To me, the Home Media Option is kind of a nice "extra" feature that isn't worth nearly as much to me as access to the TiVo interface. I've used a number of the generic TiVo clones and have always been disappointed. Rarely used features do not make up for problems in an interface that I use every day. So I'm looking forward to the new DirecTiVo
In which case they'd be far better off suing or pursuing arbitration individually than hoping for a class action settlement from a lawyer with a financial incentive to settle for pennies on the dollar
So the benefit to the consumer is that other companies will be deterred from prohibiting class action suits that benefit nobody except lawyers? Wow, huge benefit!
For the most part, class action suits over consumer electronics are a lawyer scam with little if any benefit to the consumer. The lawyer files a class action suit for a huge amount of money and calls a press conference, then offers to settle for a much lower amount of money. The company almost always settles regardless of whether the suit has any real merit, because it is cheaper than going to court, and ends the bad publicity sooner. Individual users get a pittance, like a discount certificate for more of the company's products. Most of the time, the benefit to the individual consumers isn't worth the time it takes to fill out the paperwork (after all, the price of a game console isn't that great, so how much can you expect to get from a "defect" that only partially compromises its functionality?). But the lawyer gets a slice of all of those piddly little settlement, and takes home a nice bundle for very little work.
In terms of pharmacodynamics, methadone is a garden variety opiate. It has two major distinctions: it has good oral bioavailability, and it is long-acting (i.e. it has slow pharmacokinetics). These are major advantages for people with chronic pain. Morphine has poor oral activity, and also wears off fast. This makes it good for intravenous infusion in a hospital setting, but terrible for patients with severe chronic pain. One aspect of opiate analgesia is that once the pain "breaks through," it is hard to knock it down again. Opiates work best for pain relief if blood levels are kept reasonably constant. So with a short acting opiate, patients have to be constantly popping pills. A long-acting opiate makes it possible for a patient with chronic pain to live something approaching a normal life.
Respiratory depression by opiates tracks very well with pain relief, so it is not plausible that the respiratory depression would greatly outlast the pain relief, as claimed in the article. Moreover, we have a huge amount of experience with methadone, because it is widely used for opiate maintenance in opiate addicts. Opiate addicts take methadone under supervision, so they can't escalate their doses. So we know that when methadone is taken as prescribed on a regular basis, it is safe and effective, and toxic levels do not build up in the body.
I think that this is a problem of poor patient and physician education and poor choices by physicians in prescribing a long-acting drug to patients who don't really understand what that means. The average patient has no experience with long-acting pain relievers, because all of the commonly used medications such as hydrocodone are short-acting. The pain relief of a long-acting opiate lasts a long time, but it is also slow in onset. This is an unavoidable aspect of the pharmacokinetics of long-acting drugs. That means that you can't wait until you start hurting, then take a methadone pill and expect the pain to go away in under an hour, as with short-acting drugs. It will take days for the pain relief from methadone to build up to its full level. A patient who doesn't understand this is likely to think, "It isn't working," and take more than the prescribed dose--and then when it does build up, they end up in respiratory depression.
There is no way to have a long acting opiate pain killer drug that does not carry the same risk as methadone. The same hazards apply to oxycontin (which is a time-release formulation of a short-acting opiate, oxycodone).
So the patient needs to be told in no uncertain terms, "This isn't a drug where you can wait until you start hurting and then take a pill. It won't work, and it is dangerous to take it that way. You must take it on schedule, every day. You can't take extra even if you are hurting. If you miss a pill, don't take extra to make up. If you take more than the prescribed dose, or take it more often than prescribed, you may DIE." And the doctor needs to be absolutely certain that the patient understands this and is capable of complying. If not (or if there is not a reliable care-giver capable of controlling dosing), then the patient should be prescribed a short-acting narcotic (although this carries its own, different risks).
ince we have gotten off to a large tangent, I'll try to bring it back. The conversation was talking about the form-factor, and physical design.
Actually, we seem rather to have gotten back to my original point. Here, I'll remind you:
Yet this particular combination of features was not industry-wide before the iPhone. And indeed, the iPhone was widely derided at introduction for these features. Multiple pundits predicted that a phone without numerous hard buttons was doomed to failure, while the notion that there was a potential large mass market for any kind of tablet was pretty much universally derided, the conventional wisdom wisdom being that consumers much preferred netbooks. But now, all of this is "obvious" [grc.com] and it's virtually impossible for anybody to imagine any other way of designing such devices.
Perhaps the courts will decide that our patent laws do not in fact protect the risky design choices that Apple made in defiance of conventional wisdom, choices that have already greatly enriched the options available to consumers. But is that really a good thing? Would it really be such a terrible thing of companies that had the courage to challenge the conventional wisdom in ways that seem "obvious" only in retrospect were encouraged by a limited-duration protection against imitation?
To say it in other words, my point is that it may turn out that patent protection based solely upon physical form may not be sufficient to protect what Apple achieved with the iPhone, and that this is an argument for strengthening patents to protect the totality of the product design, including software design as well as physical form.
LG Prada [wikipedia.org] Try again. Apple wasn't the first, and the only thing that makes them "trying to look like the iPhone" is the focus on a large touch screen rather than tons of buttons. Seems the entire "Apple transformed the market" is the straw man.
