Yes. When they compared their measurements against the measurements they gathered from the people they didn't measure, they took that bias into account.

:^P

Nobody would, except perhaps for those with inadequate Internet bandwidth.

However, for a large number of movies you can't currently "access the data instantly online" (at least, not via Netflix). Netflix's primary focus should be on getting their streaming catalog to match their DVD catalog.

Have you ever tried to reason with a 3-year old? There are times when the "Argument from Because I Said So" is literally the only option left. Finer points of logic are completely lost on a person with an undeveloped frontal lobe who is in the middle of a temper tantrum.

It's not the human *touch* that people crave in a complicated interaction with a system. It's human *versatility*.

Thus more personnel does no good, if those personnel are rigidly controlled, lack information to advise or authority to act. The fact that they're also expected to be jolly and upbeat as they follow their rigid and unyielding rules only turns the interaction with them into a travesty of a social interaction.

What would work better is a well-designed check-in system that handles routine situations nearly all the time, along with a few personnel who have the training and authority to solve any passenger problems that come up.

I'm pretty sure birth control exists.

Minimum wage has a plenty of historical proof behind it but that never makes any difference in our political debates. So why do we even bother with crap like this? If it creates jobs it'll be ignored; if it kills jobs it still will be ignored (and dismissed since it won't fit with history.)

Sure, you can raise the rate to higher levels eventually everything will go up in price as well with no net benefit; however, the world isn't that simple. Since the USA exports nothing and imports everything the impact won't be evenly spread as imports continue to be cheap and the 1 or 2 exports will rise in price (ignoring weapons export industry because that is special.) Local medium and small businesses will be at a disadvantage against larger business which can/do import easily --- but that isn't a whole lot different than today where most the big import friendly businesses have killed off smaller competition already.

As far as teen jobs paying enough to live on, those are no longer teen jobs--- there are simply not enough jobs to go around and that problem will continue due to outsourcing, automation, and "free trade." One can't try to maintain the past because that situation no longer exists today. Also don't forget, inflation is no longer reported (because it is got too high) so almost everybody is NOT getting enough of a raise to compensate for the inflation losses. I've never had a pay raise that even matched inflation; one has to switch jobs.

Right, but if your company comes up with an elegant solution that gets 10x better performance out of a given piece of hardware, and your competitors cannot (or do not) do the same, then you've got a cost advantage over your competitors and can use that to get customers to choose to buy your product rather than theirs.

That will always be true, no matter how fast and cheap the hardware gets. Either your customers will be able to do 10 times more work with your product, or (if there isn't 10 times more work to actually do), they can get the job done with 10 times less hardware (and thus 10 times less expense).

There is a whole world of software out there that runs in the background and doesn't require much (if any) UX. Think of the software that generates your credit card statement every month.

I can only go with the experience of my friends, who've gone both routes successfully.

It's true that traditional publishers expect mid-list authors to shoulder most of the promotion efforts these days. I never said they didn't. Fiction authors are now expected to maintain a platform, which used to be a non-fiction thing. Certainly traditional publishers have become more predatory and less supportive than they were twenty years ago. I don't have an inside track on why that is, but I suspect there are several causes. One is that POD allows publishers to make an reliable though modest profit from their mid-list authors, which ironically makes them more risk averse. But publishers still provide production and editing services on a MS that'd cost you maybe ten thousand dollars if you were contracting those services out. They also get your book in bricks-and-mortar bookstores, which is a bridge too far for most indy authors, even the successful ones.

A lot of the bad feeling that publishers get from indy authors comes from two sources. First, a long history with rejection. Second the lack of respect indy authors get relative to traditionally published authors. We can see it in this discussion elsewhere, where one poster puts "authors" in quotes when referring to indy authors. And it's easy to see why because most indy authors just aren't good enough to get traditionally published. *Some* indy authors put out a product that's every bit as good as the mid-list authors from the big publishing houses, but most just dump their terrible manuscripts on Amazon with a clip-art cover and no copy editing, much less developmental editing.

