I'm probably more ignorant that you realize, but that's beside the point. Visa/Mastercard support is necessary but not sufficient. The historical challenge for electronic but non-credit card systems has been placing readers at the point of sale locations. Without those readers, Apple Pay is useless. Someone has to pay for those readers. The stores don't want to do it unless they are convinced they can recover the cost.

If Apple can get either the stores or the banks to pass for the readers, then I will admit that Apple is an amazing magician. With the iPhone, Apple convinced AT&T et al. to subsidize the phones because the carriers were guaranteed to recover their investment through contracts with early termination fees. iPads don't come with such subsidies and are not as profitable for Apple. With Apple Pay, unless Apple swallows the cost of the readers, how will they convince the stores or banks for pay for the infrastructure without any guarantee of coming out ahead?

Getting Visa and MasterCard to agree to process transactions is a necessary first step but doesn't mean much by itself. Banks don't give out readers for free. That upfront and monthly cost will be hard for many small retailers and may not be worthwhile even for larger stores. The only game changer is if Apple can somehow get the banks to subsidize the cost of the readers. Apple got the cell phone carriers to agree to this subsidy, but I imagine the banks will be a harder sell. It remains to be seen if the retailers will feel the need to swallow the monthly and per-transaction costs to the banks plus to Apple. Small retailers and restaurants already complain about paying the bank tax. Would they agree to another tax? Would there be any benefit for the stores? Would iPhone users actually avoid a store just because it didn't have an Apple Pay reader, especially given that they could always just pay with a credit card add they have always done?

It will be interesting to see if even Apple is able to change user habits. Visa and Mastercard might have signed on, but that's not important. Retailer support is the critical factor. Even though Apple has signed up "200,000 retail locations" including "Bloomingdale’s, McDonald’s, Subway, Walgreens, and Apple Stores", and users and use Apple Pay "inside a store’s mobile apps, such as Target’s or Starbucks’", I'm guessing the number of retailers is a very small percentage of potential retailers and a small percentage of a typical user's purchases. If that's the case, then it's very likely that there are almost no people who can use Apple Pay exclusively without continuing to carry traditional credit cards. And if I'm carrying a credit card anyway, what's the point of Apple Pay? Yes, I whip out my phone instead of my wallet and credit card, but is that an improvement in my life?

2 business cards makes it sound insignificant. Meanwhile 1mm / 6.9 mm is about 15%, which makes it sound more significant.

Does this 15% matter? If you want an Apple phone, it doesn't matter. If you don't care for Apple phones, it does.

The statement "We depend too much on science and not enough on faith" presents a false dichotomy. Science as depicting scientific thought and experimentation via the scientific process is orthogonal to religious belief. I can believe in God and still apply the principles of the scientific process.

In fact, the scientific process itself is even orthogonal to scientific belief. The sleight of hand occurs when science is used to represent both the scientific process as well as scientific belief. For example, there is a huge difference between trust in experimentation to test hypotheses and the belief that humans evolved from single-celled organisms. The case of evolution (and pretty much most of past history) is poorly suited to testing via the scientific process. That doesn't meant that human evolution isn't true, but it does mean that it shouldn't be held in the same regard as other results that have been subjected to double-blind, independently repeatable experiments that are the gold standard of science.

It is part of hard science, but it's the technician part. The scientist part is figuring out what problem to address, thinking of hypotheses to test, designing a methodology to test the hypotheses, and then executing the experiment and analyzing the gathered data.

Finding a kid who has executed some scientific project is not rare. However, finding a kid who has done that without having the problem set up or at least directly motivated by a mentor (often a parent) is rare. Furthermore, it's even more rare to find a kid who has finished the experiment without resources provided by that mentor, often resources that are not readily available to most kids.

Somehow the geekboy bias of slashdot thinks it's a great idea to make the effort to do Amazon's or Google's job of making targeted ads non-annoying. For normal people, configuring ads on Amazon's behalf is obviously annoying and is obviously a non-starter.

Of course, the real solution is not to do Amazon's job for them. The real solution is to block ads. No, the websites won't go away. Corporations are hooked on money and will find another way to stay in business.

People may not necessarily understand or consciously care for open platforms, but they at least subconsciously cling to it. Of those that have flocked to closed messaging systems, how many have given up email? How many of us know even a single person that has given up email?