The LG Prada makes my point very well because the LG Prada was not a big success, despite being made by a well-known factory and having a famous design imprint. Hardly anybody in the US has used it, because no US carrier even bothered to offer it. Clearly, it takes more than just a touchscreen to transform the market for phones. What Apple offered was a touchscreen paired with software that fully exploited the capabilities of a touchscreen. The LG Prada, on the other hand, just used the touchscreen to imitate an older phone design. For example, if you wanted to enter text, there was no QWERTY keyboard--you had to do it with multiple button presses on a numeric keypad. Essentially, what the LG Prada did was use the touchscreen to emulate older phone designs. Hardly surprising that nobody was much interested in it. It turned out that coming up with a usable touch-based phone was not as easy as it now might seem in hindsight. Modern smartphones do not merely imitate the iPhone in appearance, they also emulate in in software design--another one of those things that seems obvious once somebody else is brilliant enough to come up with it. Here is a comment from Andrew Munn, who worked on the Android development team.
Work on Android started before the release of the iPhone, and at the time Android was designed to be a competitor to the Blackberry. The original Android prototype wasn’t a touch screen device. Android’s rendering trade-offs make sense for a keyboard and trackball device. When the iPhone came out, the Android team rushed to release a competitor product, but unfortunately it was too late to rewrite the UI framework.
This is the same reason why Windows Mobile 6.5, Blackberry OS, and Symbian have terrible touch screen performance. Like Android, they were not designed to prioritise UI rendering. Since the iPhone’s release, RIM, Microsoft, and Nokia have abandoned their mobile OS’s and started from scratch. Android is the only mobile OS left that existed pre-iPhone.
Before the release of the iPad tablet PCs never got the type of market penetration that it did, mostly due to the lack of good user friendly software. Tablet PCs were developed more with the Geeks and enthusiasts in mind so the average person couldn't figure out how to easily use it. With the creation of the iPad, Apple was riding its own coattails to success. It was marketed, essentially, as an iPhone with a bigger screen. They capitalized on the iOS software that scaled well and chose the size well, probably after some good R&D. However, the form-factor concept of a flat, rectangular screen, with bezels on the side is nothing new. Tablet PCs before the iPad did it just as well. The iPad's name is reportedly a homage to the Star Trek PADD, which looks extremely similar to the iPad. As I said, the concept of a flat, rectangular, bezeled device is nothing new at all. There's nothing novel about it.The software running on it that takes advantage of the form factor and makes it as useful and easy to use, that is novel.
Exactly. There is more to a successful touch phone or pad than just the form factor. What transformed the market was Apple's felicitous combination of a particular hardware design with software designed and optimized to take adva
"Completely transformed the marketplace." Oh give me a break with the exaggeration. Yes, they made the smartphone more popular through ease-of-use and marketing. They did not, however, completely transform the marketplace any more than someone who comes out with product which becomes the leading product in its category. Smartphones existed before the iPhone, which allowed applications to be installed via a store. Apple made it more user-friendly, thus revisionist history makes it seem like they revolutionized things. They simply made a great product. In technology, everyone tries to follow the current latest-and-greatest while they research what will become the next latest-and-greatest. It happens in cycles.
Isn't that straw man a bit itchy? Nobody said that Apple invented the smartphone. But before the iPhone, smartphones were more like a Blackberry. Now, virtually all are trying to look like the iPhone. That is a transformation in design.
The biggest hang-up for originality is the consumer. Consumers don't like huge changes.
The perpetual refrain of the imitator. The iPhone, with almost no hard buttons, was a huge change from popular phones like the Blackberry and Sidekick. And consumers adopted it in droves.
Which is something else that proves Apple didn't revolutionize the industry, they just found the right balance of marketing to get Consumers to accept the things they changed, while touting the things that they made better. Not even that, but most phone manufacturers aren't just playing "follow-the-leader" they are actively trying to differentiate themselves and improve upon the iPhone's design.
Ah, yes, the "consumers are the slaves of marketing" response. But there was nothing miraculous about Apple's advertising. And there didn't need to be. All they needed was to get consumers to try it. So yes, now we have manufacturers trying to ride on Apple's coattails by taking the basic design that only Apple was courageous enough to introduce and adding a bow. But the marketing strategy is still primarily based upon adding something to the basic concept of an iPhone.
Sure they had competition, the motorola Xoom, the Nook Color, etc. They were lower cost alternatives to the iPad.
None of which achieved market penetration comparable to the iPad. Which demonstrates that the iPad's huge and instant success was not simply the consequence of there being pent-up design of a tablet with that form-factor, but for the particular combination of hardware and software features that Apple pioneered.
Quite the contrary, if they just kept putting out the same thing and didn't create a new one, and had no competition to the iPhone, their profits margins would increase because they wouldn't have to spend the money to develop and create something new. Competition drives development.
If you look up Apple's R&D budget as a fraction of Apple's iPhone profits, you'll realize how ridiculous that is. The real cost to Apple was taking the initial risk to actually build, manufacture, and introduce something new into the marketplace--a design that almost all the pundits predicted would be unpopular with consumers. If it had bombed, the cost to Apple would have been tremendous. So no, even if there were no competition at all, Apple would lose money if they did not continue to substantially upgrade the iPhone and iPad. And the competition, at least in the iPad area, is probably to negligible to impact Apple's profits, and is likely to remain so for quite some time.
Surveys also show that more people own Android phones than iPhones.
And until a few months ago, many would have had to change carriers to get an iPhone, and the price of iPhones was substantially greater than the cheaper clones. Surveys also show that iPhone users hardly ever switch to Android, but And
They get enough reward by being first to market if it sells. Everything else is just anti-competitive
Really? Then why are so few companies doing what Apple does, coming up with new products that completely transform the marketplace? Why are most of the phone manufacturers playing follow-the-leader? It seems like we need more incentives to originality, not less.
Flat, few to no buttons, clear screen, bezels, rectangular. That is the form factor that Tablets serve, and is what consumers want.
