warms up a little, and then you let it drain out. It feels funny, when it drains some wax will come out with it. I've even heard some people advise it when you have a cold or your sinuses are stuffed. I wouldn't recommend it to someone, though, without checking with a doctor (or maybe Googling it!) first, because for all I know it's a very bad idea.
I agree. Hydrogren peroxide is a common home remedy for ear-aches and wax buildup. It seems reasonable (and even smart) for someone, upon receiving advice to put hydrogen peroxide in his ears, to plug it into Google to see if it's actually a good idea.
I also don't think "Why would a pregnancy test be negative?" is that crazy a question. Yes, there's the obvious answer (you're not pregnant), but one might assume the intention of the question is "Are there reasons why a pregnancy test would be negative even if the woman were pregnant?" Pregnancy tests aren't 100% accurate, after all, so someone might have just wanted to know what factors might throw one off.
In fact, most of the questions in this article are pretty valid questions that I can understand a person wanting the answer to. "Am I going into labor?" Well it's not necessarily immediately obvious, and there's even such a thing as "false labor". "Why would a married man cheat?" It's a valid question, and I bet there are interesting scientific studies that try to address the question.
One specific development build of OSX didn't work properly on a completely unsupported platform, affecting perhaps tens of people nationwide. Subsequent builds did not exhibit this problem. News at 11.
Of course some people are going to flip out and claim Apple is doing something evil. When it gets fixed in a later build, someone is probably going to claim that Apple backed down due to the outrage of Hackintosh owners. In reality, it's entirely possible that they had a bug in a development build that unintentionally broke Atom support, and then fixed the bug and unintentionally restored Atom support.
For the record, I would pretty well assume that the license does forbid every selling or giving away your copies, and that if that's not legal, Congress will make it legal and if it shouldn't be enforceable, the courts will enforce it anyway.
I'd still be interested if someone has more informative answers to my questions, but in a larger sense I was trying to call attention to the increasingly confusing terms of ownership in our society. When I "buy" a CD, I own the CD. If I buy the same album as a digital download, have I bought the digital download? No, I've bought a license to copy cache that digital download or copy it into RAM or some other kind of nonsense. But if my hard drive gets wiped out, do I now have the right to download that song again from some other source? If I burn the album to CD and then erase it from my hard drive, is my ownership of that CD on the same terms as if I had bought the CD in a store?
Yeah, I'm sure that you could sit down and read the terms of your license and pay a lawyer a ton of money to explain everything to you, and then you *might* come to an understanding of what you've actually bought when you buy something online. If you're lucky, a judge might even agree with that understanding that you've formed. If you're really really lucky, that understanding might still be valid a few years from now. Now there's this new licensing scheme, but will the people who pay for it understand what strings are attached?
Not that I don't find this idea appealing. Jim Griffen is quoted in the article saying, "If you find a way to make it faster, easier, and simpler to pay, we think people will pay," and I very much agree with that. It may be that some pirates won't pay regardless of what they do, but there's just no way to stop all copyright infringement. What these companies have to do is make their products convenient enough and cheap enough that the amount you have to work to circumvent their legal distribution methods isn't worth the money you'll save.
For example, I don't go to movies very often and I never buy them, but I do pay for a Netflix subscription. Sure, I could save $13 a month by hunting around bittorrent sites, but I'd rather pay the $13 and save myself the trouble. Now if Netflix offered DRM-free high-quality HD H264 downloads instead of streaming, I'd be willing to pay more for the service, but it wouldn't cause me to buy fewer movies. At this point, movie studios don't see a single additional cent from me by restricting the movie downloads to "streaming only" vs. DRM-free downloads. It's just a worse service so I'm willing to pay less for it.
The most unusual feature of Choruss is that users would be able to download any song in the collection to their own computers, with no restrictions. Unlike Apple's iTunes, which charges about a dollar per song for unrestricted downloads, this would be an all-you-can-grab song buffet. Want to make CD's? Sure.
