"Performance" in that context is highly subjective. Apple stuff does what I want pretty much out of the box; Android phones don't. For some people, it will be the other way around. These days I have more money than time to dick around with devices, so I am willing to pay top euro for whatever device works best for me, even if it is overpriced (in terms of profit margin).

As a developer, I understand that the race to the bottom is even worse on the Play store, at least it was a while ago, perhaps the App Store has caught up by now.

The point of customer data, big or small, in the end appears to be to improve the ways companies can sell us crap (and doesn;t the whole world seem to revolve around that, sometimes?). Google does not sell the data to others directly because they can do so indirectly: they (claim to) provide advertisers on their network with a competitive edge by using customer data.

This may come as a shock to you, but most large companies have a big R&D division that follow the scientific method while rarely or never publishing their work. Intel knows a lot about making CPUs. Boeing knows a lot about making planes. Ford knows a lot about making cars. They're going to use that to make money, not to blab away the details to their competitors. Sure, Intel's processors are based on physics... but good look making a 14nm processor from their PR slides.

Under the right conditions snow will stick to the signs looking like these signs even though it's otherwise clear. It doesn't happen often, but when it does I think the self-driving car is pretty much screwed. Humans seem to get by on a combination of routine and heuristics.

That they need to eat 10,000 calories a day to sustain them doesn't mean they could eat 2000 kcal and net a -8000 loss. The most strenuous one day event I've done burns 5-6000 kcal, anything less than 3-4000 kcal in and you're likely to run into a proverbial brick wall. It's common to try overdoing it on exercise while cutting the intake and the result is a body with no power at all, that engine needs fuel to work and pure body fat won't do.

But over to the obese people, when I started out I could do maybe 350-400 kcal/hour and I'd probably not last the full hour. And the body feels like total shit afterwards, it's real easy to end up with excessive strain due to weight on muscles and joints that aren't used to it. It's almost like a U-curve, if you're fat and don't strain your body you're pretty comfy. If you're healthy and exercise you're comfy. But in the middle is a rather ugly place. So you come home, feel bloody miserable but hey you exercised and did good so you can give yourself a little bonus right? Turns out the kind of bonus you need on your high-sugar, high-fat diet pretty much negates any calorie benefit.

If you don't start with your intake you'll never get anywhere. Exercise is a nice accelerator, but it's really, really hard to counteract a +500 kcal intake with exercise. And that's not particularly much soda, snacks, sweets and junk food.

The thing is, you don't really need to all OCD on the calories, just get it ballpark right.

Veggies and fruit? Mostly <50 kcal/100g
Lean food? 100 kcal/100g.
Average food? 200 kcal/100g.
Fatty food? 300 kcal/100g
Sweets? 400 kcal/100g
Snacks? 500 kcal/100g

Oh and beer 200kcal/0.5L... partying is hard on your weight :/ particularly since it makes me hungry for late night supersized junk food too, which is as stupid as it gets. Volume is also a big thing, when I wanted to binge I could make myself 300 grams of pasta, add 400 grams of sausage and pour a glass of 500 ml sauce over it. That's a 3*350 (uncooked, ~100 cooked)+4*200+5*40 = 2000 kcal dish. I knew it was too much, but I guess I just didn't want to know how much. These days I make about 40% of that and it's still a slightly oversized dinner. So I'd say weighing it is the main thing, you can mostly ballpark how healthy it is.

Why do you think almost every sci-fi dystopia has robot guards/goons? Today being rich is a lot about being able to pay poorer people to work for you, tomorrow it's about being able to buy the robots instead. Sure there'll be jobs, routed around by global mega-corporations depending on where labor is the best value for money and most politically and socially stable but the rich will have to deal less and less with the riffraff. The few trusted people you need and the highly skilled workers to keep the automation society going will be well rewarded, keeping the middle class from joining the rest.

I'm not sure how worried I am about an AI, since it could also develop a conscience. I'm more worried about highly sophisticated tools that has no objections to their programming, no matter what you tell them to do. How many Nazis would it take to run a death camp using robots? How many agents do you need if you revive the DDR and feed it all the location, communication, money transfers, social media, facial recognition information and data mine it? All with an unwavering loyalty, massive control span, immense attention to detail and no conscious objectors.

If someone asked people as little as 30 years ago if we'd all be walking around with location tracking devices, nobody would believe you. But we do, because it's practical. I pay most my bills electronically and not in cash, because it's practical. Where and when I drive a toll road is recorded, there's no cash option either you have a chip or they just take your photo and send the bill, most find it practical. I'm guessing any self-driving car will constantly tell where it is so it can get updated road and traffic data, like what Tesla does only a lot less voluntary. Convenience is how privacy will die, why force surveillance down our throats when you can just sugarcoat it a little?

