In practice people cant tell the difference between 6 bit and 10 bit colour..
That is unfair.
It's not unfair all.
Most people wont be able to tell. The graphs you linked to tell you the measurable difference, but that's using a device to measure it, we're talking about people here. People are terrible at measuring things.
In a blind test. Most people wont be able to tell the difference.
As ive seen pictures of peoples massive 6 monitor setups...
There are a few games where a multi-monitor setup is really good. Flight sims in particular where you want 1 or even 2 monitors to your side to display the side windows, maybe one above or one for the instrumentation.
In fact if you're learning to fly, a multi-monitor setup with HOTAS is a godsend.
But so few games actually support multi-monitor setups. So for the most part they are just e-peen extensions.
But would you really reject a 2560x1440 display because it's 16:9?
I'd happily pay a few dollars more for a 2560x1600 display because it is 16:10.
16:10 displays are superior to 16:9 for almost all computing purposes. For games it gives me a taller FOV, for work it's exactly 2 A4 pages side by side and gives me a taller view (yes, an extra 4 CM really does make a difference when working on a large spreadsheet, config file or script), with video editing you can have the tools on screen without overlaying them on a video.
16:9 monitors are cheap. I generally recommend them if you dont do anything on your computer that requires a taller FOV (I.E. most users). If all you do is web browsing and watching cat videos, this difference means nothing, if you do serious work then it does.
People need to get over this 16:9 vs. 16:10 garbage.
My laptop is 16:9, my desktops (home and work) are 16:10.
This is mainly done due to availability. it's easy to get cheap 16:10 monitors, hard to get 16:10 laptops.
4K/8K will sell UHDTV. But the best benefit, a gem rarely mentioned: it features a hugely increased gamut and 10 or 12-bit (10-bit mandatory minimum) component depth. The image will look more life-like than any of the common TVs available today, and it won't be relegated to photographers and graph designers: it'll be standard.
In theory yes,
In practice people cant tell the difference between 6 bit and 10 bit colour. Besides this, most people wont be able or willing to configure or manage colour on their TV set properly. Most people cant be bothered to set their monitor at the proper resolution.
It's the same with DVD and Bluray, most people cant tell the difference. They only think they can because they know it's bluray. I can easily convince people an upscaled DVD is bluray simply by telling them it's bluray. They think I'm lying when I show them a plain DVD at the end of it.
A nice improvement in theory but much like 1080p or 3D, in practice it'll be nothing more than a gimmick to keep TV prices high.
However, all the resolution and gamut improvements in the world wont improve the crappy reality TV that gets served up on it.
Realize that a lot of iPhone users were once Blackberry addicts, the Q10 might provide the right kind of nostalgia to bring back some of those customers who start to remember how nice it was to use a real physical keyboard rather than the sado-masochistic on screen keyboard experience that Apple offers.
The thing is...
And the fanboys are absolutely going to slam me for this.
is that the OSK on the Iphone is terrible compared to other OSK's. The stock OSK on Android 4.2 is vastly superior to IOS with both traditional typing (hunt and peck for most users) and "swype"-like gesture typing. This is the stock KB, there are alternatives that suit specific typing styles better but the stock is the best KB I've used for speed and a multitude of typing styles.
The Iphone on the other hand (4s on the last two versions of IOS) had significant typos in almost everything, it was slower and harder to type correct words and significantly harder to go back to correct them. Android handles typo's better and actually learns what mistakes I typically make, the Iphone keeps making the same mistake. For example, I type "no probs" (short for no problems) and Android used to correct it to "no probe", IOS still corrects it to "no probe" and I've switched ROM's twice (and phones once) on Android since then. It always learns in the first 4 or 5 corrections I make.
Awaiting the inevitable flames (and probably mod downs) for suggesting this.
"The research, led by Dr Anne Roudaut and Professor Sriram Subramanian, from the University of Bristol's Department of Computer Science"
Now, we have a French name and an Indian name. It's a continuation of a trend I've been seeing for the last 10 years, with US-based researches being lead by (arguably) non-US citizens (as in: people not born in the US or born of immigrants).
So I have to ask: where are all the US-based great minds? Working for these researchers? Just wondering.
Why cant they have good 'Murican names like Einstein, Fermi, Heisenberg and Von Braun.
Ask that of the survivors of Auschwitz, Dachau, Treblinka, among others.
Try asking an Iraqi or Afghani what war bought them.