What if they want to make CDs, and then they want to sell those CDs? Copyright only governs the creation of a copy, but once a copy is created you're generally allowed to sell it. Does the license forbid such reselling? Is it enforceable?
I don't think that $12-$15 (or a buck or two per track) is really an unfair price for even a half-decent CD, really
It's not horrible, but I think part of what ticks people off is the impression that the record labels save lots of money by distributing online and also get a bigger cut of the price, and yet they keep the price the same and sit around complaining about how they're not making enough money. I don't think people are quite as upset about paying the $10-$15 for an album as they're upset about that money going to, as you say, "increasingly irrelevant middlemen". The perception is that, if you cut out that middleman, the price could drop significantly without diminishing the amount actually going to the people making the album.
Is that fair? I don't know for sure. If anyone thinks that perception doesn't reflect the reality of the situation, then I'd love an alternate viewpoint.
So I'll ask you this: how, pray tell, do you explain how properly-installed Linux has its rock-solid stability on such a wide variety of hardware? If indeed the support of a wide variety of commodity PC hardware is the cause of instability
I think the idea is more that Linux is rock-solid because they don't have crappy closed-source drivers from every little hardware vendor. Suddenly Linux's lack of hardware vendor support is a plus, since writing their own drivers increased the stability. So Windows is pretty solid so long as you're using well supported hardware with well written drivers, but you get the BSOD when you install some crappy driver from some random hardware vendor and that driver goes AWOL.
Now I'm not a Windows fan, but I've supported Windows since WfW 3.11, and I believe that there's at least some truth to this idea. If you install Windows XP or anything after (maybe excepting Vista when it was first released) on good hardware with good drivers, the BSOD should be pretty rare.
And the thing with Macs isn't just that they only have to support a smaller selection of hardware, but that they get to control exactly which hardware and then test and approve the drivers. If there's some video chipset from a given manufacturer that isn't going to work well for their OS, they just don't include that chipset in any of their systems. It's true that neither Linux developers nor Microsoft have that luxury, and I believe it's at least partially responsible for Apple's reputation of being solid and that everything "just works". It's much easier to make a solid system where everything works out of the box if you're controlling both the hardware and the software.
Personally, I think that attitude shows in Google's products. I'm not a mindless Google fan, and I agree with those who say we should be wary of a single company having so much information, but I certainly don't get the feeling from Google that they're trying to restrict their users, prevent openness, or monetize every little corner of every aspect of their interaction with users.
I think more businesses should think of people as "customers" instead of "consumers". It may not be a major distinction, but it's an important one. Don't treat the general population as a herd of mindless animals whose job it is to consume whatever crap you shovel out; treat them like the group of people you need to please in order to support your business. I get the sense that Google understands that.
Sure, kind of like how knowing how to put together furniture from Ikea without looking at the directions is a sign of intelligence, or having good karma on Slashdot is a sign of intelligence. It's a sign, but one which isn't very clear and may be misleading.
TFA seems to be about trying to show that George W. Bush was actually smart.
I don't think that's quite what it's saying. It's claiming that he has a high(-ish) IQ and yet isn't smart, and trying to use that as an example of IQ failing to be a good measure of intelligence.
I don't know... I guess I subscribe a little more to the "stupid is as stupid does" line of thought. There's not much point in calling someone dumb when they're making good decisions. On the other hand, I don't care how high your IQ is, if you frequently do stupid things, then you're stupid.
I always thought of intelligence as being something like height. Physical height seems to be a genetic gift, something you're born with or your not, but nutrition still has a fair amount to do with it. Being tall allows you to see over other people's heads and reach things others can't. It changes your perspective. On the down side, sitting on a bus with your knees pressed against the seat in front of you is uncomfortable, and sometimes you have to duck to keep from smacking your head on low-hanging obstacles. Though you have very limited control over how tall you are, short people can still climb ladders or even wear lifts to equal things out a bit.
