Most of america is also car-illiterate, financially-illiterate, woodworking-illiterate, sewing-illiterate, hunting-illiterate, gardening-illiterate and cooking-illiterate.

I don't think we should ever celebrate ignorance, but there is a big difference between this and acknowledging that people only have so much time/energy/capacity to learn about how the world works and would rather spend their time living their lives.

Basic gardening is also super-easy and is beneficial both financially and health-wise, but most people don't bother with it, the same way most people don't bother spending time understanding their computer.

As we look at how to improve our society, I think concerns about cooking/food-illiteracy and financial-illiteracy are far more pressing than bemoaning that people don't bother to learn how to navigate a directory structure. It is better to discuss making "open" computing simple, easy and relevant rather than berating people for wanting to get on with their lives.

Speculative: They *only* released it because they had to.
Fact: They had to release it.

Fact: Apple has benefited greatly by the proliferation of WebKit. No longer is the Mac a second-class citizen of the internet due to not having IE6.

Speculation: I don't think it is unreasonable to believe that they chose to start with an open-source project partly because it saved development time and also partly because using a widely-adopted engine as a basis for the browser is good for Mac users, which is a goal furthered by releasing the engine as open-source. I think if Konqueror didn't exist, or wasn't used as the basis of the project, Apple may have (I'd say 50/50 chance) still released WebKit as open-source. (It is also quite reasonable to argue they didn't care about the open-source part and just wanted to ship quickly - unless the people who made those decisions state them publicly, it is all speculation).

In most industries the profit margins are pretty similar across businesses that market to the same niche. This is because of competition - if you price your product at a 60% markup and somebody else is happy to sell a similar product for a 30% markup, you aren't going to do well for very long.

So while you are technically correct, usually a company's profit margin stays fixed while prices and costs of doing business fluctuate. Businesses do sometimes bite the bullet during temporary spikes in costs, but the costs of doing business can only increase so much before a price increase is necessary for doing business.

They could have developed their own engine instead. You are working hard to split hairs, and basing it entirely on speculation.

Dude, all federal agencies are run by the President (aka, Executive Branch) as it is that branch's job to execute (carry out) the laws that Congress passes. Federal agencies can make rules only because congress allows them to for the sake of expediency. Congress can always override rules a federal agency comes up with.

Why should the taxpayer pay? Because taxpayers benefit - a hurricane that destroys an unprepared business in Florida is one that reduces orders from its supplier in Georgia and increases unemployment, reducing demand for goods and services from the rest of the country.

Why do we let tiny Caribbean countries use data we are already collecting for ourselves? Because we are far richer than they are and it would be cruel to not share it with them just because they are poor. (The discussion would be different if this were something that say, Canada or Europe would benefit from, that can full well afford to split costs or do it themselves.)

We can afford the weather service as it takes up less than a fraction of a percent of our total budget. Knowing when hurricanes are coming saves thousands of lives a year (which is financially worth doing even without looking at the moral/ethical side of things.)

I agree, it is much too soon to be drawing conclusions. I hadn't thought much about the slow-replacement scenario as an alternative, but that also seems very plausible. Is the key difference if somebody has a PC or not, or is it which they use more? If somebody keeps their old PC around for a few years after they stop using it day-to-day in preference for a tablet, are they slow-replacers until they sell the old PC? Or do they become post-pc once they start using the tablet more often than the PC?

Both scenarios will likely happen, but which becomes more common (if either does) is very much in the air, and will be for the next few years.

Looking at how the "post-floppy disk" era played out, Steve Jobs killed floppy disks in iMacs in 1999, but it wasn't really until a few years later that floppies really started to fall out of favor and iirc, Dell was shipping floppy drives in desktops well into the late 00's. I wouldn't expect a Post-PC shift to take place any faster than that.

Post-PC doesn't mean there will be no more PC's, it just means that consumers are going to shift their primary usage to devices like tablets & smartphones, and many won't bother to even own a PC. It does not mean that PC's will go away nor does it mean that smartphones will become the dominant development stack.

The overall PC market in 2011 has been shrinking, while tablet and smartphone sales are growing rapidly. This trend will have to last longer than a year to be strong evidence of anything, but it does hint that the Post-PC notion might not just be "marketing hype".

