You know the tiny contact switch that turns the light on in your fridge? Do you know its replacement cost? 57$. I am not joking, the tiny piece of plastic, strategically placed so that it would jostle as you put stuff in or take it out of the fridge, costs some 60$ + shipping and handling. At least for automobiles you can raid the junk yards looking for parts. But there is no fridge junkyard for me to raid.
That profit margin is sure to evaporate. People will scan and print replacement part for a fraction of the price. Sears might actually install a 3D printer in their own store with access to official CAD drawings and sell it. But they will not be able to maintain such high price for such small piece that probably costs 20cents to make for long. So yeah, 3D printing might erode some of these profit margins, and these guys will bitch, moan and yell, "IP fraud, they don't have license from us to replicate these parts". But, if you had not abused your monopoly on the replacement parts and acted nicely, may be I would have been kind. But now, I say, cry me a river Sears.
It was off. Still T-Mobile USA used to connect to Rogers Wireless Canada. They know the issue and reverse the charges. Recently I turned international roaming back on, It is just 25 cents a minute even from India. I have not been to Niagara recently. But, if I do, and if they charge me 25 cents a min, I might let it slide. It is 2$ a minute that ticks me off. 25cents a minute, total of 1$ or 2$, I might not bother to fight them for it.
People install so many apps, and give so many privileges to the apps. So many of them call home and upload connected data, also down load updates. So much of the data usage happens behind the scenes. In android at least there are settings to allow an app to connect to the internet only on wifi. These apps bitch moan and scream, "the app may not work right it it cant connect to the net all the time". But silence them anyway to get some handle on data usage. But even the apps you allow might suddenly download stuff or upload stuff. Some are more honest and nice than the others.
T-mobile plans do not have contracts. One can leave the network anytime. So there is no real hold over the customers. If they have bought a phone on installment plan, you have to pay off the remainder, but otherwise no real hold. So typically t-mobile customer service is very nice.
I have this issue of Rogers Wireless connecting to my phone across the Niagara River and charge me roaming. For some reason T-mobile is not able to stop it. May be they are owned by the same company or what not. So every time I go to Niagara Falls I can expect roaming charges. They have always been prompt in reversing the charges. It is typically 5$ to 15$. Just call, "say I have never been over the border" and the rep would reverse the chargers.
Looks like the poster got some great publicity due to the earlier post about 750$ a minute roaming charge from AT&T. I think it is possible he was very diligent in checking the usage and fees and managed to get the under paid and uninformed phone reps to say things that he managed leverage into another highly visible "10 lies from T-mobile".
Also T-mobile does not have over usage charges. It just throttles the connection speed. Even the throttled speed is 128 kbps which is good enough for google maps turn by turn navigation.
I usually side with the small guy against the corporation all the time. Now I wonder if I am being gamed by this poster.
A sort of natural experiment happened to my investments in the last decade. My 401K was all bond fixed income portfolia, with steady monthly contributions $CA. I had one mutual fund account, 4 all-stock-index funds. Steady monthly investments $CA. My 529 plan was a "age based auto rebalancing" monthly contribution plan $CA. And I had one "actively" managed account, no $CA, market timing, driven my astute analysis of the market conditions and market timed trading done by a brain proved to be in the 99th percentile. What with JEE-AIR(*) 800, GRE (790v, 790a, 800q) and not!
Well, the age based rebalancing 529 plan survived the crisis best, never went below the cost basis, and produced very reliable and steady gains. Averaged over 9% for 2005 to 2014.. The bond 401K net value dipped below the invested money for a brief period, 3 months in 2009 Feb-Apr 6% annualized return over 2005-14. The stock mutual fund went below cost basis most of 2009, but it too came roaring back, 7% annualized same period.
What about the super brain actively managed portfolio? It is the dog. 4% for that period. If you remove the 2% inflation component out, 529 did three times better than active management, even the bond fund was twice as good, the stock fund is 2.5 times better than active investment.