It is certainly a form factor that consumers like. But it is not as if anybody knew that before Apple took the risk of introducing the iPhone or the iPad. There were no market surveys showing a great demand for flat, featureless phones with hardly any physical controls. Indeed, the conventional wisdom was the consumers wanted phones and netbooks with hard keyboards. Is Apple's the only kind of design that consumers would decide they wanted only after they experienced it? It seems unlikely, but we'll never know, as long as nearly everybody is lined up behind Apple playing follow the leader, and nobody has the courage to risk trying something genuinely novel. Once more, the evidence seems to indicate that we need to make imitation harder, not easier.
Apple introduces a new iPhone and iPad every year because other companies are releasing other phones and tablets to compete with them.
So you don't suppose that it would hurt Apple's profits if owners of earlier model iPhones just decided that the model they have is good enough, and that there is no reason to upgrade to the new one?
I can guarantee the actual improvement year to year for their devices would be substantially smaller.
That's quite a strong statement. Upon what evidence do you base this guarantee? The existing evidence seems to point in the other direction. The second generation iPad was a major upgrade, at least as major as the annual iPhone upgrades. Yet Apple had no appreciable competition in the pad arena in that area. Moreover, surveys show that large numbers of iPhone 4 owners are breaking their contracts to buy the new model. This is not competition with other manufacturers, but competition with Apple's own previous models.
There was no technological reason why touch based phones of this design could not have been produced before the iPhone. Yet none achieved any appreciable market success prior to Apple. Are you seriously suggesting that it was mere coincidence that Apple was first to market with the iPhone? And the iPad? Incidentally, the fact that Apple was working on a touch phone was widely rumored prior to introduction, so it is hardly surprising that some phone manufacturers began working on similar designs in expectation of jumping upon Apple's coattails just in case Apple's approach was successful. Of course, no other company went "all in," betting their future on a single design. And note that it is not merely the physical features of the iPhone and iPad that the clones imitate; their software also is heavily imitative of Apple's iOS. It is quite clear that it is possible to produce a touch phone that is not grossly imitative of the iPhone. Palm did it. Microsoft has done it. But that requires a company with the courage to create rather than copy. The sort of courage that the patent system is designed to reward and foster.
Which brings me back to my original point: if the courts ultimately conclude that the patent system does not protect what Apple achieved with the iPhone and iPad, then patent protection is too weak, not too strong.
So... because Apple took the risk and profited insanely from it at the beginning, they get a monopoly on it?
Yes, that is one of the goals of patents--to encourage innovation and risk-taking by giving the company that took the risk a commensurate reward by offering a limited term monopoly.
I'll bet Henry Ford would have loved to keep anyone else from making black vehicles, especially if they had spoked wheels.
Henry Ford had well over 100 patents. And considering the magnitude of his company's contribution, that hardly seems excessive.
Design patents are a new concept, and they're detrimental to the industry and society as a whole.
And how is it so terribly detrimental to make other companies come up with their own original design ideas?
There's no pressure to improve if you don't have any competition.
Have you actually thought about this? Apple introduces a new iPhone and iPad every year. Do you think that next year's model will sell well if it doesn't appreciably improve on last year's one? What do you imagine would happen to Apple's profits and stock price if everybody decided to stick with last year's model?
Besides... it's not as if Apple has stolen major design paradigms from Android. Notification bar? OTA updates and backups? Voice commands?
Apple is not the only company with patents. So if the courts find that Apple has infringed an Android patent, Apple will have to pay a license fee, or trade some of its own patents to get access to that feature, or come up with its own features that are even better. How is that such a bad thing?
Yet this particular combination of features was not industry-wide before the iPhone. And indeed, the iPhone was widely derided at introduction for these features. Multiple pundits predicted that a phone without numerous hard buttons was doomed to failure, while the notion that there was a potential large mass market for any kind of tablet was pretty much universally derided, the conventional wisdom wisdom being that consumers much preferred netbooks. But now, all of this is "obvious" and it's virtually impossible for anybody to imagine any other way of designing such devices.
Perhaps the courts will decide that our patent laws do not in fact protect the risky design choices that Apple made in defiance of conventional wisdom, choices that have already greatly enriched the options available to consumers. But is that really a good thing? Would it really be such a terrible thing of companies that had the courage to challenge the conventional wisdom in ways that seem "obvious" only in retrospect were encouraged by a limited-duration protection against imitation?
I developed a neuroanatomy teaching tool in Supercard, which was an excellent Hypercard clone that was in a number of ways more powerful. The project was successful, using a teaching strategy that was innovative for it's time (although pretty much standard today). It was popular with students and it was used for years by at least a couple of medical schools that I know of. I loved working with Supercard, and I recommend it to anybody with fond memories of Hypercard. However, the fact that Supercard did not take over the world (although it is still available), suggests to me that there is not overwhelming demand for a programming tool of this sort.
Reasons why Steve Jobs might not have been strongly impelled to resurrect Hypercard: 1) Hypercard's heyday was before high-speed internet became so ubiquitous. A great deal of what could be done with Hypercard can be done with standard web design tools to produce web applications that are more portable across operating systems, more versatile, and easier to maintain. 2) Most of the presentation features of Hypercard are now better handled by dedicated presentation software such as PowerPoint and Keynote. 3) Steve Jobs preferred polished software that fully took advantage of the capabilities of the Mac platform. Hypercard was a non-native software environment that was really perfectly suited to little more than "flash card" projects. Using an interpreted language, it was rather slow. Steve may well have preferred to channel developers into a fully-fledged Mac native application development environment, and to devote Apple's efforts toward optimizing those tools rather than maintaining a parallel development system with more limited capabilities.
