If Apple can sell 5 million expensive computers with no low-end offering at all, then why can't Dell?
Because Apple is selling 5 million expensive computers with no low-end offering at all.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb, the author of The Black Swan and Fooled by Randomness, has a book chapter coming out that addresses this danger. Prof. Teleb's draft chapter on Medicine, Convexity, and Opacity from his upcoming book, Antifragile: Things That Gain from Disorder, can be found at:
http://www.fooledbyrandomness.com/medicine.pdf
While the entire chapter is worth a read, at page 389 he observes:
The “do you have evidence” fallacy, mistaking evidence of no harm for no evidence of harm, is similar to the one of misinterpreting NED (no evidence of disease) for evidence of no disease. This is the same error as mistaking absence of evidence for evidence of absence, the one that tends to affect smart and educated people, as if education made people more confirmatory in their responses and more liable to fall into simple logical errors.
That may have been the case here. That is, for years no evidence of harm was mistaken for evidence of no harm.
More generally, Prof. Taleb argues at page 376:
Simple, quite simple decision rules and heuristics emerge from this chapter. Via negativa, of course (by removal of the unnatural): resort to medical techniques when the health payoff is very large (say, saving a life) and visibly exceeds its potential harm, such as incontrovertibly needed surgery or lifesaving medicine (penicillin). It is the same as with government intervention. This is squarely Thalesian, not Aristotelian (that is, decision making based on payoffs, not knowledge). For in these cases medicine has positive asymmetries —convexity effects— and the outcome will be less likely to produce fragility. Otherwise, in situations in which the benefits of a particular medicine, procedure, or nutritional or lifestyle modification appear small—say, those aiming for comfort—we have a large potential sucker problem (hence putting us on the wrong side of convexity effects).
It seems to me that helping them communicate (setting up proxies, opening more tor exit nodes, etc) is helpful, but not particularly open to cries of puppetry. Plenty of people are doing exactly that, and I think it's wonderful that there are simple things a quiet geek can do to help out a bit. Of course, detractors can always claim that open communication is a Western ideal, but it's become quite clear that a lot of Iranians want it as well.
Agreed.
See Anonymous Iran.
http://iran.whyweprotest.net/
Interesting video:
Anonymous Message to Iranian Government.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_hUFv5c4lFg&
Actually, no. Good luck in the next 15 years.
Great. So now somebody has an incentive to cut off my fingers.However, TrueSuite goes a step further with the fingerprint reader, also allowing you to log in to Web sites, applications, and networks as well by using just your fingerprints.
"Money is the root of all money." -- the moving finger