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Comment Re:Most of us have some weakness (Score 1) 267

If you passed the standard screening test in school, you probably thought you were perfect in this regard. Actually, most of us have some weakness and there are tests for that. Try this one. It was rather tedious for me; one of the hardest perceptual tests I've taken. You need patience, so set aside some time. I got a TES (Total Error Score) of 12. YMMV because of monitor quality and other factors. The official version of this test uses actual physical tiles, and specifies what kind of lighting to use in the room.

Good news, everyone! The results of the color blindness test are in, and we also have a new policy regarding who is no longer allowed to change the tail lights on the ship...

Comment Re: Other explanations (Score 2) 72

I've found that MANY hotels (as of two years ago anyway) seem to only have a t-1 line (symmetrical 1.x mbps at 4am being my best speed tests).

Many hotels (or at least the company they pay to manage their network, like Windstream) have at least a slight sense of service management, and cap single hosts to about a T1 worth at any given time. These days a 1.44Mbit downstream would be crushed after 2 users tried to get on Youtube at the same time.

Comment Re: How much is due to Congestion (Score 2) 72

I've found this matches my experience flying too.

Southwest charges very little, and it's not even worth it. But us air charges 2-3x as much and is a decent value ($4/hour about on a cross country flight).

Its a joke on Southwest because they are busy piping DirecTV to all the passengers (as a paid advertisement for DirecTV service) so even if the backhaul isn't saturated, you will have to fight for bandwidth on the WLAN.

Comment Re:Panama Canal took 33 years, 4 countries (Score 2) 322

France, US, Columbia, and Panama. Jungle diseases of workers was a huge problem at beginning.

What they dug the panama canal with:
http://www.corbisimages.com/im...

Modern version:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/C...

See your mistake?

WTF? They dug the canal with rigs like this (posted in anther reply): https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...

And to be true, the current equivalent is this beast: http://ritchiespecs.com/specif...

A pretty stark comparison but the Panama canal was not dug (the bulk of it anyway) by hand.

Comment Re:Still a hurtle (Score 1) 41

The unspoken assumption behind your comment (and much else on the page) is that it's important for 'open source' to be accepted by big business.

Why?

Because some things (for this thesis let's say it's a crypto algorithm) work much better when they are visible to all parties, and those with a vested interest commit themselves via development time instead of cash. If you need a good crypto algorithm and you pay a closed source company for it, either you or the company you paid had better employ an army of mathematicians in order to validate that the process is secure, otherwise it could have (probably does have) a flaw just waiting to be exploited. Your investment, as a business, can only go so far. With an open source solution, everyone can see the algorithm and offer their input on its efficacy.

Open Source is the ultimate economy of scale in the information business (driving cost per unit down while selling/utilizing more) so every business with even a modest investment in software should care. There are plenty of ways to innovate in closed ways (at least, ways proprietary to your company) while taking advantage of open source technologies. The problem (to expand on the original summary) is that most uninformed decision makers jump to the conclusion that if the software was developed for nothing, it's worth nothing and furthermore that anything they do with it will be worth nothing because their innovations will somehow get gobbled up by the open source monster, too. For someone who doesn't really add anything (companies trying to get by in niches, strongarming markets, exploiting cronyism, etc) there is plenty to fear. Meanwhile Google, Apple, Facebook, IBM, Cisco, etc would casually disagree (and gladly sell you some open source software).

Comment Re:Where are the buggy whip dealers? (Score 1) 544

The old Henry Ford saying goes (not that he necessarily said it) "If I had asked people what they wanted, they would have said faster horses".

Of course faster horses weren't an option. And what were the early cars, other than bare-bones "horseless carriages"? It's not as if the Model-T was a Ferrari in an age of wagons.

Consumers almost always choose "cheaper" when the price is significant. Designing the cheapest possible car, within the confines of the engineering of the day, seems like an obvious choice, and basically what they did.

That's based on the premise that the model T was less expensive than a horse (even after a few years of TCO) yet, they weren't... Consumers could have kept using horses, but chose to switch to cars in huge numbers because of other advantages (they could do things like travel farther distances, ignore daily maintenance, etc) that were not really obvious at the time. Sure, it's easy to look back and say "of course the car was popular, its *the car*" but that was not a sure statement in 1908, otherwise Ford wouldn't have been the only one in the USA doing it so cheaply/successfully for the better part of 10 years.

Comment Re:Where are the buggy whip dealers? (Score 1) 544

What specifically do you think was the "wrong question" and what do you think would be a "right question"?

To be true the issue is that they were inadequately specific questions and of an inadequate variety for regression, on top of a heaping dose of selection bias. Since you didn't post the questions, only the answers, I will go ahead and Jeopardy! it... "What is your Age?", "what is your gender?", "do you prefer slide-keyboards or virtual keyboards?", "essay portion worth 2/3 of your final grade".

Then there's the premise in your comment that the survey was "seeking out respondents who had used both a phone with a slideout keyboard and a phone with a virtual keyboard" which tells me that your survey may very well have gone in front of 10,000 respondents and found the 49 that even knew what a slideout keyboard was, skipping past the 9,951 that had never used one and were quite happy with their virtual keyboards. This is a bit of selection bias which will skew your statistics to the point of worthlessness.

Comment Re:Where are the buggy whip dealers? (Score 1) 544

What I wrote was: "Obviously that's too small of a sample to be very precise about the percentage of users that prefer slide-out keyboards (apart from the fact that Mechanical Turk users are unrepresentative of the general population in several ways), but it does mean that the near-extinction of slideout-keyboard phones in retail stores is probably not in proportion to what people actually want."

i.e., it was just a quick and dirty survey to show that the proportion of people who want slideout keyboard phones is not zero, like the stores are pretending that it is.