So, folks, the moral of the story is, go for dollar cost averaging, and do regular rebalancing. I was very fortunate I did not have to liquidate any of my portfolio in the middle of the crisis, that is what saved my tail. Not my active investment. Simple brain-dead $CA and the luck of not having to sell anything during the crisis.
You think the purpose of the research is to help FBI find the original numbers? ha! The real purpose is to let an FBI expert witness testify that "FBI forensic labs recovered this A12345 X73464, of the weapon known to be owned by the defendant from this weapon entered into evidence as prosecution exhibit A23".
You don't know BMW. It would void a warranty if you keep their car in an unapproved or incompatible garage. Only BMW approved soda compatible soda cans are permitted in the drink holders. I would not be surprised if it has a list of approved shoes that are compatible with the damned accelerator pedals.
The article has a picture of a BMW going through a brush wash. It would void the warranty. BMW says only BMW certified brushless car washes are compatible. Using unauthorized car washes will void the warranty.
In general the mainstream media in India and almost all of the intelligentsia, thought leaders, meme generators in India are very hostile to the West in general and USA in particular. They will dutifully line up days if necessary for a visa to the western countries, but in their hearts and mind, they just don't trust USA.
We can argue till the sacred cows come how why it is so, or whether it is justified, or whether it hurts or helps USA or India. But ground reality is, USA has no real credibility. If it monitors air quality and announces the results, people would find thousands of hidden agenda and subversion in it.
It is not just India. This old lady in northern Iraq passionately pleads for peace to ISIS militants, (assuming the sub titles are true) tells them their ways are un-Islamic in their face. But thinks America is providing ISIS weapons and money!
I grew up in India and visit it every year. It is very hard to convince even highly educated and informed Indians that "USA is not a monolith. Parts of it are purely profit driven. Parts of it are genuinely altruistic, desiring real democracy and good life for all of the world. No, President Obama is not conspiring with the CEOs of Coca-Cola and Pepsi to drive your hometown soda maker out of business, your rose-flavor-soda is safe from Pepsi. No, the President can not order CEO of Warner Brothers to censor a movie". I am talking about people who have very advanced degrees, worked in Middle East, Africa and far East outside India, people who have visited USA and Europe as tourists and visited friends and relatives there. They just don't believe any part of USA could be altruistic.
All the goodwill earned by all the people doing tremendous charity work, altruistic work, is squandered by a few bad players, mostly corporations corrupting the local politicians for their profit.
If machine learning is such a great thing, why is Microsoft giving it away? It probably hired dozens of machine learning PhDs from top schools, used their insights in its product designs and made a colossal failures out of them. Now their thinking goes, "If machine learning lured us in and fooled us, may be our competitors also would be lured in, made fools of and waste their resources here, and they will pay us a fee to use Azure! win-win!"
Please do not link to any site that autoplays a video. Chrome handles html5 natively. It is not easy to block it in chrome. That alone is going drive users away from Chrome to Firefox+NoScript. It is just a matter of time before advertisers and sleazy websites add autoplaying videos. It is back to X10 popup and blinking text of geocities.
Thanks for the warning, you will see the drastic reduction in hits for such links from Chrome. You will create a policy of not linking to any site that has auto play video. Also why do you include it directly in read? Can't you just put up a link and say click to play?
.. this was the company that sought world domination using a product named "Betamax". Pushed mini-DVD disks and mini-CD-R based cameras, pushed its memory stick relentlessly... Tried to be incompatible with the rest to lock their users in. Eventually it was able to kill Phillips' HD-DVD and got its Blue-ray to dominate the market, only to be blind sided by decidedly low-def streaming videos.
So it is going to push weirdo glasses with cameras without the a history of "not being evil". With a wired handheld controller no less. Good luck with that. After the walkman in 1970, did Sony ever invent a new market category by itself?
At least now you could protect yourself from the bad guys if you want to or if you care to. In the bad old days of IE domination, you could not even if you wanted to.
All the tabs as a tree on the left. Very useful. All links opened from a tab nest under it. Trees can collapsed at any node.
