Apple was a niche luxury computer maker until they made the iPhone, which was purchased by everyone from the wealthy elite to the middle poor through the magic of financing.

Look around. The majority of jobs now are bullshit jobs. The sign of a successful modern economy is an overwhelmingly large service sector.

This has been going on a long time. Machines do most of the real work for us but we've bought into the fantasy that we all need to work 40+ hours so most of us are engaged in things like trying to sell each other stuff, handing each other stuff or throwing darts at a board to pick stocks for other people.

It's faded from the front page because it's now so routine nobody cares. iPhoto is free and does decent facial recognition. Facebook runs it on everything. My phone can take natural language spoken queries and respond with reasonable answers much of the time.

I worked on AI fifteen years ago and that was the stuff of dreams. Now you can have it in your pocket for a couple hundred bucks.

"LA is totally different -- it was built around cars and is only now getting a very small set of public transit choices"

To be fair, LA wasn't built around cars, it was built around an extensive commuter rail system that was subsequently dismantled.

The LAPD enforces No Thru roads around the Hollywood Bowl on show nights, they just check everyone's ID and it works alright. You just set something like that up for a week, with random checkpoints every couple weeks thereafter and people would get the message.

Yes, they're presently adding three stops under downtown that will connect light rail lines in the city. This particular project is expected to take FIVE YEARS.

A subway line is also being extended down Wilshire Blvd. (the main drag between downtown and the ocean). It will eventually connect downtown to west LA and Beverly Hills, in 2023(!!). As it is the rail systems all join in downtown, and downtown just isn't where most destinations are, people come from outlying areas like Burbank and Manhattan Beach to go to jobs in West LA or Santa Monica, areas that are nominally urban but are in fact intensely developed residential areas where everyone has a $2m house and getting transit built is a huge political slog. NIMBYism is bad but if someone told you a light rail track near your house might cost you $400,000 in home equity you might not be crazy about it either.

Nobody seems to know what they're going to do in the 405 corridor, they've been adding lanes like crazy over the past 5 years but it does nothing. They could add a train but the problem with the 405 is that it connects two very dense areas over a mountain pass, and there's about 6 miles of nothing in between and it's not a natural spot for LRT. Even if they started today, they probably wouldn't finish for 15 years. LA can't pull a Robert Moses, all of the most desirable routes go through very wealthy areas that are politically organized and simply cannot be eminent domained.

This sounds like it's till a bit hacked together (risk scoring?), and only available for business transactions, but it's a step in the right direction. Another ten or twenty years and you might be enjoying something like Europe and Australia's transfer system, or Canada's debit system.

I'm a scientist who works with physicians. Physicians are not "as much scientists as scientists" are.

A physician who has taken a particular interest in research at a good school might have a few of years of part time research experience, plus a few courses in basic stats and research methods. In order to become an independent scientist you need to have eight to ten years of pure research training, plus another two (yeah right) to ten years of additional training and experience, again in full time research. It's not the same thing at all. And it shows. Phrases like "I have a great grasp on statistics" give it away. I know I don't have anything close to "a great grasp on statistics."

I don't feel at all qualified to prescribe drugs, diagnose patients or perform surgery, despite working and studying medical science at a postgraduate level for ten years. Why is it physicians feel they're just as good at science as a scientist?

Doctors yes. Biologists, no. Not that most doctors are shady business people, they're just poorly trained to evaluate scientific evidence.

However, more people are "nearly killed" by all sorts of things than by vaccines. Now that you know you're potentially allergic to particular adjuvants, you can avoid them.

No. My expected enjoyment (not to mention earnings) for the rest of my life are greater than the differential between that and the same thing plus a million dollars. The 90% chance of winning $100 is a roundoff error.

I'm curious what your answer was.

The thing that scares me about Bitcoin is that a significant portion of the total bitcoins that can exist are out of circulation in a few private, anonymous, hands. One of these early adopters could easily crash the whole market, now, or just as easily in a possible future where bitcoin is a major currency.

Governments can crash their currencies but they have a pretty big incentive not to. Bitcoin, no matter how big it gets, could crash just because anonymous18283@hotmail.com decides he wants to cash out and buy New Zealand.

Benett discovers moderation. Speaking of which, the corruption of Slashdot demonstrates how vulnerable the "editor" system is to being swamped by "weirdos with verbal diarrhea." An alternative algorithm could be created that allows readers to rate whole stories, and vote Bennett into oblivion.

There are different kinds of "AI" researchers. Oren Etzioni looks like a soft AI guy, where you use some well defined algorithm and a bunch of data to build a rules based approach. Like a decision tree (I think he founded a company that developed decision forest based stuff).

There are other AI researchers who have long thought that approach is unlikely to provide us with real AI. They go in for more unpredictable approaches - sophisticated machine learning, neural simulations, hardware implementations of neurons, or artificial neural nets made of real neurons grown on plates. Those seem to be the ones who are more likely to make something most of us would recognize as intelligent.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/G...

The jigga pronunciation was apparently popular in the US in the 80s (when Back to the Future was made), and was made a standard by NIST. It's since swung overwhelmingly towards the hard g.

It looks like you're right though, the pronunciation in the movie, despite being correct, WAS the result of scriptwriters who had no idea what it was:

http://wheels.blogs.nytimes.co...

Pronouncing gigawatt like jiggawatt is perfectly valid. I've never looked at a Back to the Future script so I don't know if they spelled it correctly or not.