Government thrives on mediocrity.

As far as costs of doing business goes, $1250 is a god damn bargain.

Really wish people would stop whining about $100 development certificate. It's a negligible cost in the face of the actual App development cost.

Whatever you're selling, it's way too expensive if you can throw $1250 out the window as the "cost of doing business" as some freelancer developing an "app" that is supposed to run on some fiddly little device. The entire Apple ecosystem is way overpriced, from their consumer products to their stock, as well as all the little "apps" that run on those things. My pocketbook is staying firmly closed when it comes to anything Apple.

Maybe I'm old-fashioned, but I get my work done on a real PC on my desktop, and when I have to talk to someone on the phone, I use a land-line, because cell phone reception is insufferably poor, spotty, and unreliable out here in the boondocks. A cell phone is great to carry when I'm out and about town in case of emergency, but as a rule I buy the cheapest piece-of-junk cell phone I possibly can, and I interact with the thing as little as possible. I resent the idea that I'm supposed to waste so much of my time to fiddle with some little pocket device encumbered with a thousand patents to text and email people who don't have the time to communicate in real life---and I'd have to "jailbreak" the thing if I ever wanted to interact with it on my own terms anyway.

You need to look at the big picture of what you're developing apps for. Someday people will realize and learn to work with the inherent limitations of interfacing with a little piece-of-junk device that fits in your pocket, and then maybe it won't be so bad, but until then, please spare me the hype and all the stupid cutesy little "apps."

All kinds of math- and physics-related crackpottery are posted to arXiv on a regular basis. It's too labor-intensive for mathematicians to pore through all the math on every paper that's posted. First, a few mathematicians by chance will skim through it to see if it's even worth considering, and if it looks like some half-way serious mathematical thought went into it, it'll get a closer look, and when somebody with some reputation can't find any obvious flaws, it'll start to get some peer review, if it gets that far.

Sorry, I don't grok math at that level, and without any indication of peer review, I'm skeptical that the author of the paper does either. Not news.

'We are effectively forcing local community psychiatrists to use the only tool at their disposal, which is psychotropic medications.'

That's the problem right there.

When all you've got is a hammer, everything starts to look like a nail. And there's way too much money being made with this particular hammer for shrinks, in their "right mind" of self-interest and ultimately greed, to refrain from using it. I think it's altogether too common for shrinks to have material conflicts of interest due to unseemly financial ties with the collusive and highly profitable industry of Big Pharma.

I also want to remark that it's unfortunate that legitimate opposition to the excesses and corruption of the psychiatric industry appears to have been co-opted by the Church of Scientology, whose real intent appears to be to collude in allowing such corruption to continue unrestrained behind the scenes while they make an outward show of railing against it in public.

I don't gamble. A COD from my bank right now will yield 1.05% on a 36 month note.

You're gambling that puny 1.05% that you won't need your money before 36 months are up. According to the BLS as of August the CPI-U is up +1.7% from a year ago. Of course half the battle of saving is is simply the self-discipline not to spend it, but you're proposing to tie up your money for three years at an almost certain loss.

If you find Google Earth useful, thank In-Q-Tel.

I still can't get over the feeling that public money was spent for private gain, and it just isn't right in my book. If the government's intent had anything to do with getting a monetary return on investment, it would liquidate that fund, use the proceeds to pay down the debt, and let us the people decide how to invest our own money. If, on the other hand, the government's intent is to stimulate certain research, there needs to be a more ethical way to do it than giving away intellectual property monopolies to private parties for research done on the public dime.

The public is taking a lot of risk in these partnerships, and the big gains are staying in private pockets. It smells like baksheesh, and I just don't like it.

Made this HUGE mistake myself. As a geek, I got too involved in messing around and setting up the systems instead of focusing on the business. Things like sales and marketing are what bring in greenbacks, not my choice of which brand of UPS I buy for my local server.

Granted, sales and marketing are good and necessary for bringing in the greenbacks, but you need to come through with what you sold to your customers for their hard-earned cash. If your customers feel that they aren't getting their money's worth, and/or better/cheaper alternatives are available, you won't be in business for long.