Sorry if this dulls your giant hard on for violence, but war caused more human misery than it has ever solved. Ask the dead if they accomplished anything, silence is the answer.
He wants children and teenagers to read Science Fiction because it makes science and math interesting, which in turn, turns more of our youth to those fields of study.
But if we do that, children might start using their imagination.
No, not necessarily. There's a lot of good sci-fi that doesn't focus so much on individual characters, but rather social issues, how a new technology affects society, etc.
Really good Sci-Fi does both.
The distinction people are looking for is between "Hard" Sci-Fi and "Space Opera".
Hard Sci-Fi sticks to the rules, makes everything scientifically plausible (or almost everything) and tends to have in depth technical explanations (I.E. 5 pages explaining how the drive systems work). More emphasis on the "Science" part of Science Fiction.
Space Opera tends to focus on the story and takes a lot more liberties with the science aspect and doesn't always make things plausible. Explanations of technologies tend to be terse, only having enough detail to enable their use as a plot device. More emphasis on the "Fiction" part of Science Fiction.
Both are capable of having good characters and engaging stories.
Only 'cause it's cheaper and more profitable for them to make the weapons, sell them to the government, then have government pay for the army and its use to "liberate" the resources they need.
The only reason why we won't see the big "corp wars" of Cyberpunk is simply that it's not cost effective. Why bother fighting when you can use governments to do it for you, for free?
Actually that's not the only reason, it's not even the biggest reason.
A man does not have himself killed for a half pence a day, or a petty distinction. You must speak to his soul to electrify him.
- Napoleon Bonaparte
Men fight because they believe in something. In their god, in their country, in their preferred form of government. They aren't willing to die for their day job. Corporations simply dont inspire reverence in their cause.
Mercenaries are not as good as people think. They are pretty disloyal and will up and leave when things become too much trouble. This is not a trait that is desirable when you're asking someone to die for your cause.
It seems to me without knowing how many tickets of both were sold its pointless to compare how long they took to sell out.
A better question is how many were pre-ordered/pre-booked.
Apple does this with every product release. "Look, we sold 200,000 iTurds in just 1 day, dont look at the 3 months previous where we took pre-orders, this was all in one day" and then waves hand and spreads iPixie dust.
Not really, a free hamburger is a good, a free highway is a service. That is a critical difference.
The goal of a highway isn't to accommodate cars, it's to accommodate car movement. This means you dont worry about how many cars you can put on there at any one time rather you are concerned with how quickly you can get a car from point A to point B. Adding tolls to roads does not fix congestion, it just makes it more expensive to sit in congestion. It will also force more traffic onto secondary routes, increasing commute times because it takes longer just to get to an expressway. This has been well proven everywhere from Sydney to Bangkok. You cant treat a road like a hamburger, if you constrict supply of a road, demand does not decrease.
To fix congestion, you need to offer alternatives like decent public transport or by better traffic management. I.E. Prohibiting trucks (any vehicle with a GVM >4.5t using the Australian definition) from using expressways in peak hours (7-9 AM and 4-6 PM for arguments sake) will do as much as adding another lane.
Toll roads are not a solution to congestion. They are at best a means to offset the cost of road maintenance or at worse a blatant money grab.
Yeah, and the FUD comment that "omg phones MIGHT have greatly increased NFC range in the future" is bullshit.
Forget about phones, you can already buy off the shelf NFC devices that have more range than phones.
Increasing range would require:
1) More power (eats battery)
2) More antenna surface area. To get a range of about 6-10 inches, you need an antenna that is more than a foot on each side. (I need to hold my badge within 6-10 inches of the reader when badging into the largest readers at my workplace - which are over a foot in both width and height.) Oh yeah, that's with a fixed reader that has all the power it could ever want.
More power yes, but a 60 CM wide antenna is utter bollocks. Even if you do have a 60 CM antenna, it will be so incredibly easy to get it into public places without being noticed it's not funny.
If I walked into a shopping centre wearing a high visibility vest with a ladder, a tool kit and my antenna, who the hell would question what I'm doing?
Never underestimate where you can get with only a high vis jacket and a clipboard.
Given how close you need to get to do this, more like wargrinding.
Testing with my GS3 and Interac Flash-enabled debit card, the card needed to be in physical contact with the back of the phone to be read, despite their "4 inches" claim.
This is only because phones have incredibly low powered NFC transmitters.