Intelligence is a lot like that, but it's not just the food you eat that affects your development, it's also the ideas you fill your head with and the mental exercises you engage in. Being smart makes some things easier and can let you see things that others can't, but it can also make things more painful or even dangerous. Yes, there are metaphorical mental analogs to the short doorjam or low ceiling. And though being exceptionally quick is an advantage, there are other ways to get similar results. Studying, experience, thinking a lot, and talking to other smart people can allow someone with lesser natural gifts to out-think someone with greater gifts, just like a shorter man on a ladder can stand taller.
Yeah, I know that test-taking is a skill because I'm pretty good at it. A big chunk of the skill is just staying calm and not getting too nervous. On multiple-choice tests, there are definitely strategies for what answers to pick, though it can vary a bit depending on who made the test. For example, some people will only include "None of the above" or "All of the above" in cases where that's the answer. For some teachers, "All of the above" is never the correct answer. If you know that your teacher has a preference for one of those two, it can help you out a bit.
Some people fear seeing the "All of the above" option on a test because it can complicate thing, but it actually improves your odds of guessing. For example, let's saying you're taking a test where each question has 5 possible answers and you come across a question with "All of the above". If you can find one answer in that 5 that couldn't possibly be right, then you've knocked out 2 answers for the price of 1. You're down to 3 already. On the other hand, if you can find 2 of those answers that you're sure are both right, then you can pick "All of the above" even if you're not sure about the other 2 answers. That is, if A and B are both true and E is "All of the above", then you can just assume that C and D are true too.
But the key thing about these standardized tests is that you watch for patterns in the questions that you know the answers to and then apply those to the questions you don't know the answer to. So if you have a test where they're clearly trying to trip you up by giving you 1 impossible answer, 2 likely answers, and a 4th answer which sounds completely wrong but is actually correct, you can guess they'll probably reuse that in other places in the test. When you come to a later question where you again have one impossible answer, 2 likely answers, and a 4th unlikely but possible answer, you may very well want to pick the 4th even though it seems unlikely. This is another good reason why, if you don't know an answer, you should generally skip it and come back to it later. Answering more questions on the test will give you a better idea of what kind of preferences the test's author has for tripping you up, thereby allowing you to make better guesses.
There are lots of more subtle techniques and tricks. Sometimes if you can talk to the test's author or the person administering the test, you can even get an idea for how tricky they think the test is or what kind of answers they're expecting. All of this helps. Actually being deeply intelligent isn't necessary.
Mensa and testing agencies have been making it clear for a couple decades now that IQ only measures your ability to take tests.
Some people have even argued that IQ tests are to some degree cultural. But yeah, for one thing, taking tests is a skill in itself. There's usually a certain logic to the answers in multiple choice tests, for example, and knowing that logic can allow you to make good guesses even if you have no idea what the answer is. Essay questions are harder to fake, but a lot of times it boils down to giving the answer that the person who's evaluating the answer wants to hear. If you give a very intelligent answer that the teacher or TA hates, it's going to get marked wrong.
So there's such a thing as general test-taking ability, and then individual tests have their own skills. You can study for the SATs, and you can even study for a given model of IQ test.
But let's even assume you've successfully tested a person's "intelligence" in the sense of their memory, spacial sense, raw ability to crunch numbers, etc. That still doesn't account for their experience in a given situation, their moral judgement, or any number of other cognitive skills. You might have the highest IQ in the world and be great at understanding a math proof, but if my car breaks down I'm still going to trust a mechanic's judgement on what's broken before I trust yours. The mechanic will have more knowledge and experience about the particular subject matter. Likewise, I might not trust some half-autistic genius's advice on interpersonal relationships even if he's a brilliant physicist.
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I assume that the Droid is a CDMA phone? So the other option is Sprint.
The problem isn't just that the phone is vendor locked, but the only vendors you can choose from are all evil and incompetent.
So what do you propose? We all stop using cell phones, landlines, or the Internet?
I believe that there's also a theory that we evolved from "aquatic apes", and that our fat stores may be in part to make it easier to swim.
Well, a 3.5 to 7 pound weight loss over 12 weeks isn't such a bad result. You can't just diet, you have to change lifestyle. TFA seemed kind of whiny, like one expects to magically melt the pounds off if you run around a while. Even moderate physical activity only burns a couple of hundred calories per hour - that's one brownie.
