The far left of the (traditional) political spectrum is communism. not socialism. It's easy to be confused since in the US media, 'socialist' (like terrorist) is a catch-all phrase that has been used to explain the evils of regimes as diverse as Nazi Germany and Red China. Both communism and fascism are a total(itarian) merge of state, religion, business, and the press into one entity - the (absolutely) powerful and corrupted state. Every other system has some degree of independence between those conflicting power centers, ie: the corruption is still there, but at least it's not absolute.

Four legs good, two legs bad.

Certainly. But what you DON'T do is look at the extreme, pick a single attribute, and extrapolate to the rest of the population. You also don't look at a single outlier and do more than say, "hm, that's interesting, I wonder if" and then validate in a bigger group.

Yes, that's what they said.

However another explanation of the data is that many products fail early, and thus many of the people who buy products early in the release cycle ("early adopters") will buy many products that will fail. Is the set of "early adopters who adopted products that then failed in the market place" a set that can predict future failure in the marketplace? Well, they didn't show that.

It's easy to predict the past.

# of flops chosen (position in set)

Those particular numbers (one in four, two in four, two in three, >2/3) are indicative: the study set consists of people who made only three or four choices. (If it were larger numbers, the cut points wouldn't be such even numbers)

This is not significant.

And, more significantly, that's way too few to tell if membership in a set is predictive.

Certainly some early adopters pick products that don't take off, and mathematically some of these will have done it multiple times.
But the article claims that some people are actually predictors-- that their product choices have predictive value for product failure.
Is this actually true? It's easy to select out a set of people who have bought failed products, and then cull out of that set the ones who have not also sometimes bought successful products. But is this group statistically able to make future predictions?
I'm doubtful. Clearly, the way to not select products that don't grab a market niche... is to not be an early adopter. Lots of products fail; if you're an early adoptor, you're likely to be adopting failed products. If you instead wait to see where a product is going before buying-- you never buy products that fail a month after launch.
FWIW, the original article is here:
http://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/pa...

Increasing numbers of places - sports stadia, school plays and the like - ban video recording of the action. Sometimes the excuse is "don't you dare think of the children". Other times the more honest line is "we are filming it ourselves and you can buy the video for $ XXX." But in either case, finding a video of the event on YouTube is likely to result in a phone call to the land sharks.

That would explain why after the election it'll be governed by Kirchner's allies.

Soon you'll be crying out for a VR game allowing you to interact with a hoard of idiotic noobs. I know of IT departments that are already looking to outsource their hell desks to you, AND charge you for the pleasure.

Next season the "History Channel" will be running shows discussing possible extraterrestrial influences on Herbert's writings. :-)

If they're showing it next year, then it has been in production for about 6 months already, and they've probably finished main filming already. I wonder if they had the gonads to film at Armageddon (modern Meggido). Or more likely an important question - whether they had the budget for it.

No it's not, it's Japan.

After 21 days on the job (24x7 cover, typically 20 hour working day) I had to identify one saple of dark grey claystone from one of two possible other types of dark grey claystone. I decided one way, then went to pack my bags to crew-change with my relief.

The implications of deciding one way not the other were a million dollars worth of ironmongery (9.925in OD liner pipe) being run and cemented into the hole. That operation occupied a rig crew of 90-odd people for 8 days while I was on leave. When we drilled ahead, it became clear that I had been wrong. Total unnecessary cost was about 2 million dollars.

These days, I don't lose sleep for less than ten million. The fact that I still do work for the client suggests that they figure it's better to have me around than not.

A couple of years ago I got some grief for pointing out a problem on day 10 of a job, which people upstairs from me decided wasn't likely to be a problem. So they shelved the problem, told me in writing to shut up, and continued with the well. 3 months of work later, we'd made a beautifully-tuned geo-steered well ... and had to wait on weather for a major storm. And when we came back on location, the problem I'd been making a fuss about had come back to haunt us and forty million dollars worth of ironmongery and effort was junk. Several embarrassed faces upstairs, but all my fellow contractors knew who had said "We need to deal with this problem, now." when we were five million into the project. Who needs advertising?

Slovenia was not the center of a province called "Rome" for hundreds of years. Northern Mexico was not part of a province called "America" for hundreds of years. The appropriate analogy would be if the US later collapsed, and the southewestern border states were overrun by Mexicans (and then later other peoples), and then much later said people insisted on being called Americans, even though they had interbred with their conquerors.

Note that the people in Greek Macedonia are no more "direct descendants" of the ancient Macedonians than the people of modern Macedonia. Probably less, due to the huge refugee influx that was settled there.

As described here:

Due to the fragmentary attestation of this language or dialect, various interpretations are possible.[8] Suggested phylogenetic classifications of Macedonian include:[9]

An Indo-European language that is a close cousin to Greek and also related to Thracian and Phrygian languages, suggested by A. Meillet (1913) and I. I. Russu (1938),[10] or part of a Sprachbund encompassing Thracian, Illyrian and Greek (Kretschmer 1896, E. Schwyzer 1959).
An Illyrian dialect mixed with Greek, suggested by K. O. Müller (1825) and by G. Bonfante (1987).
A Greek dialect, part of the North-Western (Locrian, Aetolian, Phocidian, Epirote) variants of Doric Greek, suggested amongst others by N.G.L. Hammond (1989) Olivier Masson (1996), Michael Meier-Brügger (2003) and Johannes Engels (2010).[11][12][13][14]
A northern Greek dialect, related to Aeolic Greek and Thessalian, suggested among others by A.Fick (1874) and O.Hoffmann (1906).[11][15]
A Greek dialect with a non-Indo-European substratal influence, suggested by M. Sakellariou (1983).
A sibling language of Greek within Indo-European, Macedonian and Greek forming two subbranches of a Greco-Macedonian subgroup within Indo-European (sometimes called "Hellenic"),[8] suggested by Joseph (2001), Georgiev (1966),[16] Hamp & Adams (2013),[17]

There's no question that ancient Macedonian was related to Greek (most likely to a northern dialect such as Aetolian) - the question is how and to what degree vs. that of the Illyrians and Thracians. As mentioned, by the 3rd century BC it had become nearly fully absorbed, but not without first contributing words and grammar of its own. An example of the Greek view toward the Macedonians was that Macedonians were initially banned from competing in the Olympic Games (which was only for Greek Men); the first Macedonian to be allowed to compete was Alexander 1, who was made to first prove that he was of sufficient Greek ancestry (note: if that incident ever even happened - there's some suggestion that Alexander's competition in the Olympics may have been a later addition to try to prove their Greek credentials). But even if we take the story at face value, the fact that they demanded proof that he was sufficiently Greek (something not asked of any other competitors) should be a more than sufficient indicator of their views of Macedonians at the time.

someone want to tell me how launching from NZ, apart from political issues, is in any way advantageous over launching from the US?

If you're a non-US company (shockingly, there are such people!) then that may be a sufficient reason already. Before you even get into politics.

I see elsewhere that Rocket Labs have "recently become a US company, for VC reasons" (paraphrasing). Shrug. That'll make them harder to deal with for some customers. Say - an Indian telecomms company wanting to put up a series of satellites. Dealing with your (relatively near) neighbours instead of people on the other side of the world could be a very good start for a commodity like launch facilities, even if you're only using it as a bargaining chip to argue down the price with your in-country launch facilities.