NFC has a theoretical range of 5 metres, so it's just a matter of having a better hardware platform and yes, you can buy them off the shelf. I've had an NFC device in my car that can communicate with a garage door receiver 2 metres away for years. It sat on my dashboard and I never had to move it to get the door to open (well it was meant to work this way). The range of NFC is determined by the power of the hardware, phones deliberately keep NFC power low in order to conserve battery, other NFC systems (like the garage door pass) which have a transmitter connected to mains have no such restrictions.
So maybe you wont be able to do this with a Galaxy S3 or my Galaxy Nexus. But you'll be able to do it with other off the shelf hardware.
I'm pretty sure I proposed "cardsnarfing" many years ago, trying to find the post now...
I've known about this application for six months. On the play store it's called Card Test and blanks out the middle 10 numbers from scanned cards. But this application is based on the source code developed by someone else that doesn't blank out the numbers.
On my Visa it got the full card number, expiry date and name. Enough to make a purchase online. On my MasterCard it didn't get the name, but I'm sure that's only because the application was made for Visa's specifications instead of MasterCard's. The only thing stopping card sniffing on mobile phones is the fact that NFC on most phones is limited to a centimetre at most (certainly is on my Galaxy Nexus). But this is just a matter of getting better hardware, NFC has a theoretical range of 5 metres so imagine how many cards could get skimmed just by sitting in your average shopping centre (mall) for an hour or two.
If you want to disable NFC, you just need to sever the induction loop. If you dont want to damage the chip, the best place is usually right above the chip where the induction loop connects to it, make a cut there with a scalpel or stanley knife but be careful not to cut through the mag stripe. Other suggestions have been to drill though the card lining up the chip with the Visa/Mastercard logo (just above the last quartet of numbers) but this is hit and miss as I cant say where the induction loop is exactly.
Financing the buyback with debt is a tiny bit worrisome,
Financing the buyback with debt is to dodge tax.
FED: You earned 100 million in profit this year.
APPL: Yes but we have this 60 million of liability on the books.
FED: well OK then, I guess we can only tax 40 million.
APPL: erm... we have other deductions.
FED: How much.
APPL: something something 40 million.
They make money by creating goods, engaging in commerce and employing people, but dont kid yourself, this is a means to an end.
I think you need to awaken from your libertarian fantasy world, libertarians dont make good businessmen because they assume that their competition are going to play by the same rules. They dont learn that the competition dont have any rules until the libertarian's lunch has been well and truly eaten.
2. The iPhone is the right width for the human hand. Any larger and you need two hands to use it. It's a phone, not a tablet.
Which Iphone?
The 4:3 or the 16:9?
Because they are different widths so only one can be right.
Realistically, forcing all applications to have the back button in the upper LH corner blows your theory out of the water. You pretty much have to use two hands to go back. Especially if your right hand is dominant (people make phone calls with their non dominant hand, they use their phone as a web browser/application platform using their dominant hand).
At 24, he's a "senior Australian IT professional" for an "international IT company"? Well, there's your problem right there. Skinny jeans and a hoodie? Check! Who hired this guy?
You must be unfamiliar with how consultancies work.
Everyone, even the tea lady is a senior. I have seen "Senior Trainee" before, I kid you not.
However, the problem is that this study is only looking at reaction time, which is pretty limited of a measure
But a very, very important measure.
Reaction time covers the time it takes you for your brain to react, to actually tell you body to do something.
A 3 second reaction time (not unusual for a tired or distracted human) at 60 KPH means you travel 50 metres before even hitting the brakes, it takes another 18 meters to stop with good tyres on dry bitumen. 60 KPH is not particularly fast either. For a good reaction speed of 0.5 seconds, your reaction distance is 8.5 metres at 60 KPH. So reaction time is quite important as it determine reaction distance.
So, bad drivers, the ones who get in accidents don't just use cell phones, they drive more wrecklessly while using them
Did you think that maybe these two behaviours are linked. Someone distracted by their mobile phone will not be paying attention to their vehicle. Very few humans can actually multi-task, for the most part we use time division multiplexing, our brains act like a multithread, single core processor. Put simply, when they are concentrating on their phone, they aren't paying any attention to their driving.
They are just the device people have chosen to measure.
