Yup. If it is THAT important to protect the president's life, then he shouldn't be anywhere near a window or wall that isn't armored.

If this were literally a matter of life and death then the national guard should be herding people onto trucks to get them out of danger, and shooting looters in the street.

Since the national guard wasn't around to give people a lift, maybe we should offer additional compensation to the folks who take the risk of getting into an accident so that you don't have to.

What a surprise that during hurricane Sandy there were huge lines in NJ and it was impossible to buy gas there. Maybe if they allowed prices to float people would have reconsidered the importance of their trip, but anybody with a need to drive could pay the $20/gallon to drive, or at least easily obtain enough gas to drive to someplace where it was cheaper (you only need a few gallons to get to an area not impacted by the storm). Also, if prices were higher you'd see everybody with a tanker truck driving east to fill up and offering the gas for sale at a street stand, which would provide far more gas to the region.

Instead it worked a bit like the USSR. If you knew somebody you could go buy cheap gas from FEMA, and if not you either stood in line all day long, drove 150 miles yourself for gas, or went without.

Free market pricing is desirable BECAUSE it ensures that there aren't shortages. That doesn't mean that this is the primary motivation of the participants in a market.

When you buy a smartphone you're not doing it to reward some kid for studying hard to become an engineer, but that is the result of your actions all the same. The smart kid isn't building the phone so that you personally can have one, but that is the result of his actions all the same.

All the benefits of a free market tend to be side-effects, but they're benefits all the same.

What is the alternative, capping prices and watching everybody stay home, so that you're stuck freezing on the side of the street when nobody wants to go pick you up?

Even most conservatives don't believe that free markets can work unless there is government restraint on monopolies, which tend to form in any free market due to economies of scale. Ironic that I have to point this out in the middle of a discussion about a cable company merger.

I said that a hypothesis has to be "testable against observations." Presumably the observational sciences have observations. If their theories aren't testable against observation, then they aren't science.

Considering that Google won't even do this for their pre-4.4 Nexus phones, I'd say that the chances are pretty low. The fact that Google still won't fix its own phones doesn't let it off the hook. They don't actually make ANY commitment to update Nexus devices at all, and have no documented end of life policy. They're basically not serious about security.

They control the updates on the GSM Galaxy Nexus phone. It isn't getting the security patch.

So, people should be smart enough to not buy any phone that works on the Verizon network, any phone sold in an AT&T store as part of a contract, and any phone in a T-Mobile store sold under a purchase plan other than 1-2 models in the US?

You're basically saying that Android is great as long as you don't buy 99% of the devices on the market.

And even if you guy, eg, a Galaxy Nexus with an unlocked bootloader, the company that sold it to you (Google) only provided support for 1.5 years from the date the device FIRST went on sale. MS supports Windows for 10 years after the NEXT version of Windows goes on sale. That is why 95% of the PCs in businesses are STILL running Windows despite all the talk about the death of the desktop. I don't really have a problem with the death of the desktop, but businesses aren't going to buy into an alternative that isn't supported for a long time. They're fine with BYOD, since they're not the ones paying for support.

Agree. I use Android, but they could really benefit from something like this:
https://www.google.com/chrome/...
or
http://windows.microsoft.com/e...
or
https://access.redhat.com/supp...
or
http://www.ubuntu.com/info/rel...

The first link is Google's, so it isn't like they don't know how to do this stuff.

That, and their users don't seem to care if random small things break from time to time. Fortunately bluetooth stereo is much more mainstream now than it used to be, so the volunteer testers are far more likely to notice when it breaks. Back in the early days of CM it seemed like it only worked 70% of the time, but the average college student didn't use it so they didn't notice. That was before the M-series builds as well, so running "stable" meant just waiting for the next version of Android to come out so that you could use the last one, and it was basically abandonware.

As far as I've noticed, their paid firmware is just fine, probably because they actually give it serious QA, and of course it doesn't hurt that they have full access to the drivers/etc (which to be fair is a major handicap for their free efforts).

I also like that they have personally committed to updates for the phones they support, and they don't just say "it is up to your OEM." I get the impression that if a company like Oneplus folded that CM would still keep the OS updated for existing owners. Of course, they've yet to be tested on that.

Don't get me wrong, CM does great work. I just wouldn't say that they are without issue, or proof that the free software model works without any commercial ties. The areas where CM seems to go toe-to-toe with other OEMs in every regard is in the cases where they do have commercial ties.

Good thing you don't have a GSM Galaxy Nexus purchased directly from Google. I doubt they're patching those.

More like once the guy with the guess can come up with an experiment that can demonstrate the falsehood (or lack thereof) of the guess it is a hypothesis.

Obviously if the guess is already inconsistent with observations then there is no need to run the experiment since it is already falsified.

You want to hang on a wall a statement that a hypothesis is "ideally" testable somehow, even if only mathematically (he did say "or"), and herald it for stressing the importance of observation?

Being testable against observations is an essential characteristic of a hypothesis. If it isn't testable against observations, it isn't a "non-ideal" hypothesis, it is pseudoscience. Sure, any hypothesis should be mathematically consistent if it relies on math, but that isn't sufficient to make it a hypothesis.

I'm fine with it being impractical to perform the experiment with current technology/resources - that is unfortunate but as long as the experiment exists I'll accept something as being a hypothesis. I certainly won't trust it as being correct though.