The premise of the article seems basically stupid. We don't need more tech giants like Apple because they don't create as many jobs as the manufacturing work which is mostly no longer done in this country? Apple did not cause manufacturing jobs to move overseas; that's a consequence of the economics--basically the availability of overseas semiskilled labor at much lower costs than in the US.
The key point is that Apple's data center created 50 jobs that wouldn't be there if not for Apple, not to mention all of the jobs in Apple stores, all of the people working for Apple in Cupertino, all of the people developing apps, all of the people working on developing, marketing, and selling peripherals for Apple devices, etc., etc. Does the author somehow imagine that the existence of those 50 jobs is preventing other companies from opening factories in North Carolina?
So while it would be wonderful to have some new business that in some magical way makes large scale manual assembly-line work once again economical in the US, it seems like we could use a lot more companies like Apple.
Controls can be (and are) done, but it's hard to be sure that your controls are adequate, because there are so many variables. As anybody who works with primary cells of any kind will tell you, sometimes they just die and you never figure out why. Basically, cells in a dish want to die; the trick is keeping them alive. Does it matter exactly where you place the experimental and control dishes in your incubator? How gentle you are when you change solutions? How the manufacturer prepared the culture dishes? Could one or the other be contaminated with some kind of microbiological or viral contaminant?
It's a type of experiment that can be useful, but it tends to be weak evidence. And biological damage from radio waves is a remarkable claim that requires very strong evidence.
I take reports of damage to cells in a dish with a grain of salt. This isn't a natural environment for the cells, and it is incredibly easy to harm them accidentally in a variety of ways. When the phenomenon is unlikely to begin with (damage to cells from photons that individually don't carry enough energy to produce lasting changes in any biological molecule), place your bets on "artifact."
Well, there goes global warming. This is what I really dislike about the AGW pundits - when the temperature goes down for a few years, they'll say "It's just part of a natural ${X} year cycle, and doesn't affect the overall, long term climate..." but when you point out that average temperatures have both risen and fallen in the last 150 years, they'll tell you there's no such thing as a 100 year cycle, as you've just done.
Particularly when it comes to science, a pundit is generally a guy who isn't a scientist, but plays one on TV. If you want to criticize the media, then by all means talk about the pundits. But if you are concerned about what science really says about what's going on, read the original science.
Temperatures fluctuate up and down. But that doesn't make a cycle, which requires a reproducible periodicity. People's eyes tend to fool them, and they see imaginary cycles, which is why science long ago developed unbiased statistical tests for cycles, which are not vulnerable to the human eye's proclivity to see patterns even when they don't exist. So statistically, there is no 100 year cycle. Which isn't surprising, because there is no plausible mechanism to create one. Even a "natural" cycle requires some sort of physical mechanism. Moreover, to reliably detect a cycle, you need enough data to cover multiple complete cycles. So anybody who tells you that they can detect a 100 year cycle in 150 years of data is either fooling themselves or trying to fool you.
When I'm asked if I believe in global warming (as if it were a religion, but I digress...), I have to say "probably", simply because even those who do understand the science, who are supposed experts in their field, are very guarded about their predictions. When you combine this with the fact that it's hard to find the actual models they're using (many simply don't publish their code, as was the case with the IPCC), it's very hard to convince a skeptic that this isn't some scheme cooked up for the benefit of the wealthy. Consider this page [easterbrook.ca] where 10 of the 23 models from the IPCC report do not make their code available for free download. Those that do often have a restrictive license, and only 1 (one) gives access to their code repository.
A huge amount of climate science data and models is publicly available, more than in almost any other field of science. Even when the actual code is not available, the algorithms are published, so any decent programmer can reproduce the models. As any scientist will tell you, if you want to check somebody's work, it's better to write your own code from the original algorithms than to borrow their code, because if you use their code, you are liable to inherit their bugs.
There is no statistically significant evidence that the modern warming is part of any kind of cycle, nor is there any natural mechanism that could produce a 100 year cycle. There is also no statistically significant evidence that warming stopped in 2000. Moreover, statistical analysis of climate models tells us that the expected warming trend is too small to be reliably detected on anything less than a multidecade climate scale, so such a claim makes no sense.
So now it's some unnamed pundit who predicted a 2C warming by now, which amounts to much the same thing as some guy in a bar--these days, a pundit is a guy who is not an expert but plays one on TV. It certainly was not Al Gore who made such a prediction, despite your ritual invocation of his name. He's more accurate than most so-called pundits in reporting the science, but he's no scientist. If you want to criticize the science, don't you owe it to yourself to look into what the actual scienctists are saying? I refer you again to the IPCC reports.
And yes, scientists qualify their knowledge in terms of probability rather than engaging in the false certainty common in other fields. An engineer will not tell you that a bridge will "probably" stand up. The engineers were quite confident in the soundness of the Tacoma Narrows bridge and the unsinkability of the Titanic. Scientists recognize that any prediction of the future caries some degree of uncertainty. You will find quantification of the degree of certainty in the IPCC reports
Oh, "you remember hearing" that predictions would rise 2C by the end of the century? Where, pray tell? Some guy in a bar, maybe? Slashdot does permit posting of links to citations. All of the IPCC reports are freely available online. So why not spend a couple of minutes to support your claim with actual evidence--if it exists. And while you are at it, why don't you link to the scientific evidence for a "100 year cycle?"
The casino is betting on each spin of the wheel just like the customer. Predicting where a wheel won't stop still doesn't help a casino predict whether it will win the next spin, any more than it helps the gambler. Bot both the casino and the customer can predict the long-term average trend. The difference between the casino and the gambler is like the difference between the climate scientist and the AGW skeptic; the casino is betting on a long term trend calculated based upon the best scientific and mathematical understanding of physics and statistics; the gambler is betting against it.
