Google should just buy Sprint and T-Mobile, merge their networks to optimize their coverage footprints and backhaul and then sell this plan to anyone and any device.

The use of enhanced images, illustrations, artists' conceptions, and diagrams in science education cuts both ways.

Even when I was growing up (in the 1950s) my first impressions of astronomy were formed by illustrations of the solar system--shown from a point of view outside the system, with the orbits displayed as brightly colored, ellipses, and the planets on a scale a thousand times larger than the scale of the orbits.

Something like this helps the child understand what it is that astronomers discovered, and what the spatial relationships actually are. That's good. On the other hand, it leaves them completely unprepared to see Jupiter or Venus out in the backyard on a clear summer night.

And it leaves them unable to appreciate the discovery, the sheer intellectual achievement of someone like Kepler. He figured that out? He didn't have any picture of ellipses? Just from measurements of positions of bright little dots of light that look like they're pinholes in a dome a few hundred feet away? Doing three dimensional trig with nothing but pencil and paper?

My first impressions of Halley's Comet were highly magnified photographic time exposures made by big observatories. The tail, viewed with my eye on the printed page, was bright and probably subtended thirty degrees of visual arc.

I don't think there's any layperson in the world who hasn't been disappointed and upset by their first view of a real comet in the real sky. It should be a wonder, a miracle, a creepy sort of thing--your left brain knows it isn't really a portent, but your right brain is sure it is. Instead, it's like a Peggy Lee refrain: "Is that all there is to a comet?"

What a thrill it ought to be to recognize the Andromeda Nebula with the naked eye. But not if you were expecting a sort of Fourth of July fireworks Catherine wheel instead of a faint smudge.

Understanding the scientific results is worthwhile, but it is almost more important to understand the bedrock experiential reality, and the discovery process.

I know that Jupiter has moons because one night I saw four little stars all in a line right next to it, and next night I saw them again but they'd moved. There is something terribly important in the direct experience, the personal verification. Good buddies, Galileo and me. I've seen something in the sky that wasn't moving around the earth, and so I know Galileo was right.

Last year I finally got around to buying the right kind of telescope for what I wanted to do, a wide aperture low-power "richest field" telescope. With it, I've seen the Andromeda Nebula for myself better than I've ever seen it before.

Boom! No guessing, no squinting, no waiting for a perfectly dark night, THERE IT IS. I'll have to take someone's word for its being a spiral. But I've seen it, me, with my own eyeball. Big faint oval, small bright center. No time exposures, no false color, no computer processed CCD imagery.

It's there, it's really there, I've seen it with my own eyes, not in a planetarium, not in a book, and the light from that sucker had to leave two and a half million years ago to get here just for me to see it. Wow.

This sounds a lot like Gatekeeper on the Mac, which works really well. It allows the user several levels of trust - "trust store apps only", "trust store apps plus recognised developers" (certificate signed), "allow everything".

I have mine set to "store apps plus recognised developers" and ask for the rest. If I run something else, I can right click and select Open..., it asks me if I'm sure and I say yes. This is a five second operation which gives me control over my options, whilst preventing unknown apps from running without my knowledge and explicit say so. This Windows one sounds pretty much the same, with the addition of your classic enterprise lock down features - it it's a corporately-owned machine, then yes the corporate should get say over what's running on it.

Imagine the kind of download-happy, click-on-everything user that we've all seen around. They would download cunningly-disguised-malware.exe and try to run it, and the OS would simply prevent them. Now true if they had admin rights they could go into preferences, set to allow everything etc. but it's all more effort and a quick realisation that something's unusual here.

Nope, I regard this as a good move. It already exists in OS X and works well - putting a similar system into Windows seems like a good idea to me.

That was covered in a Black Mirror episode where you were punished for not watching advertisements.

Now you're just picking up any little thing to criticize because I called you out on the strawman argument you made. You aren't looking to have any sort of substantive discussion - that much is obvious - so good day to you.

Is it biology and psychopharmacology that are the limits on our drug development or is it some kind of bullshit puritanism that's opposed to success/wins/gains without the concomitant misery and suffering?

The drugs we have for feeling good, being productive, or increasing our sociability are just OK at best and kind of shitty at worst. The "productive" drugs (amphetamines, anti-narcoleptics, cocaine) tend to be somewhat-to-a-lot addictive and can produce psychosis and/or overdose death at the shitty end of the spectrum. The feel-good drugs (tranquilizers, barbiturates, opiates) also tend to be addictive, potentially deadly or induce depression. Sociability drugs are a mess, too -- alcohol, MDMA, cocaine all have serious drawbacks.

Of all the common drugs, only marijuana seems to escape most of the problems, although it has a habit-forming potential which will keep you stuck in mom's basement being a slug and watching Netflix or playing Xbox.

Why aren't we developing improved drugs that solve these problems -- reduce the risk of dependence, prevent overdose, basically provide as much of the desired effect with as little drawbacks as possible so that we don't have to have a ridiculous control regime, prisons, health problems, etc and people can take them as desired for their benefits without any significant downsides?

Provide a limited marginal utility of amount -- ie, the first N units provide most of the effect, taking more is just a waste because the effect tops out. I think Butalbital sort of does this by including low doses of naloxone, so that if its injected the naloxone inhibits the opioid effect. Couple this with a limited useful frequency -- the longer it has been since you last used the drug, the greater the effect, and the more often you take it decreases the effect.

Why aren't we creating better, safer drugs?

Crank? Crystal radio all the way!

Seriously though, my cheap MP3 player will run the FM radio for more than 24 hours off a fresh alkaline AA.