Well so you already know what the article is talking about, but it's contrary to a lot of people's beliefs. There are a lot of people who are under the impression that overweight people are all necessarily lazy slobs who won't even engage in minimal exercise, since if they would just go for a walk once in a while instead of sitting around, all those pounds would just melt off. So the message here is, it's not quite that simple.
However, when you say it's about "minimizing calories and maximizing physical work," I think you might be missing the point here. It's not so simple. Calories in - calories out =/= weight gained. It also matters what you eat. It matters what kind of exercise you do, when you exercise. Your state of mind matters-- people who are depressed or stressed out apparently put on more weight and even put in weight in different places than people who are happy and relaxed. I've always heard (though haven't read from about any actual studies) that your body will burn more energy to maintain existing muscle, so the idea might be not just to burn calories but to build muscle.
I know there has been years of teaching kids about how the human body is just a simple machine that turns calories into energy and stores any excess as fat, but it's just not that simple. The human body is tremendously complex. There's evidence that if you simply minimize calories, your body goes into starvation mode and tries to use less and less energy. It's much better to eat *good* foods with moderate serving sizes and make sure you're getting good nutrition. Start an exercise routine that includes aerobic stuff and muscle building. Make sure you're getting enough sleep and relax (good exercise actually helps you relax). Get your body in good working order.
Part of my point is that I think it's a mistake to believe the "next step up from the wiimote" = no controller. The wiimote gave some feedback both in terms of sound and vibration, and also allowed relatively good control of some things with relatively subtle movement. Yes, people got up and jumped around and looked like idiots, but if you wanted to you could play Wii Sports sitting comfortably on your couch, barely moving around.
You can make things easier to control and more immersive through other techniques. For now, I don't think getting rid of the controller will be more than a poorly supported gimmick.
Yeah, maybe I'm wrong here, but I feel like this idea is about as overhyped as the idea of replacing your keyboard and mouse with a touchscreen.
First, people have to realize that it won't be like sci-fi level virtual reality. You'll still be looking at a TV, so it won't be completely immersive. Just measuring body movement without a controller means no haptics or force feedback. Plus, game designers still aren't good a providing real freedom in games to "do what you want". Hell, even sandbox games usually only allow you a couple of pre-prepared actions in a walled-off world. Grand Theft Auto is nice enough not to have you running into invisible walls around their world, but they instead put you on an island in the middle of an infinite ocean.
So the things people imagine don't quite work out. People imagine a sword fighting game, but forget that you won't feel the other fighter's block. People imagine a game where you can have realistic interactions, where refined and specific movements can make a meaningful difference in what happens in the game, but instead you're limited to a vocabulary of a couple gestures.
Maybe these things are a stepping stone to something more, but I doubt I'll be ditching my controller anytime soon. There are probably also other techniques that are both easier to pull off and more effective at creating immersion. For example, imagine playing a FPS with a high-quality Wii-remote-like device and 3D head tracking.
And if you poll, you'll consume so much battery that the iPhone won't make it through a working day....And SMS does require special handling since the target may not be awake when you need to push it out.
So this stuff isn't really my area of expertise, but insofar as the problem is in the polling/pushing over IP, doesn't it make sense to come up with a generalized solution that can be used freely for things other than SMS? There are lots of things that people want some kind of "push" technology for, including emails, IM, social networking updates, and even file changes. Doesn't it make sense to just make a standard for pushing whatever data needs to be pushed rather than coming up with something special for voice and SMS?
Why stop there? Mount a small LCD to it, throw in a small HDD, and call it a mouseputer.
Keep going. Replace the keyboard with a touchscreen, put a mic and speaker in it, and wifi/3G networking. Then put the CPU in it and let it run independent of a computer.
Nah... never mind. That sounds retarded.
Yeah, I don't know for sure whether it's actually a good idea to use hydrogen peroxide for any of these purposes, but it's something I've heard from various people. I've also heard "starve a cold and feed a fever", and I've been told that if you have acid reflux you should drink more milk, but apparently neither of those are good advice.