So we're back to the argument, "Nobody can reliably predict the outcome of a single spin of a roulette wheel, so it is crazy to think that anybody can predict the average of thousands of spins!"
And meanwhile, the casinos continue to make money.
Strong candidate for the single dumbest argument against global warming.
I actually experienced unwanted acceleration in a rental car, not a Toyota. When I took my foot off the accelerator and hit the brake, I felt the engine "fighting" me, rolling into the intersection in spite of the brake. By stomping down even harder on the brake, I brought it to a stop a couple of feet beyond where I intended to stop. I continued to drive the car for a week, and the problem never recurred. I reported it to the rental agency when I returned the car, but only barely. With no repetition, and knowing that the brakes were strong enough to stop the car, I'd almost forgotten about it. I'm certain that if it had been a Toyota, it would have stuck in my mind more firmly.
Even though the Wikipedia article has a notation that "This article needs attention from an expert on the subject," it is actually not bad. You'll note that null hypothesis is used only in the context of measurement, and the examples given are ones in which the null hypothesis is that some measurement has a null value (i.e. zero).
Arrgh. I'm sorry, I was thinking you were the fellow who was dismissing Copenhagen as "superstitious nonsense" that few people had taken seriously in the last 50 years.
I didn't say that, but I do think that the Copenhagen interpretation has been something of an impediment to thinking seriously about the real-world implications of quantum mechanics, and how they could be tested experimentally
With respect to the null hypothesis, I've heard several respectable physicists use it in the context I've given.
Even respected scientists can sometimes speak imprecisely, particularly when trying to provide a popular explanation of difficult scientific concepts, so I suppose that you might have heard somebody using the expression metaphorically and taken it a bit too literally. But I challenge you to find anywhere in the scientific literature in which it in anything other than the statistical sense. It would be very unlikely to pass peer review.
With respect to failure to reject the null hypothesis not being evidence in favor of the null hypothesis, this is just a recasting of "absence of evidence is not evidence of absence." Which is, as I've said several times by now, true. But that statement by itself does not absolve you of the responsibility for presenting extraordinary evidence for your extraordinary claims -- and claiming that the universe follows Goedel is an extraordinary claim.
This is another common expression that is easily misunderstood. The statement that "extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence" is perhaps better understood in terms of Bayesian statistics, as applied to cases where there are existing grounds for assigning reasonable prior probabilities to the competing hypotheses. If there is already existing evidence that one hypothesis is much more likely to be true, then a new observation would have to be very strong (i.e. have very low probability if the "extraordinary" hypothesis is not true) to shift the overall probabilities. But for something like this, there really are no such grounds. Is it really more extraordinary to suggest that the universe exhibits the characteristics of pretty much every nontrivial mathematical system or to suggest that it does not? So a Bayesian probably would assign uniform priors--in other words, neither one qualifies as an extraordinary claim.
Slashdot Mirror
Huh? TiVo is Unix based. And I have a Model III and a Model II, and the Model III is substantially faster.
To me, the Home Media Option is kind of a nice "extra" feature that isn't worth nearly as much to me as access to the TiVo interface. I've used a number of the generic TiVo clones and have always been disappointed. Rarely used features do not make up for problems in an interface that I use every day. So I'm looking forward to the new DirecTiVo
In which case they'd be far better off suing or pursuing arbitration individually than hoping for a class action settlement from a lawyer with a financial incentive to settle for pennies on the dollar
So the benefit to the consumer is that other companies will be deterred from prohibiting class action suits that benefit nobody except lawyers? Wow, huge benefit!
For the most part, class action suits over consumer electronics are a lawyer scam with little if any benefit to the consumer. The lawyer files a class action suit for a huge amount of money and calls a press conference, then offers to settle for a much lower amount of money. The company almost always settles regardless of whether the suit has any real merit, because it is cheaper than going to court, and ends the bad publicity sooner. Individual users get a pittance, like a discount certificate for more of the company's products. Most of the time, the benefit to the individual consumers isn't worth the time it takes to fill out the paperwork (after all, the price of a game console isn't that great, so how much can you expect to get from a "defect" that only partially compromises its functionality?). But the lawyer gets a slice of all of those piddly little settlement, and takes home a nice bundle for very little work.
In terms of pharmacodynamics, methadone is a garden variety opiate. It has two major distinctions: it has good oral bioavailability, and it is long-acting (i.e. it has slow pharmacokinetics). These are major advantages for people with chronic pain. Morphine has poor oral activity, and also wears off fast. This makes it good for intravenous infusion in a hospital setting, but terrible for patients with severe chronic pain. One aspect of opiate analgesia is that once the pain "breaks through," it is hard to knock it down again. Opiates work best for pain relief if blood levels are kept reasonably constant. So with a short acting opiate, patients have to be constantly popping pills. A long-acting opiate makes it possible for a patient with chronic pain to live something approaching a normal life.
Respiratory depression by opiates tracks very well with pain relief, so it is not plausible that the respiratory depression would greatly outlast the pain relief, as claimed in the article. Moreover, we have a huge amount of experience with methadone, because it is widely used for opiate maintenance in opiate addicts. Opiate addicts take methadone under supervision, so they can't escalate their doses. So we know that when methadone is taken as prescribed on a regular basis, it is safe and effective, and toxic levels do not build up in the body.