Don't use Mechanical Turk as a crutch; it's not that far from representative, and nonrepresentative samples are often just as useful, thanks to regression. The real problem is that you asked all the wrong questions. I suggest, if you want to gain *any* sort of ground on your quest to shake up the cell phone industry from the ground up by revealing what you think customers really want, is to read the Freakonomics books, and follow that up with a (well thought out) question to the authors. This sort of thing (mostly the situation where you insist on one thing via all available observations, when the opposite is true) is right up their alley. If you still think you are sitting on some sort of secret, start your own handset company, and get rich off of all the customers that are apparently being ignored.

Comment Re:Where are the buggy whip dealers? (Score 2) 544

I thought sales would be huge because people like horses more than cars. Somebody please help!

The old Henry Ford saying goes (not that he necessarily said it) "If I had asked people what they wanted, they would have said faster horses". Point being, you never know what a consumer will do (even if you are that consumer) when presented with a new/different set of choices. Consumers are flocking away from physical keyboards when given the choice. Consumers overwhelmingly prefer thinner phones (since no matter how much more you charge, you can't get a slide out keyboard phone to be nearly as thin as one without) so when presented with the choice, they gladly give up the keyboard (if they ever wanted it) for a thinner phone.

Comment Come on (Score 1) 544

Jesus this submission is so sad. Bennett, you overlooked the #1 rule of consumers... FIRST IMPRESSION IS EVERYTHING. If someone sees a lineup of ten phones in a showroom, nine of them thin and svelte and made of nice tightly constructed materials, while the tenth is twice as thick in order to accommodate the keyboard, they will immediately gravitate away from it. Yet, you overlooked this obvious decision point. Add to that the other rather obvious trend of smartphones: everyone wants to be Apple. The more your phone looks like an iPhone (to hell with what the courts think, amiright) the better it will sell. A slide out keyboard? Steve Jobs would come back to life as a zombie and have a personal sit-down to fire everyone at Apple if that ever happened. He would even skip eating their inferior, clunk-loving brains out of principal. So there you have it, please take a few more minutes to think through your next submission, and maybe you will actually have something insightful to say.

p.s. onscreen keyboards really do work great if you give them a chance. machine learning techniques by Google and Swype are getting pretty good at learning how and what you type, to allow for very fast and reliable input under even less than ideal conditions.

Comment Re:5 options (Score 1) 113

I guess one more... try to access it directly from the USB using a computer and special drivers and software designed to reflash a non-booting tablet... (ie. rooting your system).

Access via ADB doesnt require root to get to the point where you can confirm/deny the existence of functioning memory. It looks like the Transformer line has an out of band update method by installing a microSD card with the flash zip, and doing a startup with certain buttons pressed. If it can be coaxed through this process (even with a dead screen) it would wipe any previous user data. Watching the device state via the USB port and ADB would be helpful to know if the device is likely to respond in that kind of scenario.

Comment Does the PC connection work at all? (Score 5, Informative) 113

Do you get the ADB device to register if you plug it in to a PC via USB and turn it on? That would be your only hope to wiping it assuming the screen is damaged but the SoC/flash still works to some extent. Also, have you tried opening it up? A similar thing happened to my Nexus device, and after popping the back cover off it turns out that the drop caused the battery to slide to one side, and come unplugged. Relocating the battery, adding a little more double sided tape, and snapping it all back together had it good as new in under 5 minutes.

Comment Re: We can't live without these things? (Score 1) 212

Because NASA isn't in charge of the energy sector? They monitor and advise. DOE via FERC is in charge of the electrical sector. The ES-ISAC, run by the FERC-appointed ERO, NERC, and the regional Reliability Coordinators (PeakRC in the western US, formerly the WECC RC).

More to the point, there are NERC standards being developed which deal with geomagnetic disturbances. A TPL and EOP standard: http://www.nerc.com/pa/Stand/P...

The bigger issue is cost. We can prepare for anything, but at what cost? Are you ready for your electricity rates to double to cover a 12% chance in the next 10 years? It's a tough balanacing act.

Why would rates double as a result of putting into place a plan (and probably a few layers of communications systems on top of already existing infrastructure) to mitigate the problem before it starts? Oh right, because we would have to pay for a team at NASA, a team at FERC, a team at each of the regional ISO, etc. to all do the same thing? Ugh. Put NASA in charge, they got us to the moon damnit. If rocket scientists cant fix it, no one can.

Comment Re:FUD filled.... (Score 1) 212

Roll eyes and move on. I'm sorry you don't know how nuclear power plants work, nor how solar flares cause damage, but get with the program, son.

Critical electrical components in nuclear power plants are more than sufficiently shielded from electrical spikes, and EMPs don't cause magical explosions. Nor, if a melt down were somehow to occur, an explosion an expected outcome.

Actually professor you might want to take a second look at those figures. A nuclear plant relies entirely on *already produced electricity* for safe operation. With a normally functioning grid, this is not an issue. Take that out of the picture (in a scenario like a CME hit) and it will have to fall back on site generators (the local turbine generation is likely to go down with the grid) which hopefully will have been isolated from the effects of the CME and can be instantly switched in to the site system to take over and shut the plant down. However, if any of those switching components went bad during the CME hit, it could be hours before they are repaired, which starts to push the cooling safety margins to the limit (the plant is, after all, still producing heat as if it had a job to do). There are certainly good disaster plans in effect at nuclear plants for situations similar to this, but do you really want to test them all at once? There are bound to be holes. Mushroom cloud style explosions are out of the question, but we know from experience with Fukushima that all kinds of bad things can happen (including lots of little explosions of errant hydrogen) when plants go dark and can't be shut down safely.

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