Most important feature is that I can collapse the tree to keep the logos and first website names from prying eyes at work. When I use WebEx or Google+ to share a desktop, I don't want sites like DailyKos, Mother Jones or Salon to show up in the tab line. Now it gets conveniently collapsed under "C++ STL Reference";-)
This is nothing compared to what University of Pittsburgh Medical Center is doing. It calls itself a non-profit and pays no taxes. Classified all its employees as contractors and dodged pay roll taxes too,. With such inherant cost advantages, it has driven all competition out. It also is fully vertically integrated. From general practioners to specialists to pharmacies to ambulances to parking garages to...
The game is not between Dyson and Press. It is Dyson and Press on one side, and clickbaited eyeballs, (that would be us), on the other. They managed to extort far higher number of page views from us than they deserve. Thus proving their point about the research.
More children die choking on small parts of toys, or drowning in backyard pools. Many suffer serious injuries to their eyes etc. Radiation does not kill, not immediately. I am not sure the kids picked enough radiation to get cancer or something.
So many parents assiduously sanitize every damned surface their precious child might come into contact with, their immune system becomes hyper sensitive to everything and they grow up to have so many allergies. That behavior has harmed and is harming more children today than this toy ever did, or this toy ever could.
The telling thing about the description, (I could not get the math) is that the strategy with longer memory loses! They are using a concept of "strategy with a theory of mind". Basically it tries to predict if the other person is rational. If they think the other one is, then it pays to be irrational. It is basically a game of chicken and the player who is reckless will win against the one who is prudent.
There is some real life applications for this. Since I am a bleeding heart liberal I see the Republicans being reckless with government shutdowns and pushing the envelop on filibusters etc as this "I will first show you I am reckless then let us play chicken". (If you are a Republican you might strongly disagree with this example).
I also see this as the explanation for being reckless revenge and disproportional response. Typically in India riots would erupt on the rumor Some boys of set A teased some girls of set B. The sets could be caste, religion, language. In the over the top response for something minor the riot inciting group suffers as much damage as all others. It is totally irrational. But the purpose is to set the stage for others for all future interactions, "Malabar Muslims or Dharavi Tamils or Biharis are known to be violent. Be more careful around them".
Or like John McEnroe's tantrums in the tennis matches is to intimidate the line judges into giving him the benefit of doubt in the future calls.
So the theory is not without its merits. But, as usual, the title is more provocative than warranted.
In the iterative prisoners dilemma problem the tit-for-tat strategy won big in the first tournament, back in 1988, U Mich, conducted by Axelrod, won by Anatole. The biggest breakthrough of that research is to show that "it is possible for islands of cooperation to emerge in the sea of selfishness". That is all it showed, It did not show that tit-for-tat is the best under all circumstances, nor the islands of cooperation could not be snuffed out if the pay outs changed. It is also very well known it is not an evolutionarily stable strategy. It will never drive selfishness to extinction. There will always be islands of selfishness even after the population is dominated by cooperating members.
All this paper shows is, once tit-for-tat establishes a beachhead and converts the population to a largely cooperating one, other strategies will emerge that will exploit the naive cooperators. Big deal. It is very well known.
Within two generations of eradicating most viral diseases, the anti-vaccination people are back, showing that once something becomes the common wisdom, there will be incentives to be a contrarian.
Slashdot Mirror
That profit margin is sure to evaporate. People will scan and print replacement part for a fraction of the price. Sears might actually install a 3D printer in their own store with access to official CAD drawings and sell it. But they will not be able to maintain such high price for such small piece that probably costs 20cents to make for long. So yeah, 3D printing might erode some of these profit margins, and these guys will bitch, moan and yell, "IP fraud, they don't have license from us to replicate these parts". But, if you had not abused your monopoly on the replacement parts and acted nicely, may be I would have been kind. But now, I say, cry me a river Sears.
It was off. Still T-Mobile USA used to connect to Rogers Wireless Canada. They know the issue and reverse the charges. Recently I turned international roaming back on, It is just 25 cents a minute even from India. I have not been to Niagara recently. But, if I do, and if they charge me 25 cents a min, I might let it slide. It is 2$ a minute that ticks me off. 25cents a minute, total of 1$ or 2$, I might not bother to fight them for it.