I think that this is a problem of poor patient and physician education and poor choices by physicians in prescribing a long-acting drug to patients who don't really understand what that means. The average patient has no experience with long-acting pain relievers, because all of the commonly used medications such as hydrocodone are short-acting. The pain relief of a long-acting opiate lasts a long time, but it is also slow in onset. This is an unavoidable aspect of the pharmacokinetics of long-acting drugs. That means that you can't wait until you start hurting, then take a methadone pill and expect the pain to go away in under an hour, as with short-acting drugs. It will take days for the pain relief from methadone to build up to its full level. A patient who doesn't understand this is likely to think, "It isn't working," and take more than the prescribed dose--and then when it does build up, they end up in respiratory depression.
There is no way to have a long acting opiate pain killer drug that does not carry the same risk as methadone. The same hazards apply to oxycontin (which is a time-release formulation of a short-acting opiate, oxycodone).
So the patient needs to be told in no uncertain terms, "This isn't a drug where you can wait until you start hurting and then take a pill. It won't work, and it is dangerous to take it that way. You must take it on schedule, every day. You can't take extra even if you are hurting. If you miss a pill, don't take extra to make up. If you take more than the prescribed dose, or take it more often than prescribed, you may DIE." And the doctor needs to be absolutely certain that the patient understands this and is capable of complying. If not (or if there is not a reliable care-giver capable of controlling dosing), then the patient should be prescribed a short-acting narcotic (although this carries its own, different risks).
Actually, we seem rather to have gotten back to my original point. Here, I'll remind you:
To say it in other words, my point is that it may turn out that patent protection based solely upon physical form may not be sufficient to protect what Apple achieved with the iPhone, and that this is an argument for strengthening patents to protect the totality of the product design, including software design as well as physical form.
The LG Prada makes my point very well because the LG Prada was not a big success, despite being made by a well-known factory and having a famous design imprint. Hardly anybody in the US has used it, because no US carrier even bothered to offer it. Clearly, it takes more than just a touchscreen to transform the market for phones. What Apple offered was a touchscreen paired with software that fully exploited the capabilities of a touchscreen. The LG Prada, on the other hand, just used the touchscreen to imitate an older phone design. For example, if you wanted to enter text, there was no QWERTY keyboard--you had to do it with multiple button presses on a numeric keypad. Essentially, what the LG Prada did was use the touchscreen to emulate older phone designs. Hardly surprising that nobody was much interested in it. It turned out that coming up with a usable touch-based phone was not as easy as it now might seem in hindsight. Modern smartphones do not merely imitate the iPhone in appearance, they also emulate in in software design--another one of those things that seems obvious once somebody else is brilliant enough to come up with it. Here is a comment from Andrew Munn, who worked on the Android development team.
It was only after iPhone that Android scrambled to imitate the iPhone's software and hardware design
Exactly. There is more to a successful touch phone or pad than just the form factor. What transformed the market was Apple's felicitous combination of a particular hardware design with software designed and optimized to take adva
Isn't that straw man a bit itchy? Nobody said that Apple invented the smartphone. But before the iPhone, smartphones were more like a Blackberry. Now, virtually all are trying to look like the iPhone. That is a transformation in design.
The perpetual refrain of the imitator. The iPhone, with almost no hard buttons, was a huge change from popular phones like the Blackberry and Sidekick. And consumers adopted it in droves.
Ah, yes, the "consumers are the slaves of marketing" response. But there was nothing miraculous about Apple's advertising. And there didn't need to be. All they needed was to get consumers to try it. So yes, now we have manufacturers trying to ride on Apple's coattails by taking the basic design that only Apple was courageous enough to introduce and adding a bow. But the marketing strategy is still primarily based upon adding something to the basic concept of an iPhone.
None of which achieved market penetration comparable to the iPad. Which demonstrates that the iPad's huge and instant success was not simply the consequence of there being pent-up design of a tablet with that form-factor, but for the particular combination of hardware and software features that Apple pioneered.
If you look up Apple's R&D budget as a fraction of Apple's iPhone profits, you'll realize how ridiculous that is. The real cost to Apple was taking the initial risk to actually build, manufacture, and introduce something new into the marketplace--a design that almost all the pundits predicted would be unpopular with consumers. If it had bombed, the cost to Apple would have been tremendous. So no, even if there were no competition at all, Apple would lose money if they did not continue to substantially upgrade the iPhone and iPad. And the competition, at least in the iPad area, is probably to negligible to impact Apple's profits, and is likely to remain so for quite some time.
And until a few months ago, many would have had to change carriers to get an iPhone, and the price of iPhones was substantially greater than the cheaper clones. Surveys also show that iPhone users hardly ever switch to Android, but And
Really? Then why are so few companies doing what Apple does, coming up with new products that completely transform the marketplace? Why are most of the phone manufacturers playing follow-the-leader? It seems like we need more incentives to originality, not less.
It is certainly a form factor that consumers like. But it is not as if anybody knew that before Apple took the risk of introducing the iPhone or the iPad. There were no market surveys showing a great demand for flat, featureless phones with hardly any physical controls. Indeed, the conventional wisdom was the consumers wanted phones and netbooks with hard keyboards. Is Apple's the only kind of design that consumers would decide they wanted only after they experienced it? It seems unlikely, but we'll never know, as long as nearly everybody is lined up behind Apple playing follow the leader, and nobody has the courage to risk trying something genuinely novel. Once more, the evidence seems to indicate that we need to make imitation harder, not easier.
So you don't suppose that it would hurt Apple's profits if owners of earlier model iPhones just decided that the model they have is good enough, and that there is no reason to upgrade to the new one?
