I don't know if that's going to work, given that the youth unemployment rate has gotten so high they've stopped publishing numbers for it, because either they'd be too high to publish under Chinese law, or else no one would believe them. Granted, that's not tech-sector-specific, but a *lot* of those unemployed young people are college educated, and STEM fields are quite popular over there. Employers may in fact be in a stronger negotiating position than the prospective employees.

Well, it's like in Econ 101 when you studied equillibrium prices. At $3500 the number of units demanded is small, but if you dropped that to $1000 there should be more units demanded, assuming consumers are economically rational.

There is a tech adoption curve in which different groups of people play important roles in each stage of a new product's life cycle. At the stage Vision Pro is at now, you'd be focused on only about 1% of the potential market. The linked article calls these people "innovators", but that's unduly complementary; these are the people who want something because it's *new* whether or not it actually does anything useful. This is not irrational per se; they're *interested* in new shit, but it's not pragmatic, and the pragmatists are where you make real money.

Still, these scare-quotes "innovators" are important because set the stage for more practical consumers to follow. Perhaps most importantly, when you are talking about a *platform* like this people hungry for applications to run on the doorstop they just bought attract developers. And when the right app comes along the product becomes very attractive to pragmatists. This happened with the original IBM PC in 1981, which if you count the monitor cost the equivalent of around $8000 in today's money. I remember this well; they were status symbols that sat on influential managers' desks doing nothing, until people started discovering VisiCalc -- the first spreadsheet. When Lotus 1-2-3 arrives two years after the PC's debut, suddenly those doorstops became must-haves for everyone.

So it's really important for Apple to get a lot of these things into peoples' hands early on if this product is ever to become successful, because it's a *platform* for app developers, and app developers need users ready to buy to justify the cost and risk. So it's likely Apple miscalculated by pricing the device so high. And lack of units sold is going to scare of developers.

But to be fair this pricing is much harder than it sounds;. Consumers are extremely perverse when it comes to their response to price changes. I once raised the price of a product from $500 to $1500 and was astonished to find sales went dramatically up. In part you could say this is because people aren't economically rational; but I think in that case it was that human judgment is much more complex and nuanced than economic models. I think customers looked at the price tag and figured nobody could sell somethign as good as we claimed our product to be for $500. And they were right, which is why I raised the price.

The only thing the moon offers that's better is for resupply or emergency scenarios, Earth is just a hop and a skip away.

Which is exactly what you want for prototyping. Work out the kinks close by where you can iterate designs quickly and have near real-time conversations with legions of engineers back on Earth. Then you can take all that experience and build something that has to work the first time and takes months or years to resupply.

So yes, Mars is a better colony location, but the Moon is a better testbed.

You had me at "there's no way I'd visit Russia."

Technically speaking the crime of fraud has three elements: (1) A materially false statement; (2) an intent to deceive the recipient; (3) a reliance upon the false statement by the recipient.

So, if you want to lie to people and want to avoid being charged with fraud, it's actually quite simple. You lie by omission. You distract. You prevaricate (dance around the facts). You encourage people to jump on the bandwagon; you lead them to spurious conclusions. It's so easy to lie without making any materially false statements that anyone who does lie that way when people are going to check up on him is a fool.

Not only is this way of lying *legal*, it happens every time a lawyer makes an closing statement to a jury. It's not a problem because there's an opposing counsel who's professionally trained to spot omissions and lapses of logic and to point them out. But if a lawyer introduces a *false statement of fact* to a trial that's a very serious offense, in fact grounds for disbarrment because that can't be fixed by having an alert opponent.

We have similar standards of truthfullness for advertising and politics because in theory there's competition that's supposed to make up for your dishonesty. In practice that doesn't work very well because there is *nobody* involved (like a judge) who cares about people making sound judgments. But still, any brand that relies on materially false statements is a brand you want to avoid because they don't even measure up to the laxest imaginable standards of honesty.

Now investors have lots of money, so they receive a somehat better class of legal protections than consumers or voters do. There are expectations of dilligence and duties to disclose certain things etc. that can get someone selling investments into trouble. But that's still not as bad as committing *fraud*, which is stupid and therefore gets extra severe punishment.

If I understand your argument properly, you're suggesting that things will be OK with the reefs because "survival of the fittest" will produce a population of corals better adapted to warmer conditions.

Let me first point out is that this isn't really an argument, it's a hypothesis. In fact this is the very question that actual *reef scientists* are raising -- the ability of reefs to survive as an ecosystem under survival pressure. There's no reason to believe reefs will surivive just because fitter organisms will *tend* to reproduce more, populations perish all the time. When it's a keystone species in an ecosystem, that ecosystem collapses. There is no invisible hand here steering things to any preordained conclusion.

So arguing over terminology here is really just an attempt to distract (name calling even more so) from your weak position on whether reefs will survive or not.

However, returning to that irrelevant terminology argument, you are undoubtedly making an evolutionary argument. You may be thinking that natural selection won't produce a new taxonomic *species* for thousands of generations, and you'd be right. However it will produce a new *clade*. When a better-adapted clade emerges due to survival pressures, that is evolution by natural selection. Whether we call that new clade a "species" is purely a human convention adopted and managed to facilitate scientific communication.

You don't have to take my word for any of this. Put it to any working biologist you know.