You take a little bit (maybe a teaspoon?) of the hydrogen peroxide solution you get at the drug store, and pour it in your ear while you're laying down. Let it sit for a few minutes. It will bubble and I think it warms up a little, and then you let it drain out. It feels funny, when it drains some wax will come out with it. I've even heard some people advise it when you have a cold or your sinuses are stuffed. I wouldn't recommend it to someone, though, without checking with a doctor (or maybe Googling it!) first, because for all I know it's a very bad idea.
I agree. Hydrogren peroxide is a common home remedy for ear-aches and wax buildup. It seems reasonable (and even smart) for someone, upon receiving advice to put hydrogen peroxide in his ears, to plug it into Google to see if it's actually a good idea.
I also don't think "Why would a pregnancy test be negative?" is that crazy a question. Yes, there's the obvious answer (you're not pregnant), but one might assume the intention of the question is "Are there reasons why a pregnancy test would be negative even if the woman were pregnant?" Pregnancy tests aren't 100% accurate, after all, so someone might have just wanted to know what factors might throw one off.
In fact, most of the questions in this article are pretty valid questions that I can understand a person wanting the answer to. "Am I going into labor?" Well it's not necessarily immediately obvious, and there's even such a thing as "false labor". "Why would a married man cheat?" It's a valid question, and I bet there are interesting scientific studies that try to address the question.
I'm confused... do you think you're arguing with me, or with someone else? Am I part of "you people"?
One specific development build of OSX didn't work properly on a completely unsupported platform, affecting perhaps tens of people nationwide. Subsequent builds did not exhibit this problem. News at 11.
Of course some people are going to flip out and claim Apple is doing something evil. When it gets fixed in a later build, someone is probably going to claim that Apple backed down due to the outrage of Hackintosh owners. In reality, it's entirely possible that they had a bug in a development build that unintentionally broke Atom support, and then fixed the bug and unintentionally restored Atom support.
For the record, I would pretty well assume that the license does forbid every selling or giving away your copies, and that if that's not legal, Congress will make it legal and if it shouldn't be enforceable, the courts will enforce it anyway.
I'd still be interested if someone has more informative answers to my questions, but in a larger sense I was trying to call attention to the increasingly confusing terms of ownership in our society. When I "buy" a CD, I own the CD. If I buy the same album as a digital download, have I bought the digital download? No, I've bought a license to copy cache that digital download or copy it into RAM or some other kind of nonsense. But if my hard drive gets wiped out, do I now have the right to download that song again from some other source? If I burn the album to CD and then erase it from my hard drive, is my ownership of that CD on the same terms as if I had bought the CD in a store?
Yeah, I'm sure that you could sit down and read the terms of your license and pay a lawyer a ton of money to explain everything to you, and then you *might* come to an understanding of what you've actually bought when you buy something online. If you're lucky, a judge might even agree with that understanding that you've formed. If you're really really lucky, that understanding might still be valid a few years from now. Now there's this new licensing scheme, but will the people who pay for it understand what strings are attached?
Not that I don't find this idea appealing. Jim Griffen is quoted in the article saying, "If you find a way to make it faster, easier, and simpler to pay, we think people will pay," and I very much agree with that. It may be that some pirates won't pay regardless of what they do, but there's just no way to stop all copyright infringement. What these companies have to do is make their products convenient enough and cheap enough that the amount you have to work to circumvent their legal distribution methods isn't worth the money you'll save.
For example, I don't go to movies very often and I never buy them, but I do pay for a Netflix subscription. Sure, I could save $13 a month by hunting around bittorrent sites, but I'd rather pay the $13 and save myself the trouble. Now if Netflix offered DRM-free high-quality HD H264 downloads instead of streaming, I'd be willing to pay more for the service, but it wouldn't cause me to buy fewer movies. At this point, movie studios don't see a single additional cent from me by restricting the movie downloads to "streaming only" vs. DRM-free downloads. It's just a worse service so I'm willing to pay less for it.