The device they are measuring is good, in fact it's very important as it governs the distance you travel before you even react to an unexpected risk, I.E. if a pedestrian who is too busy paying attention to their phone walks out on the road without looking, as demonstrated above, the reaction increases 41 metres over 2.5 seconds, this is the difference between missing the pedestrian and killing them.
The problem, quite simply, is not cell phones.
The problem is not just mobile phones, rather the prevailing attitude that people think they are good enough to use a phone whilst driving when in reality, they are dangerous enough when their full attention is on the road (see the Dunning-Kruger Effect). The guy who totalled my parked Supra was on the phone, so distracted he hit a parked car with no other traffic on the road and wrote off the car in a rear end collision (and good luck replacing a mint condition 2001 Supra in 2009).
As someone who tracks their car regularly, I see a lot of people who think they are so awesome that they can speed and use their phone come to the track, it's no exaggeration that 9 out of 10 of them lose control and spin out into the sand on the first hairpin. Most people have no idea of their limits or their cars limits and knowing these people are on the road, I wont use my phone in the car (I wont take the risk that they'll hit me whilst I'm distracted).
You really can't multi-task unless it is in your muscle memory.
What you are really doing is time slicing. And even if it is in your muscle memory, it still takes a time slice- just a smaller one.
And having a passenger in the car takes another time slice too. More if they are saying something interesting or distracting.
This, very few humans can truly multi-task. Must just use time division multiplexing (like a multi thread, single core processor)
So when they are paying any attention to their phone, they are paying zero attention to their driving.
With a passenger, the passenger has the advantage of being aware of the situation so they can shut up if things get risky.
I've had two accidents in my driving life. Both times I was rear ended by a distracted driver, the first was too busy eating his breakfast, the second was turning around to scream at her kids (there was a third time where someone on the phone totalled my parked Supra, but I was nowhere near it when that happened). Most drivers can barely keep it together when they have no distractions, they're a rolling accident when distracted.
Slashdot Mirror
Will this grocery delivery service discriminate against "atheist" foods?
All foods are atheist. At least, I've never met or heard of any food that claimed that it believed in a god.
Feel free to provide evidence that theist foods exist - after all - extraordinary claims require extraordinary proof.
Ahem,
Is the swiss cheese not holy?
In practice people cant tell the difference between 6 bit and 10 bit colour. .
That is unfair.
It's not unfair all.
Most people wont be able to tell. The graphs you linked to tell you the measurable difference, but that's using a device to measure it, we're talking about people here. People are terrible at measuring things.
In a blind test. Most people wont be able to tell the difference.
As ive seen pictures of peoples massive 6 monitor setups...
There are a few games where a multi-monitor setup is really good. Flight sims in particular where you want 1 or even 2 monitors to your side to display the side windows, maybe one above or one for the instrumentation.
In fact if you're learning to fly, a multi-monitor setup with HOTAS is a godsend.
But so few games actually support multi-monitor setups. So for the most part they are just e-peen extensions.
I'd happily pay a few dollars more for a 2560x1600 display because it is 16:10. 16:10 displays are superior to 16:9 for almost all computing purposes. For games it gives me a taller FOV, for work it's exactly 2 A4 pages side by side and gives me a taller view (yes, an extra 4 CM really does make a difference when working on a large spreadsheet, config file or script), with video editing you can have the tools on screen without overlaying them on a video.
16:9 monitors are cheap. I generally recommend them if you dont do anything on your computer that requires a taller FOV (I.E. most users). If all you do is web browsing and watching cat videos, this difference means nothing, if you do serious work then it does.
My laptop is 16:9, my desktops (home and work) are 16:10.
This is mainly done due to availability. it's easy to get cheap 16:10 monitors, hard to get 16:10 laptops.
4K/8K will sell UHDTV. But the best benefit, a gem rarely mentioned: it features a hugely increased gamut and 10 or 12-bit (10-bit mandatory minimum) component depth. The image will look more life-like than any of the common TVs available today, and it won't be relegated to photographers and graph designers: it'll be standard.
In theory yes,
In practice people cant tell the difference between 6 bit and 10 bit colour. Besides this, most people wont be able or willing to configure or manage colour on their TV set properly. Most people cant be bothered to set their monitor at the proper resolution.
It's the same with DVD and Bluray, most people cant tell the difference. They only think they can because they know it's bluray. I can easily convince people an upscaled DVD is bluray simply by telling them it's bluray. They think I'm lying when I show them a plain DVD at the end of it.