That's quite a strong statement. Upon what evidence do you base this guarantee? The existing evidence seems to point in the other direction. The second generation iPad was a major upgrade, at least as major as the annual iPhone upgrades. Yet Apple had no appreciable competition in the pad arena in that area. Moreover, surveys show that large numbers of iPhone 4 owners are breaking their contracts to buy the new model. This is not competition with other manufacturers, but competition with Apple's own previous models.
There was no technological reason why touch based phones of this design could not have been produced before the iPhone. Yet none achieved any appreciable market success prior to Apple. Are you seriously suggesting that it was mere coincidence that Apple was first to market with the iPhone? And the iPad? Incidentally, the fact that Apple was working on a touch phone was widely rumored prior to introduction, so it is hardly surprising that some phone manufacturers began working on similar designs in expectation of jumping upon Apple's coattails just in case Apple's approach was successful. Of course, no other company went "all in," betting their future on a single design. And note that it is not merely the physical features of the iPhone and iPad that the clones imitate; their software also is heavily imitative of Apple's iOS. It is quite clear that it is possible to produce a touch phone that is not grossly imitative of the iPhone. Palm did it. Microsoft has done it. But that requires a company with the courage to create rather than copy. The sort of courage that the patent system is designed to reward and foster.
Which brings me back to my original point: if the courts ultimately conclude that the patent system does not protect what Apple achieved with the iPhone and iPad, then patent protection is too weak, not too strong.
Yes, that is one of the goals of patents--to encourage innovation and risk-taking by giving the company that took the risk a commensurate reward by offering a limited term monopoly.
Henry Ford had well over 100 patents. And considering the magnitude of his company's contribution, that hardly seems excessive.
And how is it so terribly detrimental to make other companies come up with their own original design ideas?
Have you actually thought about this? Apple introduces a new iPhone and iPad every year. Do you think that next year's model will sell well if it doesn't appreciably improve on last year's one? What do you imagine would happen to Apple's profits and stock price if everybody decided to stick with last year's model?
Apple is not the only company with patents. So if the courts find that Apple has infringed an Android patent, Apple will have to pay a license fee, or trade some of its own patents to get access to that feature, or come up with its own features that are even better. How is that such a bad thing?
Yet this particular combination of features was not industry-wide before the iPhone. And indeed, the iPhone was widely derided at introduction for these features. Multiple pundits predicted that a phone without numerous hard buttons was doomed to failure, while the notion that there was a potential large mass market for any kind of tablet was pretty much universally derided, the conventional wisdom wisdom being that consumers much preferred netbooks. But now, all of this is "obvious" and it's virtually impossible for anybody to imagine any other way of designing such devices.
Perhaps the courts will decide that our patent laws do not in fact protect the risky design choices that Apple made in defiance of conventional wisdom, choices that have already greatly enriched the options available to consumers. But is that really a good thing? Would it really be such a terrible thing of companies that had the courage to challenge the conventional wisdom in ways that seem "obvious" only in retrospect were encouraged by a limited-duration protection against imitation?
I developed a neuroanatomy teaching tool in Supercard, which was an excellent Hypercard clone that was in a number of ways more powerful. The project was successful, using a teaching strategy that was innovative for it's time (although pretty much standard today). It was popular with students and it was used for years by at least a couple of medical schools that I know of. I loved working with Supercard, and I recommend it to anybody with fond memories of Hypercard. However, the fact that Supercard did not take over the world (although it is still available), suggests to me that there is not overwhelming demand for a programming tool of this sort.
Reasons why Steve Jobs might not have been strongly impelled to resurrect Hypercard:
1) Hypercard's heyday was before high-speed internet became so ubiquitous. A great deal of what could be done with Hypercard can be done with standard web design tools to produce web applications that are more portable across operating systems, more versatile, and easier to maintain.
2) Most of the presentation features of Hypercard are now better handled by dedicated presentation software such as PowerPoint and Keynote.
3) Steve Jobs preferred polished software that fully took advantage of the capabilities of the Mac platform. Hypercard was a non-native software environment that was really perfectly suited to little more than "flash card" projects. Using an interpreted language, it was rather slow. Steve may well have preferred to channel developers into a fully-fledged Mac native application development environment, and to devote Apple's efforts toward optimizing those tools rather than maintaining a parallel development system with more limited capabilities.
The premise of the article seems basically stupid. We don't need more tech giants like Apple because they don't create as many jobs as the manufacturing work which is mostly no longer done in this country? Apple did not cause manufacturing jobs to move overseas; that's a consequence of the economics--basically the availability of overseas semiskilled labor at much lower costs than in the US.
The key point is that Apple's data center created 50 jobs that wouldn't be there if not for Apple, not to mention all of the jobs in Apple stores, all of the people working for Apple in Cupertino, all of the people developing apps, all of the people working on developing, marketing, and selling peripherals for Apple devices, etc., etc. Does the author somehow imagine that the existence of those 50 jobs is preventing other companies from opening factories in North Carolina?
So while it would be wonderful to have some new business that in some magical way makes large scale manual assembly-line work once again economical in the US, it seems like we could use a lot more companies like Apple.
Controls can be (and are) done, but it's hard to be sure that your controls are adequate, because there are so many variables. As anybody who works with primary cells of any kind will tell you, sometimes they just die and you never figure out why. Basically, cells in a dish want to die; the trick is keeping them alive. Does it matter exactly where you place the experimental and control dishes in your incubator? How gentle you are when you change solutions? How the manufacturer prepared the culture dishes? Could one or the other be contaminated with some kind of microbiological or viral contaminant?
It's a type of experiment that can be useful, but it tends to be weak evidence. And biological damage from radio waves is a remarkable claim that requires very strong evidence.