For people who do not understand their PCs (most consumers), the simplicity of a tablet is very attractive. After all, functionality that you are afraid to use or avoid because it is too complicated might as well not exist. (And no, all of these people who haven't figured out a PC in the last 20 years are not going to en-masse decide figure it all out.) Anyone who has built their own PC, uses 2+ monitors, professionally requires lots of computing power or is a gamer is not going to give up their PC in a Post-PC world. (So NewEgg will be just fine, as these are their primary customers)

Nobody is arguing that professionals will give up their workstations, or even that that would make any sense. You need a PC to write iOS applications, and I would be very surprised if that changed anytime soon.

I don't understand why some people have such an issue with this. Your legal name should be in sync with the name you want to use. Period.

If you do legally change your name to be the one you want, then faceless, unthinking bureaucracies will have to use it.

But if you insist on using a name that is not your legal name, then faceless, unthinking bureaucracies will give you a hard time and make you use a name you don't like. (Or in Google's case, ban you from using any Google product or service)

Just because you think religion is crazy, doesn't mean it makes sense to eliminate all religious exceptions. Often the rules with religious exceptions are overly-strict in the first place. (Why no headgear in passport photos? Why not allow any headgear that doesn't impinge on facial recognition? Because it is easier to write a simple rule and add a loophole than to create a clearly written rule that allows for some headgear but not others.).

Religion doesn't need a free pass on everything no matter what, but most of the time accommodations requested are minor. Even if you didn't make any religious exemptions to rules, many Atheists also have sincerely-held beliefs that are different than those of other Atheists, so accommodations would still need to be made. (And if you think no exceptions to any rules should ever be made for any reason, then your love of bureaucracy and/or totalitarianism is truly terrifying)

(For the record, people who want to teach creation in school are whackos who don't understand science and/or the separation of church and state. )

First of all, thank you for taking the time to explain your position.

What does it mean to "make markets"? Stock markets have been around for a hundred years without high frequency trading, and they worked just fine.

Why do we need middlemen to quickly buy and sell stocks? They only are willing to do so if they can make money. So if I put out a sell order and want to sell my stocks for at least $5, and there is a HFT firm in the market that buys my stock for $5 one hundredth of a second later, then a few seconds later my stock is sold to Bob for $5.02, then I am loosing out on 2 cents. To me, this has *negative* value. I would like to know that, barring any significant news of the company, a few hours (or even days) wouldn't really change how much my stocks sell for. With HFT, the microsecond my stock sells matters, and this is very bad for long term investors.

(If a middleman were the only person willing to buy my stock at $5, hold on to it for a two weeks while waiting for the company's earnings report to come out, and then sell it after that report to Bob for $5.50, then I think there is value in that, because otherwise I may not have been able to sell my stock at all, making it worthless, or had to sell for much lower than the market price, making the market price worthless. But I would consider this person to be a short term investor rather than a useless middleman.

There are plenty of ways to implement the bid matching part of a gated system to eliminate the effect of bid-submission order or order size. For example, a Uniform Price Auction could be used, where everybody submits sealed bids and all of the traders willing to pay the competitive market clearing price for the round get to trade. (See wikipedia for details).

The goals of the stock market should be to efficiently and accurately value companies and allow all sizes of investors to fairly participate. The needs of people participating in the market as a casino (those who aren't trading based on information about the underlying company but only on trying to beat the system) should be ignored.

What you seem to be critiquing them for is not covering the entire experimental possibility space but I think this is usually done over the course of multiple, focused experiments rather than in one super-large multi-year answer-all-possibilities experiment. (Think of it as the scientific version of doing Agile development - do many, focused experiments than one large one so that if there is a flaw in your methodology others will point it out early in the process).

I do think all of the specific questions you raise are excellent questions that certainly need to be experimentally tested. However, I think that they all can (and will) be answered in future experiments that build on the results of this one. Even if the result of these experiments show this paper is wrong, it still advances our collective understanding by showing evidence for an idea that can now be confirmed, refined or refuted by subsequent experimentation.

Right idea, wrong target.

There is one social network that is still holding on by its fingernails by focusing on music, which has always been a strength: MySpace.

I agree that for most people, 3 drinks a day is moderate.

I think most everyone would agree that getting drunk would constitute heavy drinking. Given that benchmark, I have known people for whom heavy drinking is 2 drinks, and others for whom it is 12. So to label any number of drinks as being light or heavy drinking for everybody is inherently arbitrary.