A nice improvement in theory but much like 1080p or 3D, in practice it'll be nothing more than a gimmick to keep TV prices high.
However, all the resolution and gamut improvements in the world wont improve the crappy reality TV that gets served up on it.
Realize that a lot of iPhone users were once Blackberry addicts, the Q10 might provide the right kind of nostalgia to bring back some of those customers who start to remember how nice it was to use a real physical keyboard rather than the sado-masochistic on screen keyboard experience that Apple offers.
The thing is...
And the fanboys are absolutely going to slam me for this.
is that the OSK on the Iphone is terrible compared to other OSK's. The stock OSK on Android 4.2 is vastly superior to IOS with both traditional typing (hunt and peck for most users) and "swype"-like gesture typing. This is the stock KB, there are alternatives that suit specific typing styles better but the stock is the best KB I've used for speed and a multitude of typing styles.
The Iphone on the other hand (4s on the last two versions of IOS) had significant typos in almost everything, it was slower and harder to type correct words and significantly harder to go back to correct them. Android handles typo's better and actually learns what mistakes I typically make, the Iphone keeps making the same mistake. For example, I type "no probs" (short for no problems) and Android used to correct it to "no probe", IOS still corrects it to "no probe" and I've switched ROM's twice (and phones once) on Android since then. It always learns in the first 4 or 5 corrections I make.
Awaiting the inevitable flames (and probably mod downs) for suggesting this.
"The research, led by Dr Anne Roudaut and Professor Sriram Subramanian, from the University of Bristol's Department of Computer Science"
Now, we have a French name and an Indian name. It's a continuation of a trend I've been seeing for the last 10 years, with US-based researches being lead by (arguably) non-US citizens (as in: people not born in the US or born of immigrants).
So I have to ask: where are all the US-based great minds? Working for these researchers? Just wondering.
Why cant they have good 'Murican names like Einstein, Fermi, Heisenberg and Von Braun.
Ask that of the survivors of Auschwitz, Dachau, Treblinka, among others.
Try asking an Iraqi or Afghani what war bought them.
Sorry if this dulls your giant hard on for violence, but war caused more human misery than it has ever solved. Ask the dead if they accomplished anything, silence is the answer.
He wants children and teenagers to read Science Fiction because it makes science and math interesting, which in turn, turns more of our youth to those fields of study.
But if we do that, children might start using their imagination.
They may even start having ideas of their own.
No, not necessarily. There's a lot of good sci-fi that doesn't focus so much on individual characters, but rather social issues, how a new technology affects society, etc.
Really good Sci-Fi does both.
The distinction people are looking for is between "Hard" Sci-Fi and "Space Opera".
Hard Sci-Fi sticks to the rules, makes everything scientifically plausible (or almost everything) and tends to have in depth technical explanations (I.E. 5 pages explaining how the drive systems work). More emphasis on the "Science" part of Science Fiction.
Space Opera tends to focus on the story and takes a lot more liberties with the science aspect and doesn't always make things plausible. Explanations of technologies tend to be terse, only having enough detail to enable their use as a plot device. More emphasis on the "Fiction" part of Science Fiction.
Both are capable of having good characters and engaging stories.
Only 'cause it's cheaper and more profitable for them to make the weapons, sell them to the government, then have government pay for the army and its use to "liberate" the resources they need.
The only reason why we won't see the big "corp wars" of Cyberpunk is simply that it's not cost effective. Why bother fighting when you can use governments to do it for you, for free?
Actually that's not the only reason, it's not even the biggest reason.
A man does not have himself killed for a half pence a day, or a petty distinction. You must speak to his soul to electrify him.
- Napoleon Bonaparte
Men fight because they believe in something. In their god, in their country, in their preferred form of government. They aren't willing to die for their day job. Corporations simply dont inspire reverence in their cause.
Mercenaries are not as good as people think. They are pretty disloyal and will up and leave when things become too much trouble. This is not a trait that is desirable when you're asking someone to die for your cause.
It seems to me without knowing how many tickets of both were sold its pointless to compare how long they took to sell out.
A better question is how many were pre-ordered/pre-booked.
Apple does this with every product release. "Look, we sold 200,000 iTurds in just 1 day, dont look at the 3 months previous where we took pre-orders, this was all in one day" and then waves hand and spreads iPixie dust.
Free hamburgers are like unpriced freeway lanes.
Not really, a free hamburger is a good, a free highway is a service. That is a critical difference.