I figured someone would notice this. The system was designed around 1980, well before I started there. I'm not sure why the Z80 was chosen over the 6809. The explanation I was given was that the Z80 was more capable than the 6809. The Z80 was also less expensive, though given how much we sold the boards for I don't think a $20-ish difference in CPU price would have made a difference. It could have just been that the people designing it were more familiar with the Z80 and could design faster for it.

Ah, my first job out of college. Circa 1989, I got hired at Motorola to code Z80 on their EMX series of cellular telephone switches. But this was no ordinary Z80! This was a Z80 with blackjack! And hookers!

The board had an external MMU and a bank register gave it an effective 24-bit (16 MB) address space. There was an active processor and a standby processor, and 4 MB of the address space was shared between the active and standby. The MMU even had an NMI mask, so we could mask out non-maskable interrupts. I was super proud of myself that I taught our HP logic analyzer to understand the bank register and actually decode the full 24-bit address bus.

So many fond memories. Like counting clock cycles to make sure a task would run in the time allotted. Or the time a co-worker thought the I register was just another general purpose register. (It was actually the interrupt vector. Hilarity ensued.) Or the fact that we only had half a dozen machines in the lab, so lab time was scheduled 24 hours a day and you grabbed a slot whenever you could. Or the two weeks I spent all night, every night, sitting on the floor of a customer site in a refrigerated Bangkok switch room with a microfiche reader and stack of fiche about the size of a brick, typing opcodes into the debugging terminal on the running production system.

Wait, did I say fond memories? I meant nightmares.

Not really, most of us use Macs because we find Windows a disgusting cesspool of GUI abomination. Linux GUIs are equally as bad.

In all honesty, so is the Mac GUI. And I say this as someone who has used a Mac by choice for work for the past 15 years or so.

It's just a matter of taste. Do you personally prefer the taste of pig shit, cow shit, or horse shit? There's no point in arguing about which is better. At the end of the day, they're all shit.

I won't return in coin by calling you an idiot, because I don't think you are one. What I think you are is too *ignorant* to realize you're talking about evolution. "Survival of the fittest" is a phrase coined by Herbert Spencer in 1864 to refer to natural selection, a concept that's in the actual *title* of Darwin's book.

Well, no *one* of us in a position to save the coral reefs. Not even world leaders can do it. But we *all* are in a position to do a little bit, and collectively all those little bits add up to matter.

Sure if you're the only person trying to reduce is carbon footprint you will make no difference. But if enough people do it, then that captures the attention of industry and politicians and shifts the Overton window. Clearly we can't save everything, but there's still a lot on the table and marginal improvements matter. All-or-nothing thinking is a big part of denialist thinking; if you can't fix everything then there's no point in fixing anything and therefore people say there's a problem are alarmists predicting a catastrophe we couldn't do anything about even if it weren't happening.

As to the loss of coral reefs not being the worst outcome of climate change, that's probably true, but we really can't anticiapte the impact. About a quarter of all marine life depends on coral reefs for some part of their life cycle. Losing all of it would likely be catastrophic in ways we can't imagine yet, but the flip side is that saving *some* of it is likely to be quite a worthwhile goal.

Well, you bringing *evolution* into the argument shows that your views are so far off base theyr'e not even wrong.

Define: "Protect". If you play a game for more than about 10 hours it still becomes one of the cheapest forms of paid entertainment you've had, and you will have gotten your money worth out of it.

"Protect" means to defend against some undesired outcome, in this case the publisher making a previously purchased game unplayable. If you don't buy the game and don't play the game, they can't take it away from you. You could argue that this doesn't count, it's only "protection" in the sense that never visiting Asia is "protection" from wild tiger attacks. You're not at risk, but you don't get the benefit either. Fair enough.

But as you said, games are one of the cheapest forms of paid entertainment available. This has a relevant side-effect: Entertaining games are plentiful. Foregoing a particular game or even a particular publisher doesn't mean going without games completely. There are thousands of other titles out there, some just as fun as this game, which don't put you in danger of having the game arbitrarily removed from your library. There's no need to reward a publisher for their nonsense. Give your money to one of the many other publishers out there that make single-player games which run locally without requiring a connection to their server.

The article lands on a resounding "it depends". It depends on what you mean by "derivative", and it depends on how you measure "more".

I'm sorry, was there supposed to be a point to this article? If so I've missed it completely.

There could be microbes on Mars that Earth life has no immunity to. The chance is small, but not zero. Why take a say 1 in 500 chance of doomsday?

It's actually pretty darned unlikely, probably many orders of magnitude less likely than the 1 in 500 chance you suggested. The "has no immunity to" thing cuts both ways. The generalization of the statement is "has not evolved to affect" life from another planet. If Earth life hasn't evolved to defend against a Martian microbe, why would a Martian microbe have evolved to prey upon Earth life in the first place?

But we've already done sample returns from the Moon and asteroids, and we examine them in clean rooms with very tight controls. To be sure, the main reason is to keep Earth stuff from contaminating the samples, not the other way around, but there's still as complete a separation as possible in a lab. Scientists have read or seen The Andromeda Strain too.

It's way, WAY more likely that an existing Earth microbe would mutate into something we have no immunity to than it would be to find a random alien microbe that just randomly happens to be perfectly evolved to kill us while being able to completely dodge our immune systems.