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Comment Re:Wait a minute... (Score 4, Interesting) 162

Acetaminophen aka Tylenol can actually be quite harmful. The difference between the maximum safe dose, and the amount to cause liver problems (or failure) is quite a small margin. Combine that with the fact that they put it in other medications such as cold medications that people take along with regular acetaminophen, and you end up with a recipe for disaster. This American Life did an episode on it.

Comment Re:Samsung's slowing sales... (Score 1) 45

It's amazing how fast phones reached this level of performance. The iPhone was only released 7 years ago, and the first BlackBerry, which many would consider the one of the first smart phones, 15 years ago. In that short amount of time, we have gone from always wanting the newest thing, to models which are 2 years old being sufficiently fast enough, and people are starting to see little reason for upgrades. The PC market hit a similar point a few years back. And since then, you have 2 basic types of PC owners. Those who simply must have the newest stuff be it for games, work, status, or just because. This makes up a small percentage of users. And the rest of us, who will buy the cheapest PC.Laptop we can find (usually around $400), and use it until the hardware breaks. Cell phones are pretty much headed the same way. There is very little reason for people to continue to spend $700 on a phone every 12-24 months.

Comment Re:Misused? Murder is intrinsic in communism. (Score 1) 530

Rather or not specific jobs (or specific people who hold specific titles) are getting paid too much or too little is hardly part of the argument. Because communism says everybody should get an equal share regardless of the actual work they are accomplishing or the contributions they make to society. Paying everybody the exact same amount makes even less sense than paying a small percentage of the people too much.

Comment Re:more leisure time for humans! (Score 1) 530

What happens when all the jobs have been automated away except those that require real ingenuity? Self driving cars, robot factories, self checkout, automated fast food restaurants, the list goes on and on. Doing the same thing over and over again will not be an option. Eventually the only jobs left will be those that will having people actually have original thoughts. Based on my experience in the workplace and the world in general, there is a high percentage of people who are probably completely unable to do such a job. From the beginning of the industrial revolution until now, we've only seen the tip of the iceberg as far as automation goes. Using robots/machines to completely replace human workers will lead to a very high percentage of people out of work. Perhaps not in developed countries, but in developing countries. If the automation happens before they can develop infrastructure, and their entire economy is still built around manufacturing when to machines take over all the manufacturing, they will have very few job opportunities, and no infrastructure to get them to a position where they can do non-manufacturing jobs.

Comment Re:Misused? Murder is intrinsic in communism. (Score 1) 530

Presumably, they are producing something with 10x the value. I could sit at home all day making rainbow loom bracelets, and I'm still producing something, but what I'm producing is worth very little. The output of your work is only worth what people are willing to pay for it. Does an Engineer who designs a bridge which is depended on to transport hundreds of thousands (or millions) of people over its lifetime safely deserve the same amount of money as someone who's job it is to answer tech support calls, and who can't even solve your problems because they are just reading from a script and don't actually have any skills?

You could argue that being a CEO is easy, and it probably looks that way from the outside, but it's not something most people would do without proper compensation. You never really get any time off. Your every action is under public scrutiny. Lawyers also have a difficult job. If you're a defense attorney, making a mistake could mean an innocent person goes to jail.

Comment Re:Watches? (Score 2) 129

And of those who wear watches, 90% of them will probably be wearing them as jewelry. The time keeping functionality is secondary. Even among the younger people I know who wear them, it's mostly just a fashion accessory.

Comment Re:Expert System (Score 3, Insightful) 162

I don't even know if I'd classify something like this as "AI". It's just running an algorithm using lots of information and doing complex calculations. Way more complex than any person could do, but they are not the kind of actions I would generally consider "intelligent". Efficient allocation of resources works great for computers, because they aren't biased. They don't give their friends extra shifts or wait until later to call in a repair crew because the didn't like the attitude of the person who reported the problem.

Comment Re:Where's the cheap board with gigabit ethernet? (Score 2) 122

I don't think a faster Ethernet connector would help. Even on my 20 mbit connection, using bittorrent on the Pi causes crashes because the SD card can't keep up with the I/O load. Didn't crash when I used a USB drive, but the performance was still terrible. Downloads were much slower than on my computer.

Comment Re:Just think of what you can do with this! (Score 4, Informative) 122

You can actually run the RPi quite well on batteries. I was able to get 4 hours, 23 minutes running the Quake 3 demo loop. the battery life wasn't much better when sitting idle, about 5 and a half hours. I used a pair of 18650s in a USB charger/power supply. That's plenty of battery life for a toy robot.

Comment Re:What about range on this smaller car? (Score 5, Interesting) 247

Or you could rent a car for the few times year you need to travel more than 200 miles. Some people almost never travel that far. Some people go that far every weekend.

I've always wondered how big of a generator you would need to keep an electric car running continuously, and whether it would be feasible to just tow it behind you on a trailer. Maybe make those available to rent so that people can make long trips on their electric car. It would probably be cheaper to rent than an actual car, and the money you'd save from using an electric car for most of the year would easily offset the cost of renting the generator once in a while.

Comment Re:How is this different from sensory deprivation? (Score 1) 333

Maybe people are just overworked and don't want to waste time sitting around doing nothing. I know when I'm at home, I usually try to find something to do. Either housework, internet, reading a book, watching some TV. Sitting there idle, doing nothing isn't really all that great. I don't think I would resort to shocking myself for 6-15 minutes of boredom, but It's not really pleasant to sit and do nothing. It would be a different story if you were not at home. Think about waiting at the doctor's office. There's really not much to do, and not much you can do to speed up the wait, so it's not really a problem to just zone out and relax. There isn't that looming feeling that you could be spending your time better.

Comment Re:not the norm in other non-athletic competitions (Score 1) 221

That was in 1931. I think that things have changed in the last 83 years. It wasn't so long ago (1947) that Jackie Robinson became the first black MLB player. A good example is Manon Rheaume who actually got an NHL contract. Although she only played in 2 exhibition games, and she only played 1 period of her first game.

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