Follow Slashdot blog updates by subscribing to our blog RSS feed

 



Forgot your password?
typodupeerror
×

Comment Re:Personalized medicine... and nutrition (Score 1) 291

However, in most sciences we learn things that are good enough to use, and aren't overturned. We may not have the hang of gravity yet, but for everyday purposes it works just fine and we know what to do about it.

That's a particularly weak example, since for everyday purposes we knew how to deal with gravity long before we had any scientific understanding of it at all.

Right now, I'd expect people to make good nutritional suggestions that aren't under attack.

Turns out that biology is a little bit more complicated than we expected.

Comment I doubt your doubt (Score 3, Insightful) 222

Only an idiot holds back physical inventory when they can sell it easily.

Apple doesn't need more press or hype; it already has those. They simply sell as many units as they can make.

If your "theory" is correct, then why do shipping times gradually get longer as more orders are made? If your "theory" is correct, why would the 6Plus ship a week after the 6 even for the earliest adopters?

Whatever happened to the belief that the simplest answer is usually true...

Comment Apple servers were fine.. (Score 1) 222

The Apple Store app started working well before the website did, say 30 minutes after the supposed launch...

The early parts of selection worked fine, it was when you chose a carrier that things timed out.

Once the website came up (about two and a half hours late) it was pretty speedy.

So it was something around the carrier gateway that was the issue.

The interesting aspect of that, was that people had no issue ordering from carriers directly that supported it (Verizon and AT&T were the two I knew people ordered from shortly after midnight Pacific)

Comment Re:Why is this legal in the U.S.? (Score 1) 149

You can only lower taxes if you lower your spending. I have yet to see any government entity, Federal or State, do so.

Further, if you have read The Federalist Papers you will see both how naive Madison, Hamilton and Day were on the tax issue, as well as their ideas on taxes in general. They square, more or less, with how things are done in that those who make more should pay more not as a form of punishment but only because they can.

However, this should be taken in context as in their day the difference between the rich and everyone else was just as wide as it is today but it was somewhat easier for a person to move up the financial ladder than it is today for numerous reasons.

As to taxing the rich, see above. It's not a punishment, regardless of what some on the left will say, but only the fact that they can afford to pay more without that extra money affecting their lifestyles. Compare someone making $50K/year who has a 2% increase in their federal tax rate to someone making $250K/year. That 2% impacts them significantly more than the second person even though the amount is more in the latter case.

If we're going to lower taxes we need to make across the board cuts. There are no sacred cows. Reduce the Social Security programs, cut out military projects, stop most food and fuel subsidies, remove tax loopholes and tax benefits to a bare minimum (mortgage deduction, depreciation, etc), and so on.

At this point there is no other way to lower taxes other than cutting what we spend and having, in this case Nevada, spend over $1 billion of its taxpayers money does not help the matter. That lost money has to come from somewhere and it will not be made up by those employed at the plant, those who build the extra road and development, the ones who feed these people and everything else. It won't happen. A large portion of that money will never be recovered in any form.

So the argument becomes, if we want to lower taxes we have to cut our spending or if not, the tax code needs to be rejiggered so more money can be found to keep paying for all the subsidies and the like we keep spending money on.

Comment Re:Why is this legal in the U.S.? (Score 4, Insightful) 149

At least the tax breaks for Tesla make more sense than the ones for the film industry. States continuously try to attract film and television through massive incentive programs, but they only work if the state has one of the best packages at the time of filming a particular film or season.

Texas had a good package for a while, and things were filmed here. Other states got better, and shooting moved to places like Louisiana. Right now Georgia has a great package and things like The Walking Dead and Archer are shot there, but don't for a moment think The Walking Dead wouldn't move to Louisiana or Arkansas or northern California if the incentives changed.

It's much more difficult for Tesla to move their factory, since they'll have extensive immovable infrastructure costs. The film industry is used to packing up every 6-26 weeks as films or seasons end.