The goal of a highway isn't to accommodate cars, it's to accommodate car movement. This means you dont worry about how many cars you can put on there at any one time rather you are concerned with how quickly you can get a car from point A to point B. Adding tolls to roads does not fix congestion, it just makes it more expensive to sit in congestion. It will also force more traffic onto secondary routes, increasing commute times because it takes longer just to get to an expressway. This has been well proven everywhere from Sydney to Bangkok. You cant treat a road like a hamburger, if you constrict supply of a road, demand does not decrease.
To fix congestion, you need to offer alternatives like decent public transport or by better traffic management. I.E. Prohibiting trucks (any vehicle with a GVM >4.5t using the Australian definition) from using expressways in peak hours (7-9 AM and 4-6 PM for arguments sake) will do as much as adding another lane.
Toll roads are not a solution to congestion. They are at best a means to offset the cost of road maintenance or at worse a blatant money grab.
Yeah, and the FUD comment that "omg phones MIGHT have greatly increased NFC range in the future" is bullshit.
Forget about phones, you can already buy off the shelf NFC devices that have more range than phones.
Increasing range would require:
1) More power (eats battery)
2) More antenna surface area. To get a range of about 6-10 inches, you need an antenna that is more than a foot on each side. (I need to hold my badge within 6-10 inches of the reader when badging into the largest readers at my workplace - which are over a foot in both width and height.) Oh yeah, that's with a fixed reader that has all the power it could ever want.
More power yes, but a 60 CM wide antenna is utter bollocks. Even if you do have a 60 CM antenna, it will be so incredibly easy to get it into public places without being noticed it's not funny.
If I walked into a shopping centre wearing a high visibility vest with a ladder, a tool kit and my antenna, who the hell would question what I'm doing?
Never underestimate where you can get with only a high vis jacket and a clipboard.
Given how close you need to get to do this, more like wargrinding.
Testing with my GS3 and Interac Flash-enabled debit card, the card needed to be in physical contact with the back of the phone to be read, despite their "4 inches" claim.
This is only because phones have incredibly low powered NFC transmitters.
NFC has a theoretical range of 5 metres, so it's just a matter of having a better hardware platform and yes, you can buy them off the shelf. I've had an NFC device in my car that can communicate with a garage door receiver 2 metres away for years. It sat on my dashboard and I never had to move it to get the door to open (well it was meant to work this way). The range of NFC is determined by the power of the hardware, phones deliberately keep NFC power low in order to conserve battery, other NFC systems (like the garage door pass) which have a transmitter connected to mains have no such restrictions.
So maybe you wont be able to do this with a Galaxy S3 or my Galaxy Nexus. But you'll be able to do it with other off the shelf hardware.
I'm pretty sure I proposed "cardsnarfing" many years ago, trying to find the post now...
I've known about this application for six months. On the play store it's called Card Test and blanks out the middle 10 numbers from scanned cards. But this application is based on the source code developed by someone else that doesn't blank out the numbers.
On my Visa it got the full card number, expiry date and name. Enough to make a purchase online. On my MasterCard it didn't get the name, but I'm sure that's only because the application was made for Visa's specifications instead of MasterCard's. The only thing stopping card sniffing on mobile phones is the fact that NFC on most phones is limited to a centimetre at most (certainly is on my Galaxy Nexus). But this is just a matter of getting better hardware, NFC has a theoretical range of 5 metres so imagine how many cards could get skimmed just by sitting in your average shopping centre (mall) for an hour or two.
If you want to disable NFC, you just need to sever the induction loop. If you dont want to damage the chip, the best place is usually right above the chip where the induction loop connects to it, make a cut there with a scalpel or stanley knife but be careful not to cut through the mag stripe. Other suggestions have been to drill though the card lining up the chip with the Visa/Mastercard logo (just above the last quartet of numbers) but this is hit and miss as I cant say where the induction loop is exactly.
Call me when you learn something about finance. MOST COMPANIES FINANCE BUYBACKS WITH DEBT.
No shit.
Because it is such an effective tax dodge.
Debt == liability. Liabilities are not taxable in most countries, in fact they are tax deductible in many cases.
Call me when _YOU_ learn something about finance.
Financing the buyback with debt is to dodge tax.
FED: You earned 100 million in profit this year.
APPL: Yes but we have this 60 million of liability on the books.
FED: well OK then, I guess we can only tax 40 million.