I take reports of damage to cells in a dish with a grain of salt. This isn't a natural environment for the cells, and it is incredibly easy to harm them accidentally in a variety of ways. When the phenomenon is unlikely to begin with (damage to cells from photons that individually don't carry enough energy to produce lasting changes in any biological molecule), place your bets on "artifact."
Particularly when it comes to science, a pundit is generally a guy who isn't a scientist, but plays one on TV. If you want to criticize the media, then by all means talk about the pundits. But if you are concerned about what science really says about what's going on, read the original science.
Temperatures fluctuate up and down. But that doesn't make a cycle, which requires a reproducible periodicity. People's eyes tend to fool them, and they see imaginary cycles, which is why science long ago developed unbiased statistical tests for cycles, which are not vulnerable to the human eye's proclivity to see patterns even when they don't exist. So statistically, there is no 100 year cycle. Which isn't surprising, because there is no plausible mechanism to create one. Even a "natural" cycle requires some sort of physical mechanism. Moreover, to reliably detect a cycle, you need enough data to cover multiple complete cycles. So anybody who tells you that they can detect a 100 year cycle in 150 years of data is either fooling themselves or trying to fool you.
A huge amount of climate science data and models is publicly available, more than in almost any other field of science. Even when the actual code is not available, the algorithms are published, so any decent programmer can reproduce the models. As any scientist will tell you, if you want to check somebody's work, it's better to write your own code from the original algorithms than to borrow their code, because if you use their code, you are liable to inherit their bugs.
There is no statistically significant evidence that the modern warming is part of any kind of cycle, nor is there any natural mechanism that could produce a 100 year cycle. There is also no statistically significant evidence that warming stopped in 2000. Moreover, statistical analysis of climate models tells us that the expected warming trend is too small to be reliably detected on anything less than a multidecade climate scale, so such a claim makes no sense.
So now it's some unnamed pundit who predicted a 2C warming by now, which amounts to much the same thing as some guy in a bar--these days, a pundit is a guy who is not an expert but plays one on TV. It certainly was not Al Gore who made such a prediction, despite your ritual invocation of his name. He's more accurate than most so-called pundits in reporting the science, but he's no scientist. If you want to criticize the science, don't you owe it to yourself to look into what the actual scienctists are saying? I refer you again to the IPCC reports.
And yes, scientists qualify their knowledge in terms of probability rather than engaging in the false certainty common in other fields. An engineer will not tell you that a bridge will "probably" stand up. The engineers were quite confident in the soundness of the Tacoma Narrows bridge and the unsinkability of the Titanic. Scientists recognize that any prediction of the future caries some degree of uncertainty. You will find quantification of the degree of certainty in the IPCC reports
Oh, "you remember hearing" that predictions would rise 2C by the end of the century? Where, pray tell? Some guy in a bar, maybe? Slashdot does permit posting of links to citations. All of the IPCC reports are freely available online. So why not spend a couple of minutes to support your claim with actual evidence--if it exists. And while you are at it, why don't you link to the scientific evidence for a "100 year cycle?"
The casino is betting on each spin of the wheel just like the customer. Predicting where a wheel won't stop still doesn't help a casino predict whether it will win the next spin, any more than it helps the gambler. Bot both the casino and the customer can predict the long-term average trend. The difference between the casino and the gambler is like the difference between the climate scientist and the AGW skeptic; the casino is betting on a long term trend calculated based upon the best scientific and mathematical understanding of physics and statistics; the gambler is betting against it.
So we're back to the argument, "Nobody can reliably predict the outcome of a single spin of a roulette wheel, so it is crazy to think that anybody can predict the average of thousands of spins!"
And meanwhile, the casinos continue to make money.
Strong candidate for the single dumbest argument against global warming.
I actually experienced unwanted acceleration in a rental car, not a Toyota. When I took my foot off the accelerator and hit the brake, I felt the engine "fighting" me, rolling into the intersection in spite of the brake. By stomping down even harder on the brake, I brought it to a stop a couple of feet beyond where I intended to stop. I continued to drive the car for a week, and the problem never recurred. I reported it to the rental agency when I returned the car, but only barely. With no repetition, and knowing that the brakes were strong enough to stop the car, I'd almost forgotten about it. I'm certain that if it had been a Toyota, it would have stuck in my mind more firmly.
Even though the Wikipedia article has a notation that "This article needs attention from an expert on the subject," it is actually not bad. You'll note that null hypothesis is used only in the context of measurement, and the examples given are ones in which the null hypothesis is that some measurement has a null value (i.e. zero).
I didn't say that, but I do think that the Copenhagen interpretation has been something of an impediment to thinking seriously about the real-world implications of quantum mechanics, and how they could be tested experimentally
Even respected scientists can sometimes speak imprecisely, particularly when trying to provide a popular explanation of difficult scientific concepts, so I suppose that you might have heard somebody using the expression metaphorically and taken it a bit too literally. But I challenge you to find anywhere in the scientific literature in which it in anything other than the statistical sense. It would be very unlikely to pass peer review.
This is another common expression that is easily misunderstood. The statement that "extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence" is perhaps better understood in terms of Bayesian statistics, as applied to cases where there are existing grounds for assigning reasonable prior probabilities to the competing hypotheses. If there is already existing evidence that one hypothesis is much more likely to be true, then a new observation would have to be very strong (i.e. have very low probability if the "extraordinary" hypothesis is not true) to shift the overall probabilities. But for something like this, there really are no such grounds. Is it really more extraordinary to suggest that the universe exhibits the characteristics of pretty much every nontrivial mathematical system or to suggest that it does not? So a Bayesian probably would assign uniform priors--in other words, neither one qualifies as an extraordinary claim.