People install so many apps, and give so many privileges to the apps. So many of them call home and upload connected data, also down load updates. So much of the data usage happens behind the scenes. In android at least there are settings to allow an app to connect to the internet only on wifi. These apps bitch moan and scream, "the app may not work right it it cant connect to the net all the time". But silence them anyway to get some handle on data usage. But even the apps you allow might suddenly download stuff or upload stuff. Some are more honest and nice than the others.
I have this issue of Rogers Wireless connecting to my phone across the Niagara River and charge me roaming. For some reason T-mobile is not able to stop it. May be they are owned by the same company or what not. So every time I go to Niagara Falls I can expect roaming charges. They have always been prompt in reversing the charges. It is typically 5$ to 15$. Just call, "say I have never been over the border" and the rep would reverse the chargers.
Looks like the poster got some great publicity due to the earlier post about 750$ a minute roaming charge from AT&T. I think it is possible he was very diligent in checking the usage and fees and managed to get the under paid and uninformed phone reps to say things that he managed leverage into another highly visible "10 lies from T-mobile".
Also T-mobile does not have over usage charges. It just throttles the connection speed. Even the throttled speed is 128 kbps which is good enough for google maps turn by turn navigation.
I usually side with the small guy against the corporation all the time. Now I wonder if I am being gamed by this poster.
Well, the age based rebalancing 529 plan survived the crisis best, never went below the cost basis, and produced very reliable and steady gains. Averaged over 9% for 2005 to 2014.. The bond 401K net value dipped below the invested money for a brief period, 3 months in 2009 Feb-Apr 6% annualized return over 2005-14. The stock mutual fund went below cost basis most of 2009, but it too came roaring back, 7% annualized same period.
What about the super brain actively managed portfolio? It is the dog. 4% for that period. If you remove the 2% inflation component out, 529 did three times better than active management, even the bond fund was twice as good, the stock fund is 2.5 times better than active investment.
So, folks, the moral of the story is, go for dollar cost averaging, and do regular rebalancing. I was very fortunate I did not have to liquidate any of my portfolio in the middle of the crisis, that is what saved my tail. Not my active investment. Simple brain-dead $CA and the luck of not having to sell anything during the crisis.
You think the purpose of the research is to help FBI find the original numbers? ha! The real purpose is to let an FBI expert witness testify that "FBI forensic labs recovered this A12345 X73464, of the weapon known to be owned by the defendant from this weapon entered into evidence as prosecution exhibit A23".
Brain, is that you? Long time no see, Amigo. --- Pinky.
That is the password for Earth.
You don't know BMW. It would void a warranty if you keep their car in an unapproved or incompatible garage. Only BMW approved soda compatible soda cans are permitted in the drink holders. I would not be surprised if it has a list of approved shoes that are compatible with the damned accelerator pedals.
The article has a picture of a BMW going through a brush wash. It would void the warranty. BMW says only BMW certified brushless car washes are compatible. Using unauthorized car washes will void the warranty.
We can argue till the sacred cows come how why it is so, or whether it is justified, or whether it hurts or helps USA or India. But ground reality is, USA has no real credibility. If it monitors air quality and announces the results, people would find thousands of hidden agenda and subversion in it.
It is not just India. This old lady in northern Iraq passionately pleads for peace to ISIS militants, (assuming the sub titles are true) tells them their ways are un-Islamic in their face. But thinks America is providing ISIS weapons and money!
I grew up in India and visit it every year. It is very hard to convince even highly educated and informed Indians that "USA is not a monolith. Parts of it are purely profit driven. Parts of it are genuinely altruistic, desiring real democracy and good life for all of the world. No, President Obama is not conspiring with the CEOs of Coca-Cola and Pepsi to drive your hometown soda maker out of business, your rose-flavor-soda is safe from Pepsi. No, the President can not order CEO of Warner Brothers to censor a movie". I am talking about people who have very advanced degrees, worked in Middle East, Africa and far East outside India, people who have visited USA and Europe as tourists and visited friends and relatives there. They just don't believe any part of USA could be altruistic.