What I am saying is that I am not that impressed by countries who manage to generate near to all of their power needs from hydro, an energy source that has been economically competitive and easily adjusted to power demand for ages. The biggest impediment to building competitive hydro plants these days are environmental concerns

I'm more impressed by countries that generate a sizable amount of power from other renewables like solar and wind, like Denmark, Germany and Spain. Irregular overcapacity may be playing havoc with their wholesale electricity prices, while at the consumer level these sources are not yet competitive for consumers buying wind power or for grid operators buying surplus solar back at consumer rates... but even so they continue to research and improve.

I'm not saying we shouldn't do the R&D; on the contrary. And there's a business opportunity there as well; solar and wind are technologies that most countries can benefit from, unlike hydro.

I thought the US military uses "klicks" (which is a kilometer) rather than miles.

Nothing. And in the meantime, Russia flies unscheduled military missions along routes of their own choosing over Sweden, Germany and the Netherlands, in planes that may or may not be actually armed. They routinely pulled this crap during the cold war, and it has started up again. Putin knows we're not going to take potshots at his aircraft.

It's easy being green... if you have loads of opportunities to use hydro power. Hydro is the only large scale green power source we currently have that is a buffer as well as a generator, and will continue to run regardless of environmental conditions until the buffer runs dry. You can even top up the buffer if you have a surplus of wind or solar power, which is what Norway does I believe. But in densely populated and more or less completely flat countries like my own, we need to look at other green sources that require a great deal of investment and R&D before they can be used on a large scale. For our situation, the technology simply isn't there yet.

I suppose, a bit. But mostly because you need a lot of rainfall and a lot of height difference to make sense. Compared to wind or solar, there's a lot less room for expansion and to power the needs of the future. And putting small waterfalls in tubes is not very visually appealing either, here in Norway the ones we have left we mostly like to keep for tourism and preserving som of the natural environment. Sure you could put Niagara Falls in a dam, but it wouldn't be pretty.

Sorry, but I've met quite a few intellectually sound people who deal too much with evidence and proof and far too little with reality to be easily manipulated by anyone with a little street smarts as long as it happens to be an area they don't know much about. They simply don't use their EQ do consider questions like who is this guy? What is it that he wants? What's his goals here? Why would he tell me that? They read things too much like a scientific paper with objective informasjon, where a more street wise person realizes he's being hustled.

I think you're confusing cause and effect, people ask why you don't use Windows and the answer is because you want to use something other than Windows. Particularly when the person you're talking to doesn't feel the same things chafing, maybe even though it works for you it doesn't work for me and it's not just about "being different" but that we have different needs or priorities. Just like every graphics tool discussion usually ends up with why you don't use Photoshop. It's the way of things when one tool has ~90% market share.

The "average person" also used Internet Explorer when it had 95% market share and was really slow at seeking alternatives. Because IE6 worked because sites had to work in IE6, the mainstream only follows once a significant portion of early adopters have led the way. Not that Linux has too many trendsetters, we're "experts" but soccer moms don't take car advice from race car drivers. They want to know what works for a soccer mom.

Market share is a battle won one step at the time. Either you double 1% to 2% and get a few more to care or you halve to 0.5% and a few less care. That the 90%+ didn't care and still don't care is something that might change if you get the pebble rolling into a landslide, but if the pebble's stuck you're stuck. It's not about making Linux a killer gaming platform, it's about making gaming not be a Linux-killer. If that makes it viable for another 1%, you're making progress.

Still not much, I must admit I thought Linux would be different after playing with it for 15+ years. On the other hand, it hasn't faded away into obscurity. It does get significantly easier and better to use, but so does the competition. And times change, it almost had it once when we had wired desktops plugged in the wall. Then mobile came and sleep modes and power management matters. Wired went Wireless and Bluetooth and so on. And now recently touch is the new hype. I think when it's more like a car, where a car from ten years ago is very much the same that Linux will catch up. It's morphing too much.

A doctor can look at the medical records of anyone for the purpose of providing medical treatment, it doesn't mean he can snoop on the records of husbands/wives/exes/your daughter/celebrities/etc. so I don't see how military intelligence is different in that respect. A lot of people technically have access to acquire privileged information, it doesn't mean they can snoop on whoever they like or do whatever they want with it. You could have picked many good arguments against this, that was not one of them.