A UPS is not a good choice of example for your case. You don't need a UPS unless it's mission critical, and if it's mission critical, "grab the first one you see off the shelf" is not exactly the right attitude for procuring one. Cheap consumer-grade UPSs fail more often than your power will tend to go out anyway, and when they go into a failure mode, those sealed battery units tend to evolve a lot of rather flammable hydrogen gas under pressure, and meanwhile a lot of little parts are getting much hotter than they are supposed to in normal operation. Not a good thing, because all those greenbacks you raked in just went up in smoke and flames.

You don't need to fiddle and mess around endlessly, but you still need to do the research, make a sound decision given the circumstances and your knowledge, and follow through on it for what it's worth. No shortcuts here. It's hard work.

The CIA's investment fund, In-Q-Tel,

You know, the government has absolutely no business running an investment fund, especially a "secret" one where it looks like there's no meaningful oversight. This is we the people's money, and we the people have no interest in being the angel to some sleazy fly-by-night foreign start-up who just wants to suck at Uncle Sam's ever-so-generous teat.

if you're starting a business, just about the last thing you should be doing is worrying about is being sysadmin for your phone system - let alone doing so according to the "right" political principles and hoping you can get it to work together. Call your local phone company, get setup with them or some other turnkey provider and turn your attention towards your business.

Now that's a kneejerk response if I ever saw one.

The "right" political principles have absolutely nothing to do with a business case for an open-source phone system. Your phone system is probably business-critical, and some "turnkey" providers are not only ridiculously expensive, but truly awful as well. And sooner or later you'll find out it lacks some important feature, which either requires some super-expensive add-on module to implement, or is simply unavailable from that vendor. By that time you are good and well locked in because you've already invested so much time, money, and effort in that vendor's "turnkey" system.

No, open source doesn't always make sense for any particular business need, but the "nobody ever got fired for buying IBM" approach isn't always appropriate for a small business which out of necessity has to take care of its own $#!& and take out its own trash in order to stay ahead of the competition.

...all I can say is sell your HP stock! They're doomed.

... for what it's worth anymore. I paid $29.59 a share and today it closed at $14.91 :-(

They were once a company I admired for their quality printers and calculators, but ever since that ill-fated acquisition of Compaq, it's just been downhill. What a misdirected, aimless company. Make something half-way decent and reliable like you used to, not 2100 different models of laser printers, and all those crappy laptops and desktop computers that never were your core competency to begin with.

Not going to turn the company around until 2016! Ha, ha, ha! That's several more CEOs into the future, if the company lasts that long.

You have to be very careful here.

Yes you do.

In serious studies, you don't get to choose your null hypothesis or how you're going to analyse the data after collecting it. That's a textbook example of introducing confirmation bias.

There is also the danger of making an unjustified assumption of objectivity. In preliminary studies, scientists will have gathered data, analyzed it, looked for patterns, and tried to come up with all kinds of hypotheses that could be tested. Even the most final, definitively objective experiment is not designed in a cleanroom with complete objective naivete, and often enough the scientist will have a pretty good idea of the expected nature of the data to be collected. So how significant is a failure to reject a null hypothesis? We cannot say without a full application of Bayes' theorem to interchange the roles of statistical power and degree of confidence.

A positive result is the rejection of a null hypothesis. In the frequentist statistical paradigm, a failure to reject the null hypothesis is simply not significant. Insignificant results are not usually considered worthy of publication. "If your study comes out a way you didn't expect," then the way you expected your study to come out is a null hypothesis which can supposedly be rejected with some measurable degree of significance. This way you can explain the significance of what you learned from the "failure" of your experiment, and there is no reason you should not be able to publish it.

That's the statistical paradigm. Results just aren't significant unless you can state them in a positive way.

Can this ferment viili or filmj:olk?

... but this is just disgusting, and the same technology will be used (for marketing purposes) in stores and restaurants and all kinds of other public places. Thieves, stalkers, and predators as well as advertisers will gain access to this data. And pretty soon, you may as well have one of those ankle monitors on, because the police will inevitably want to know where you are and what you do at all times.

If you don't like the ads or the commercialism or anything else about Ubuntu, it's a rather minor change to go back to Debian, upon which Ubuntu was originally based. Otherwise, Shuttleworth et al. are free to do what they want, and if you don't like it, well, it's not like you don't have plenty of other choices. In the meantime, give the guy a little credit for massively popularizing and attempting to commercialize a GNU/Linux distro. Because in the long run, that's better for your other choices, too, and in this case, it's really more his own pocketbook than anything that gets hurt when he pisses off his customers. Or not, as the case may be.