All the goodwill earned by all the people doing tremendous charity work, altruistic work, is squandered by a few bad players, mostly corporations corrupting the local politicians for their profit.
If machine learning is such a great thing, why is Microsoft giving it away? It probably hired dozens of machine learning PhDs from top schools, used their insights in its product designs and made a colossal failures out of them. Now their thinking goes, "If machine learning lured us in and fooled us, may be our competitors also would be lured in, made fools of and waste their resources here, and they will pay us a fee to use Azure! win-win!"
In the Joint Entrance Examn for the IITs it used to be a common problem. I know from memory it would oscilate back and forth. 90 minutes period of so.
It has been embraced. So you know what comes next.
Thanks for the warning, you will see the drastic reduction in hits for such links from Chrome. You will create a policy of not linking to any site that has auto play video. Also why do you include it directly in read? Can't you just put up a link and say click to play?
So it is going to push weirdo glasses with cameras without the a history of "not being evil". With a wired handheld controller no less. Good luck with that. After the walkman in 1970, did Sony ever invent a new market category by itself?
At least now you could protect yourself from the bad guys if you want to or if you care to. In the bad old days of IE domination, you could not even if you wanted to.
All the tabs as a tree on the left. Very useful. All links opened from a tab nest under it. Trees can collapsed at any node. Most important feature is that I can collapse the tree to keep the logos and first website names from prying eyes at work. When I use WebEx or Google+ to share a desktop, I don't want sites like DailyKos, Mother Jones or Salon to show up in the tab line. Now it gets conveniently collapsed under "C++ STL Reference" ;-)
This is nothing compared to what University of Pittsburgh Medical Center is doing. It calls itself a non-profit and pays no taxes. Classified all its employees as contractors and dodged pay roll taxes too,. With such inherant cost advantages, it has driven all competition out. It also is fully vertically integrated. From general practioners to specialists to pharmacies to ambulances to parking garages to ...
The game is not between Dyson and Press. It is Dyson and Press on one side, and clickbaited eyeballs, (that would be us), on the other. They managed to extort far higher number of page views from us than they deserve. Thus proving their point about the research.
So many parents assiduously sanitize every damned surface their precious child might come into contact with, their immune system becomes hyper sensitive to everything and they grow up to have so many allergies. That behavior has harmed and is harming more children today than this toy ever did, or this toy ever could.
Yes, Rajnikant is balding and getting on the years. But still he is not that old. I would say he is 120 years, tops.
There is some real life applications for this. Since I am a bleeding heart liberal I see the Republicans being reckless with government shutdowns and pushing the envelop on filibusters etc as this "I will first show you I am reckless then let us play chicken". (If you are a Republican you might strongly disagree with this example).
I also see this as the explanation for being reckless revenge and disproportional response. Typically in India riots would erupt on the rumor Some boys of set A teased some girls of set B. The sets could be caste, religion, language. In the over the top response for something minor the riot inciting group suffers as much damage as all others. It is totally irrational. But the purpose is to set the stage for others for all future interactions, "Malabar Muslims or Dharavi Tamils or Biharis are known to be violent. Be more careful around them".
Or like John McEnroe's tantrums in the tennis matches is to intimidate the line judges into giving him the benefit of doubt in the future calls.
So the theory is not without its merits. But, as usual, the title is more provocative than warranted.
All this paper shows is, once tit-for-tat establishes a beachhead and converts the population to a largely cooperating one, other strategies will emerge that will exploit the naive cooperators. Big deal. It is very well known.
Within two generations of eradicating most viral diseases, the anti-vaccination people are back, showing that once something becomes the common wisdom, there will be incentives to be a contrarian.
Sounds like this metal is to steel what steel is to iron. I vaguely recall a name for this material. Quick, someone make a bracelet out of this!