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Comment Re:not so fast (Score 1) 128

Wow, I can't believe that someone missed the point so completely!
The point being that it is unlikely that the brain is stealing the glucose and thus stunting growth like the article supports, because when kids are fat, that means they have metabolized carbs->glucose->fat, and thus have had plenty of glucose. That fat kids' bones don't appear to shoot past normal kids in growth strongly suggest that there are other reasons why kids don't grow physically to adults in half the time.

I suggest that being smaller and having different proportions to adults triggers the "do not harm" and "protect" instinct in most adults, thus increasing the chance of reaching adulthood and bringing one's genes on.
There are probably other survival advantages, like having less mass and more flexible bones might be adventageous at the age one learns to climb trees and cliffs.
When reaching the age where one is going to procreate and bring up own children, the advantage is to have a more adult body, capable of hunting, foraging, carrying and protecting.

Get it now, or are you going to get sidetracked by a single word again?

Comment Re:Security (Score 1) 194

Between manufacturer avarice and customer stupidity I hold out very little hope; but it would warm my cold, black, shriveled, heart if somebody would standardize a key-fill interface (like the DS-101/DS-102 devices that the DoD has for connection to U-229 ports on communications gear and other things that need crypto keys; but actually remotely suitable for end users, unlike those systems) for dealing with this class of problems...

Right now, it seems like everything is either "Oh, totally wide open, maybe papered over with some pitiful little obfuscation attempt" or "So damn much asymmetric key crypto that you'll need to beg the vendor for permission to do anything"; but options are very, very, thin on the ground if you want something as secure as a mothership-bound lockdown device; but obedient to your crypto keys, not the ones burned in at the factory.

It's like the 'secure boot' controversy that erupted a while back. "Well, you can have Microsoft's keys and protection against certain types of OS tampering, or you can turn it off entirely(x86 only other restrictions may apply); but set your own root of trust? Ha!"

Comment Re:For that price (Score 1) 194

It's insane that it isn't easier to re-key/re-pair with a replacement device; but I suspect that it is otherwise very much for the best to move some functions to the iPod.

Apple has spent a Lot of money designing iDevices and perfecting them over multiple generations. Hard to say how much; but it's a large number. Conveniently for you, they'll sell 'em to you in quantities of 1 for a only a modest premium over production cost.

In an ideal world, the prosthesis would require no 'interface' at all(your arm doesn't, after all); but if it does, a company specializing in prosthetics doesn't have a prayer of delivering an interface device nearly as good as an iDevice or Android unit for less than they could just buy one and develop the necessary software on top of it. (In practice, they'd probably be lucky to develop something substantially worse for three powers of ten more, if they tried it.)

If it turns out that timing-critical control and feedback loop stuff is being done over bluetooth, by an 'app', somebody needs a hell of a beating; but if it's just a UI/Configuration/etc. interface using an off-the-shelf device is extremely logical.

Comment Re:Bad Planning (Score 3, Informative) 194

It tends to be discouraged, out of concern that states aren't very good at it, or that they might be inclined to use their other powers to make themselves more competitive; but there isn't anything architecturally precluding a state from earning money. They can have employees, own and operate R&D and production facilities, sell products, same as a company.

There are reasons to discourage that, and have them focus on things that the private sector can't do or does poorly; but those are pragmatic considerations, not fundamental obstacles.

Comment Re:Hmmm ... (Score 2) 194

I'd be totally unsurprised by incredibly bad design; but that incredibly bad design would also tend to make it relatively trivial to access whatever memory holds the UID or key used to establish the pairing and blank or rewrite it to establish a new pairing with a new device. Probably not in the owner's manual; but likely something that an EE undergrad could do with access to a few hundreds to thousands of dollars worth of borrowed test equipment and a congratulatory couple of six-packs. Definitely for less than replacing the hardware.

Design that is both appallingly ill thought out and too ironclad to subvert would be fairly surprising. Now, if it were a prosthetic eye, and needed to appease the MPAA when handling Premium Content, I'd be more concerned...

Comment Re:not so fast (Score 1) 128

Imply in real-world terms means hint at.

No, it doesn't. You have the wrong idea of what "imply" means. It is not a synonym for "hint at" or "suggest" any more than "implication" is a synonym for "hint" or "suggestion". It is a near synonym to "mean".

That you have two X chromosomes and no Y chromosome implies that you are female. It does not merely hint at it.