Comment Re:So what? (Score 3, Insightful) 110

endemic corruption and all that it enables (e.g. drug-related violence, election fraud and inefficient business and government) make it impossible for the nation to realize its full potential.

Yes, the influence of the corruption in Norteamericano politics really has boned Mexico. Wait, is that not what you meant?

The influence of Norteamericano (a misnomer, since México is also part of Norteamérica) politics has boned México, but not so much because of our political corruption but because of our failed drug policy. The really horrible drug violence problems they're facing now are a result of caving to US pressure to try to stop the flow of drugs through Mexico. The attempt failed utterly, as anyone with a brain knew it was going to, and it turned the Mexican drug traffickers into ultra-violent thugs. The relatively peaceful traffickers from 20 years ago were imprisoned or killed, and the guys who replace them are seriously nasty.

Comment Re:Why is this legal in the U.S.? (Score 5, Insightful) 149

It happens regularly in this country. The taxpayers get the shaft so private industry doesn't have spend their money. Our football teams (U.S. football, not your football), when they need a new stadium, threaten to take their team to another city unless the taxpayers cough up their money to build the new stadium and related matters, while the team continues to charge exorbitant prices.

This country wastes hundreds of billions of dollars each year by making sure private industry doesn't have to suffer the pangs of going out and getting financing for its projects like the rest of us do when we want to buy a home or do major repairs.

Don't forget we used several trillion dollars to prop up our banks and financial firms when, through their own incompetence, our financial system went into meltdown. These folks then used the taxpayer money to give themselves bonuses for the great job they did AND have told us taxpayers to go pound sand any time it is mentioned they should thank us for protecting them.

For all our talk about free markets and capitalism, we are incrementally closer to fascism than we are to a representative democracy. Industry, as a whole, gets what it wants, even if it means the taxpayers have to bend over and take it.

Comment Re:Personalized medicine... and nutrition (Score 1) 291

Yeah, much of what we know is being overturned.

Keep in mind that your statement has been true since the dawn of the age if scientific reasoning -- basically, the enlightenment -- and will be true forever. The only way that it will ever end is if we stop learning and just stick with believing in the erroneous beliefs we currently hold. Because our current knowledge will always contain a lot of errors.

Obviously, I'm speaking more broadly than just medicine and nutrition. The subjects about which we're rapidly overturning much of what we know drift around, but any scientific society will always be in the process of overthrowing old ideas as accumulating evidence and improving conjectures generate new knowledge.

Comment Of course they don't need the full spectrum (Score -1, Troll) 80

digital TV broadcasts don't need the full 6MHz of broadcast spectrum that was used for analog TV.

Which is why the signal is worse than analog. Clipping, blocky shadows, dropped signals.

The only time digital has been better was the move to DVD from VHS/Beta and CDs from tape. 78s and 45s are still better than digital.

Comment Re:They ran with a hypothesis (Score 1) 291

But a good theory isn't a necessarily fact and it sounds like a lot of medical effort went into controlling sodium before anyone actually could test to see if it really mattered.

This is often a problem with scientific progress. A hypothesis that seems reasonable and has some experimental support arises, but it takes years and a lot of work and money to test the implications of the hypothesis. And even when that is done, future research can still find that there were subtleties that, when understood, dramatically change the conclusion.

In the mean time, people have to live and have to make decisions. Science provides the best guide we have for doing that even though it's nearly always flawed in unknown ways. So, what do we do? Refuse to act until we've found all the answers? Obviously not. Instead, we have to act on the best knowledge we have at the time -- though applying a little bit of conservatism if the change predicted by that best knowledge is too radical -- and expect that we'll have to change our approach in the future when more knowledge is available.

If what you want is final, unequivocal and never-changing answers, don't look to science. Science asymptotically approaches correctness. However, no other decisionmaking method we have guarantees even eventual correctness on any time scale.

Slashdot Top Deals

The next person to mention spaghetti stacks to me is going to have his head knocked off. -- Bill Conrad

Working...