What about this:
The most unusual feature of Choruss is that users would be able to download any song in the collection to their own computers, with no restrictions. Unlike Apple's iTunes, which charges about a dollar per song for unrestricted downloads, this would be an all-you-can-grab song buffet. Want to make CD's? Sure.
What if they want to make CDs, and then they want to sell those CDs? Copyright only governs the creation of a copy, but once a copy is created you're generally allowed to sell it. Does the license forbid such reselling? Is it enforceable?
I don't think that $12-$15 (or a buck or two per track) is really an unfair price for even a half-decent CD, really
It's not horrible, but I think part of what ticks people off is the impression that the record labels save lots of money by distributing online and also get a bigger cut of the price, and yet they keep the price the same and sit around complaining about how they're not making enough money. I don't think people are quite as upset about paying the $10-$15 for an album as they're upset about that money going to, as you say, "increasingly irrelevant middlemen". The perception is that, if you cut out that middleman, the price could drop significantly without diminishing the amount actually going to the people making the album.
Is that fair? I don't know for sure. If anyone thinks that perception doesn't reflect the reality of the situation, then I'd love an alternate viewpoint.
So I'll ask you this: how, pray tell, do you explain how properly-installed Linux has its rock-solid stability on such a wide variety of hardware? If indeed the support of a wide variety of commodity PC hardware is the cause of instability
I think the idea is more that Linux is rock-solid because they don't have crappy closed-source drivers from every little hardware vendor. Suddenly Linux's lack of hardware vendor support is a plus, since writing their own drivers increased the stability. So Windows is pretty solid so long as you're using well supported hardware with well written drivers, but you get the BSOD when you install some crappy driver from some random hardware vendor and that driver goes AWOL.
Now I'm not a Windows fan, but I've supported Windows since WfW 3.11, and I believe that there's at least some truth to this idea. If you install Windows XP or anything after (maybe excepting Vista when it was first released) on good hardware with good drivers, the BSOD should be pretty rare.
And the thing with Macs isn't just that they only have to support a smaller selection of hardware, but that they get to control exactly which hardware and then test and approve the drivers. If there's some video chipset from a given manufacturer that isn't going to work well for their OS, they just don't include that chipset in any of their systems. It's true that neither Linux developers nor Microsoft have that luxury, and I believe it's at least partially responsible for Apple's reputation of being solid and that everything "just works". It's much easier to make a solid system where everything works out of the box if you're controlling both the hardware and the software.
Personally, I think that attitude shows in Google's products. I'm not a mindless Google fan, and I agree with those who say we should be wary of a single company having so much information, but I certainly don't get the feeling from Google that they're trying to restrict their users, prevent openness, or monetize every little corner of every aspect of their interaction with users.
I think more businesses should think of people as "customers" instead of "consumers". It may not be a major distinction, but it's an important one. Don't treat the general population as a herd of mindless animals whose job it is to consume whatever crap you shovel out; treat them like the group of people you need to please in order to support your business. I get the sense that Google understands that.
Sure, kind of like how knowing how to put together furniture from Ikea without looking at the directions is a sign of intelligence, or having good karma on Slashdot is a sign of intelligence. It's a sign, but one which isn't very clear and may be misleading.
If you love money, become a thief.
... or a politician, or a lawyer. The main idea here being, take up a disreputable and immoral profession.
TFA seems to be about trying to show that George W. Bush was actually smart.
I don't think that's quite what it's saying. It's claiming that he has a high(-ish) IQ and yet isn't smart, and trying to use that as an example of IQ failing to be a good measure of intelligence.
I don't know... I guess I subscribe a little more to the "stupid is as stupid does" line of thought. There's not much point in calling someone dumb when they're making good decisions. On the other hand, I don't care how high your IQ is, if you frequently do stupid things, then you're stupid.