When I used the word imply in the real world example of my GPP, it was to say exactly what I said. Not your uneducated guess at what it means.

Comment Re:I seem to remember... (Score 1) 275

Given the work they've put into having clients for most things, and broad 3rd party integration, they probably have some room to overcharge for small amounts of space (sure, you could just go shove S3 buckets yourself; but we've already done the integration work for you...); but they seem strangely overconfident about their ability to set prices for larger blocks of storage that just emphasize the discrepancy in per GB price.

That may actually be part of how Google and Amazon and Apple are hitting them hard now: DropBox offers a reasonably compelling deal if you don't need too much space. Sure, it costs too much per GB; but it's all nicely wrapped up and integrated with the programs you use, and life is just too short to go tinkering or comparison shopping to save a small amount. However, Google, Amazon, and Apple will all give you a modest amount of storage for nothing, as part of their respective plans to sell stuff, achieve platform dominance, or whatever. That obviously cuts the knees out from under DropBox's formerly cushy margins on small accounts; and, as you say, their price/GB has always been sufficiently high that they really start to look bad if you need nontrivial amounts of storage(which nobody will give you for free; but which players like Amazon will sell impressively close to cost).

Comment not so fast (Score 5, Insightful) 128

That there is an inverse correlation between brain glucose use and body growth does not imply that the brain's use of glucose stymies the growth until later.
If that were the case, kids who are overfed carbohydrates would be smarter and taller, not fatter and dumber.

My guess is that slow growth is selected for because children who look like children enjoy special care and protection by adults. Growing to adult size by age 7 might be detrimental to survival.

Comment Re:OMG (Score 2) 29

I suspect that, aside from the high costs (and even higher PR costs) of air crashes, the way most contemporary flights are scheduled makes maximum-granularity/low-predictability information less valuable than lower granularity and higher predictability.

As much as you wouldn't guess it from a trip to Baggage Claim, mass market air travel is very much a 'just in time' operation. Every minute an aircraft spends sitting on the ground and waiting for something is money lost. Every minute one spends circling around and waiting for a landing slot is even more money lost. Customers who miss connecting flights are either foregone sales, pissed off, or people that unexpectedly need to be crammed onto later flights. Airplanes themselves have connections to make. After doing one route, the plane is almost certainly scheduled for a deeply cursory cleaning and another destination.

In such an environment, you do want timely alerts of unexpected emergencies(since the cost of having to replace multiple glassed engines, or an entire airplane and passengers is really bad); but the value of unexpected or unreliable good news is much less obvious unless it can be slotted neatly into an overall schedule that would survive if the news is bad(which definitely could happen, if a landing slot can be arranged to suit, learning that a flight will be faster and burn less fuel than expected would be good news; but not necessarily news you could bet the scheduling of the flight's next leg on).

Comment Re:Dropbox use AWS (Score 1) 275

Even if MS and Google aren't willing to lose money on storage(they certainly are in the short term; but as a long game that strategy will not sell well), it isn't terribly obvious why repackaging AWS should be a particularly sustainable niche.

There is room(and dropbox exploited it) for the outfit that makes using AWS trivial and bodges together clients for OSes that allow fairly low level integration and 'app' integration for those that don't; but that's a goal where reaching 'adequate' is not a terribly high barrier to entry and where it isn't obvious what novel features one can add to continue justifying one's profit.

Once there are multiple players who have adequate client integration available what remains but to sell on price?

Comment Re:I seem to remember... (Score 2) 275

There is at least an argument to be made if one looks at how much...encouragement...the platform vendors, especially on the mobile side, provide to use their own blessed and proprietary 'cloud' service; depending on how closely controlled the OS is the advantage of being the platform-blessed option can be fairly substantial.

However, TFS seems to be worked up about the fact that the price/GB of deeply undistinguished storage has cratered over time. Yes, yes it has. Advances in disk density and datacenter operations have sharply reduced the absolute cost, and unless your service offers something really cool, or an airtight SLA, or some other nice feature, why wouldn't your margins reflect the fact that you provide a commodity?
User Journal

Journal Journal: Mars, Ho! Chapter Forty Four

Nitrous
I pulled out my fone and called the fleet commander who I was amazingly boss of and told him about our little power problem, then asked the computer what the robots were doing about repairs. Or tried to, anyway.
"Computer, what is the, uh... status of..." and the God damned machine interrupted me, of course. Who programs this junk anyway?
"All cargo unconscious except specimen in com

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