Pro-metric folks talk about the ease of metric conversions, but that's mostly useless. Few calculations are of the shift the decimal place around. Rather, most calculations require more arithmetic than most people can comfortably handle without paper or a calculator.

But, even more important, the most relevant aspect of using either any system of measurement, be it metric or English, is gut feelings. That's what used daily over and over again. I have a gut feel for how big 100 miles, 1 gallon, 160 lbs, etc. are, but I have to do the conversion from metric quantities to understand metric units. I can do the conversions, and I understand the math, but it's the intuitive understanding of the quantities that is useful. It is this one quality of measurement systems that allows the English system to continue to flourish despite its mathematical limitations.

From Wikipedia, "Of the 43,000 Apple employees in the United States 30,000 work at Apple Stores." Because of this, none of Apple's numbers are comparable to other tech companies. What would be interesting to see is the breakdown for the 13,000 non-store employees. Non-tech vs. tech is not a valid point of comparison unless other tech companies provide numbers using the same criteria, since it's not always entirely obvious who is tech vs. non-tech.

Of course, the real questions are (1) whether the aggregate statistics are of any use to represent current fairness or to drive future policy and (2) if and to what extent specific individuals are disadvantaged due to certain demographic characteristics. I think the aggregate statistics are useless because target numbers do not exist. Sure, the media and CEOs happily decry the current numbers, but then they cowardly balk at stating what the desired targets are. Also, they try to portray that their sense of "fairness" may be focused on individuals, but they selectively pick and choose which individuals are worthy of fairness and which are not. It may be true that it's not fair that a certain black woman doesn't have a tech job, but does the fact that lots of other white men have tech jobs make it any more fair that a specific white man doesn't have a tech job?

China is only refusing to buy some foreign products. There is no policy of isolation. I imagine there will still be a great deal of reverse engineering and other data gathering activities (interpret that how you wish). So, the idea is to negatively impact competitors financially while at the same time benefiting from their innovations.

Actually, the question of educational value is the big elephant in the room. It is completely questionable and absolutely not obvious that these tablets have educational value. Do the kids learn more, faster, or in different ways? Can this be quantified or even vaguely estimated? There are huge IT capital and operational costs involved, and such large expenditures must be justified in terms of return.

It's telling that the article and even the discussion on Slashdot centers on technical questions because those issues are all tangential. If the main goals focus on avoiding the theft of machines and the bypass of parental controls, then the entire project is misguided. How are the children learning, and how does that learning compare to the previous system of learning? What did the $20 million buy?

It depends. It could very well be that the main reason for this mass layoff is not that Microsoft carries more deadweight than another company, say Google or Apple, for example. Many of Google's employees are not necessary, but it can afford to pay them due to its money spigot. Financial metrics, such as operating profit or more importantly projected stock price appreciation, quickly turn non-deadweight employees into deadweight. It's obvious that Microsoft (or any other company) does not execute layoffs in response to an appraisal of the quality or necessarily even the usefulness of employees but rather the financial implications of the cost centers that these employees represent.

Yes, energy usage moderation is a matter of economics and not religion. Rich people with big houses use lot of energy regardless of their views on the environment. Similarly poor people tend to try their best to minimize their energy usage, not because they necessarily care about the environment but because that is what they can afford. This is what I've seen in my life from my experience as part of the bottom 10% as well as the top 5%.

Outstanding papers for the most part will continue to be published. That's not the issue. The problem is that the overwhelming portion of submitted papers are not seminal papers, and it's these papers that are subjected to the defects in the review process, including the following:
(1) Not all reviewers are equally competent for their assigned papers.
(2) Not all reviewers are equally committed to spending the minimum amount of time needed for a thorough review. I have seen reviews submitted by well-known and regarded individuals that were obviously hastily written with a cursory reading of the submission.
(3) The assignment of papers to reviewers is mostly random. Explicit conflicts are filtered, but the assignment is mostly random, even if some sort of bidding process is used, as is done for some conferences.
(4) The number of reviewers is often minimal. For journals, often two reviewers are used. For conferences, 2-5 reviewers may be involved. However, that number includes the less competent and apathetic reviewers.
(5) Decisions are often swayed by a few very opinionated individuals. Especially on a PC, it is not at all rare to see political motivations determine the fate of a paper.

Double-blind reviews are idealistic but not practical. For many/most papers, it's almost trivial to figure out who the authors are based on the title, the subject material, and the references. Most authors will self-reference their own papers.