I always thought of intelligence as being something like height. Physical height seems to be a genetic gift, something you're born with or your not, but nutrition still has a fair amount to do with it. Being tall allows you to see over other people's heads and reach things others can't. It changes your perspective. On the down side, sitting on a bus with your knees pressed against the seat in front of you is uncomfortable, and sometimes you have to duck to keep from smacking your head on low-hanging obstacles. Though you have very limited control over how tall you are, short people can still climb ladders or even wear lifts to equal things out a bit.
Intelligence is a lot like that, but it's not just the food you eat that affects your development, it's also the ideas you fill your head with and the mental exercises you engage in. Being smart makes some things easier and can let you see things that others can't, but it can also make things more painful or even dangerous. Yes, there are metaphorical mental analogs to the short doorjam or low ceiling. And though being exceptionally quick is an advantage, there are other ways to get similar results. Studying, experience, thinking a lot, and talking to other smart people can allow someone with lesser natural gifts to out-think someone with greater gifts, just like a shorter man on a ladder can stand taller.
I have a headache now, thanks to you.
You can't figure this out and thinking gives you a headache? You must be rich.
Yeah, I know that test-taking is a skill because I'm pretty good at it. A big chunk of the skill is just staying calm and not getting too nervous. On multiple-choice tests, there are definitely strategies for what answers to pick, though it can vary a bit depending on who made the test. For example, some people will only include "None of the above" or "All of the above" in cases where that's the answer. For some teachers, "All of the above" is never the correct answer. If you know that your teacher has a preference for one of those two, it can help you out a bit.
Some people fear seeing the "All of the above" option on a test because it can complicate thing, but it actually improves your odds of guessing. For example, let's saying you're taking a test where each question has 5 possible answers and you come across a question with "All of the above". If you can find one answer in that 5 that couldn't possibly be right, then you've knocked out 2 answers for the price of 1. You're down to 3 already. On the other hand, if you can find 2 of those answers that you're sure are both right, then you can pick "All of the above" even if you're not sure about the other 2 answers. That is, if A and B are both true and E is "All of the above", then you can just assume that C and D are true too.
But the key thing about these standardized tests is that you watch for patterns in the questions that you know the answers to and then apply those to the questions you don't know the answer to. So if you have a test where they're clearly trying to trip you up by giving you 1 impossible answer, 2 likely answers, and a 4th answer which sounds completely wrong but is actually correct, you can guess they'll probably reuse that in other places in the test. When you come to a later question where you again have one impossible answer, 2 likely answers, and a 4th unlikely but possible answer, you may very well want to pick the 4th even though it seems unlikely. This is another good reason why, if you don't know an answer, you should generally skip it and come back to it later. Answering more questions on the test will give you a better idea of what kind of preferences the test's author has for tripping you up, thereby allowing you to make better guesses.
There are lots of more subtle techniques and tricks. Sometimes if you can talk to the test's author or the person administering the test, you can even get an idea for how tricky they think the test is or what kind of answers they're expecting. All of this helps. Actually being deeply intelligent isn't necessary.
Mensa and testing agencies have been making it clear for a couple decades now that IQ only measures your ability to take tests.
Some people have even argued that IQ tests are to some degree cultural. But yeah, for one thing, taking tests is a skill in itself. There's usually a certain logic to the answers in multiple choice tests, for example, and knowing that logic can allow you to make good guesses even if you have no idea what the answer is. Essay questions are harder to fake, but a lot of times it boils down to giving the answer that the person who's evaluating the answer wants to hear. If you give a very intelligent answer that the teacher or TA hates, it's going to get marked wrong.
So there's such a thing as general test-taking ability, and then individual tests have their own skills. You can study for the SATs, and you can even study for a given model of IQ test.
But let's even assume you've successfully tested a person's "intelligence" in the sense of their memory, spacial sense, raw ability to crunch numbers, etc. That still doesn't account for their experience in a given situation, their moral judgement, or any number of other cognitive skills. You might have the highest IQ in the world and be great at understanding a math proof, but if my car breaks down I'm still going to trust a mechanic's judgement on what's broken before I trust yours. The mechanic will have more knowledge and experience about the particular subject matter. Likewise, I might not trust some half-autistic genius's advice on interpersonal relationships even if he's a brilliant physicist.