APPL: erm... we have other deductions.
FED: How much.
APPL: something something 40 million.
Bwahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahaha
/wipes tear from eye.
Bwahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahaha
Companies exist to make money. End of story.
They make money by creating goods, engaging in commerce and employing people, but dont kid yourself, this is a means to an end.
I think you need to awaken from your libertarian fantasy world, libertarians dont make good businessmen because they assume that their competition are going to play by the same rules. They dont learn that the competition dont have any rules until the libertarian's lunch has been well and truly eaten.
2. The iPhone is the right width for the human hand. Any larger and you need two hands to use it. It's a phone, not a tablet.
Which Iphone?
The 4:3 or the 16:9?
Because they are different widths so only one can be right.
Realistically, forcing all applications to have the back button in the upper LH corner blows your theory out of the water. You pretty much have to use two hands to go back. Especially if your right hand is dominant (people make phone calls with their non dominant hand, they use their phone as a web browser/application platform using their dominant hand).
Because age and clothing determine ability. SMH
Sometimes they are an indication of maturity.
Fixed that for you.
Quite a few people grow old without growing up.
At 24, he's a "senior Australian IT professional" for an "international IT company"? Well, there's your problem right there. Skinny jeans and a hoodie? Check! Who hired this guy?
You must be unfamiliar with how consultancies work.
Everyone, even the tea lady is a senior. I have seen "Senior Trainee" before, I kid you not.
Coherence is, I'm afraid, not really an option in a democracy
Hence the reason this country is supposed to be a Constitutional Republic.
Pure democracies suck.
You should try a Constitutional Monarchy,
You have a leader that you can love because she has not real power and all she does is make a nice speech at Christmas.
But a very, very important measure.
Reaction time covers the time it takes you for your brain to react, to actually tell you body to do something.
A 3 second reaction time (not unusual for a tired or distracted human) at 60 KPH means you travel 50 metres before even hitting the brakes, it takes another 18 meters to stop with good tyres on dry bitumen. 60 KPH is not particularly fast either. For a good reaction speed of 0.5 seconds, your reaction distance is 8.5 metres at 60 KPH. So reaction time is quite important as it determine reaction distance.
Did you think that maybe these two behaviours are linked. Someone distracted by their mobile phone will not be paying attention to their vehicle. Very few humans can actually multi-task, for the most part we use time division multiplexing, our brains act like a multithread, single core processor. Put simply, when they are concentrating on their phone, they aren't paying any attention to their driving.
The device they are measuring is good, in fact it's very important as it governs the distance you travel before you even react to an unexpected risk, I.E. if a pedestrian who is too busy paying attention to their phone walks out on the road without looking, as demonstrated above, the reaction increases 41 metres over 2.5 seconds, this is the difference between missing the pedestrian and killing them.
The problem is not just mobile phones, rather the prevailing attitude that people think they are good enough to use a phone whilst driving when in reality, they are dangerous enough when their full attention is on the road (see the Dunning-Kruger Effect). The guy who totalled my parked Supra was on the phone, so distracted he hit a parked car with no other traffic on the road and wrote off the car in a rear end collision (and good luck replacing a mint condition 2001 Supra in 2009).
As someone who tracks their car regularly, I see a lot of people who think they are so awesome that they can speed and use their phone come to the track, it's no exaggeration that 9 out of 10 of them lose control and spin out into the sand on the first hairpin. Most people have no idea of their limits or their cars limits and knowing these people are on the road, I wont use my phone in the car (I wont take the risk that they'll hit me whilst I'm distracted).
You really can't multi-task unless it is in your muscle memory.
What you are really doing is time slicing. And even if it is in your muscle memory, it still takes a time slice- just a smaller one.
And having a passenger in the car takes another time slice too. More if they are saying something interesting or distracting.
This, very few humans can truly multi-task. Must just use time division multiplexing (like a multi thread, single core processor)
So when they are paying any attention to their phone, they are paying zero attention to their driving.
With a passenger, the passenger has the advantage of being aware of the situation so they can shut up if things get risky.
I've had two accidents in my driving life. Both times I was rear ended by a distracted driver, the first was too busy eating his breakfast, the second was turning around to scream at her kids (there was a third time where someone on the phone totalled my parked Supra, but I was nowhere near it when that happened). Most drivers can barely keep it together when they have no distractions, they're a rolling accident when distracted.