The other theory would be that they use FM radio to differentiate their higher model phones by disabling it in the lower end phones. Except that likely few actually care about an FM radio on their phone.

I'm too lazy to add anchor tags, but here are some references for you.

The UCDavis study is the best description of this -- when actually tested in scenarios designed to expose false positive results, that's EXACTLY what happened -- the dogs alerted in every place they shouldn't have and where the handler was given cues that the dogs would alert, the dogs were MORE likely to alert.

This is a huge problem with using dogs. It's not that dogs aren't good at sniff detection, its that dogs are so inclined to please their handlers that even when the handlers aren't purposefully lying they are still signaling their dogs that they should find something. So how do you separate out the dog actually sniffing out drugs versus the experienced profiling of the handler who expects their target to have drugs, gets a false alert from the dog and then discovers drugs from a hand search?

I don't think we CAN know if it was a legitimate signal from the dog or just the officer's experience that $Socialtype or $MinorityMember is very likely to have drugs.

It gets much, much worse if you take away the assumption that the cops/handler are 100% honest all the time. Do you really think that there isn't even some deliberate dishonesty with dogs? The worst outcome for the cops has been "well, the dog knows you had something in here but since I didn't find anything I'll let you go". The best outcome for the cops is that they get away with an illegal search that results in an arrest and conviction based on a dog's behavior that is beyond question, because, you know, dogs are so good at sniffing and its "a well established tool in our legal system and for good reason."

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/C...

http://www.ucdmc.ucdavis.edu/w...

http://www.cato.org/blog/cleve...

I would back date the origin to something closer to the late 19th century as urbanization and cities grew. You had increasing agricultural efficiency allowing more people to live away from the land and more and larger business organizations that required "white collar" jobs to manage the organization -- clerks, accountants, record-keepers, etc.

You might make an argument that could possibly stretch this kind of middle-class into the 18th century but the further back you go the fewer large business organizations you have requiring the kind of white collar employee base to make them run.

I'm kind of using the generic term of automation versus specific technologies that physically automate mechanical tasks, such as robots. The PC is the biggest automater -- I heard a fascinating podcast on the development of the spreadsheet application. They interviewed retired accountants describing the work involved in creating paper spreadsheets for very basic cost modeling, the kind of thing that would be a 1 hour throwaway task in Excel now. IIRC, they even interviewed an accountant who was an early PC spreadsheet adopter that managed to make huge money charging for the time to do it the old fashioned way when he was really doing it on a computer, billing a dozen hours of work for an hour of actual labor with a PC.

That was short lived, but a great example of how PCs in many ways decimated a field as a single accountant could now do the work of many. I think they said that long-term it didn't hurt that much because as the ease of which you could create sophisticated models in PC applications became understood, the same number of accountants were now doing vastly more complex accounting jobs.

Ironically, I think the increasing sophistication of business modeling has had a side effect of making businesses much more efficient and allowed them to cut costs, including a lot of jobs.

Good point. And then someone is going to say, "Well why don't we just change the laws that allow incumbants to redraw district lines to improve their reelection prospects?" It's the same catch-22 problem. The people who have the power to make it illegal are the same people redrawing the lines.

And note that this kind of thing isn't new. The Ancient Greeks complained about the same kinds of catch-22 problems regarding politics.

How would you suggest we create a government without the power to "meddle"? Or are you an anarchist?

But is the problem that we can't identify what's wrong, or is the problem that we're powerless to do anything about it?

My understanding is that you could find plenty of people with enough expertise to lay out exactly what the problem is, but the problem is essentially, "There are a bunch of legal loopholes that effectively make bribery legal, thereby handing control of our government over to those who can pay the most."

You might ask, "Well if we know what the problem is, we can fix it! Why not close the loopholes?" The fundamental problem there is that the people in position to close the loopholes are the ones receiving the bribes, and they want the bribes to keep coming. The only thing that could get them to change the law would be if their corporate overlords, i.e. those providing the bribes, bribed them to make it illegal. The problem with that is that the corporate overlords also want the bribes to remain legal, so that they can influence public officials.

Finally, you might say, "Well why not just vote those bribe-takers out of office?" The problem there is that the bribes are used to buy elections. Without that money, you can't run ads, you can't get on TV, and you can't even participate in the public debate.

It's just a catch-22 situation. The only solution would be for voters to somehow elect someone who they've never heard of, who basically can't campaign, and just hope that that new elected official is both honest and effective. And then that has to happen in a couple hundred other elections at roughly the same time.

Kitty!

But who's making money off those smartphone games at $1 a pop? All we hear about is how nobody makes money on them.

I've heard more than a few serious economists (ie, real academics who aren't mass-media brand names) sound kind of nervous about automation's role in shrinking the number of jobs. Few of them seem ready to entirely disown the notion that automating one set of tasks frees up labor for new economic expansions where the tasks can't be easily automated.

Where they seem to get nervous is over the fact that the jobs increasingly eliminated by automation are jobs that previously required a lot of education and were high wage, white collar jobs. And they're not being replaced by new jobs of the same type, they're being replaced by low-wage jobs that require hard to automate manual skills -- when they're being replaced at all.

The new high wage white collar jobs being produced often require the kind of extensive training and experience extremely difficult for mid-career professionals to obtain, which is compounded by the rate of jobs being automated.

I'm increasingly of the opinion that the notion of a broad middle class is a kind of historical accident caused by the confluence of growth in technology, wide and cheap resource availability and high labor demand. We may be nearing the end of the middle class as we've known it and mostly like it, and returning to a more historical pattern of broad poverty and narrow wealth.