The statistic that most indy authors make their investment back plus 40% didn't impress me, because (a) that counts the author's labor as free and (b) most indy authors don't invest much cash in their projects. The percentage of indy authors that clear, say, five thousand dollars in profit are very small.

It's not that indy publishing doesn't have its points, and my traditionally published friends are certainly thinking about dipping their toe in the water. But it's not as cheap as it looks if you want a comparable product, and you give up certain things. I was in Manhattan recently and went to the 5th Avenue branch of the NYPL. My traditionally published friends' books were either on the shelves our out circulating. The NYPL had *none* of my indy author friends' books, even though at least one of them has made the New York Times best seller list.

I don't think it's as simple as Amazon is good or Amazon is evil. Amazon is powerful, and that needs watching.

Now I have a number writer friends, one of whom is published both with traditional imprints like TOR and with Amazon's new in-house publishing imprints. She has good things to say about Amazon's imprints, but one thing you have to take into account is that nobody will stock your book *but* Amazon if you publish with them. That's giving up a lot, so they treat authors reasonably well. But that doesn't mean the corporation actually cares about authors. Amazon needs reliable mid-list authors to make their publishing ventures a success, and by cutting out the middleman can afford generous royalties. But if Amazon succeeds in putting a stake in the heart of traditional publishing, I wouldn't care to speculate on what will happen to authors.

Nor should what traditional publishers do for authors be underestimated. I have friends who are successful indy writers, but it's not like being a writer, it's more like running a small publishing house yourself. They hire story editors, copy editors and artists, and manage promotion and publicity. It's a lot of work; that plus actually writing pretty much precludes a day job. It's not for everyone.

It's a lot like being an engineer. Engineers are smart people who usually have a lot of insight into the companies they work for, but that doesn't mean that most engineers want to run businesses. Some do, but most would rather have other people take care of that stuff so they can concentrate on what they feel they're best at.

Many writers choose the indy market because it's the only way they'll ever get published. They just dump their manuscript on the market without editing, design or promotion and hope for the best. They rarely succeed. Others choose the indy route because they thrive on running and controlling their own small business, the way some engineers step naturally into the role of entrepreneur. They're well positioned for the future. But most writers need support to reach their full potential.

That suggests a possible YouTube advertising model -- you start the video and a 30-second ad pops up, along with a "click here to pay 10 cents to make this ad go away right now" button.

I wonder how many people would click the button?

I think the government has a legitimate national security interest in developing a transportation system that does not completely grind to a halt the day someone sets off a few nukes in the major oil-producing areas of the world.

Hybrid and electric technology is what could make the difference between an event like that being a serious problem and it being a complete disaster.

There's also the small issue of global warming; I think the government also has a legitimate interest in keeping Miami above water and crops growing in California.

Except math is almost never actually done that way in practice. Euclid was wonderful, but almost all modern math does not work that strictly (and Euclid really should have been more careful with the parallel postulate -- there's "more than one thing at a time" involved there). Yes, proofs are careful and detailed, but so is, say, technical writing in English. Except for a few cases (check out metamath.org, or Homotopy Type Theory) almost no-one actually pedantically lays out all the formal steps introducing "only one concept at a time".

I don't think you need math even to be a great programmer. I do think a lot of great programmers are people who think in mathematical terms and thus benefit from mathematics. But I also believe you can be a great programmer and not be the sort of person who thinks in those terms. I expect the latter is harder, but then I'm a mathematician so I'm more than read to accept that I have some bias in this topic.

Math is a language. Just because you can frame things in that language doesn't mean that that language is necessary. Recipes are often in English. English is sequencing (words are a serial stream after all). That doesn't mean English is necessary for programming (there seem to many competent non-english speaking programmers as far as I can tell).

Disclaimer: I am a professional research mathematician; I do understand math just fine.