Because there's no value in overengineering things that are easy to replace and where the consequences of failure are trivial. Further, most people only need the features of their phones to be "OK" rather than "GREAT" and would rather carry one device rather than 10.

For some things - such as clothing or furniture, or items where there have literally been no earth shattering developments in the last 100 years (like, I dunno, silverware), it's okay to overengineer because doing so is actually efficient. I have a coat and a pair of boots that have lasted me 20+ years, some silverware that's maybe 200 years old, and the average of most of the "important" furniture in my home is over 75 years.

But my phone? I'm not a professional photographer. I'm not even an amateur photographer. I just want pictures I took of people and things and events I found worth photographing that are "good enough." I'm not doing professional video editing, so I just want a video cam that's good enough I can take footage of my dogs doing goofy stuff that I can send to my family. If I'm in a place where I'm watching movies or TV on my phone, it means I'm traveling and therefore unlikely to give much of a shit if the screen doesn't have perfect color fidelity or whatever because, well, there's a bunch of shit going on around me anyway. Ditto for music - why would I aim for some kind of audiophile's wet dream when likely the only time I'll be using my phone for music is when I'm out and about in situations where music quality isn't terribly relevant? Etc. and so on.

It's not that we don't value quality - I think we DO value quality very, very much - it's just that we can recognize that it's kind of stupid to waste time and money and effort on overengineering things that will be hopelessly outclassed in a few scant years.

Buy quality where it matters, buy cheap and replaceable where it doesn't.

If I want someone with the potential to be brilliant, I'd go for the candidate who, despite NOT immersing themselves in the field for the last 4+ years of their life has just performed as well as the candidate who has dedicated their education to the field.

Even if things weren't precisely equal, I'd be inclined to go with the person who isn't trained yet performed well enough to be considered for the job, since they clearly have a lot more potential to grow and clearly have a desire to learn on their own rather than just because they "had" to in university. That person might have some deficits, but they will very likely be able to remedy them, given their already demonstrated desire to learn on their own.

If I'm just hiring a cog and they need to hit a few boxes on a checklist in order to be slotted in to a role where brilliance would actually be harmfully disruptive, then sure, give me the person who treated university like a vocational training course, I guess.

The genes they identified were all proteins.

I'm not that much of an expert on microarrays, but I'm pretty sure most or all of the arrays they used predate the Encode project's results that made people re-evaluate the question of how much of the genome is really important. Here is a list of the arrays they used:

Illumina: HumanHap550, 318K, 350K, 610K, 660W Quad, HumanOmniExpressExome-8 v1.0, Human610 Quadv1, 370, 317, HumanOmniExpress-12v1 A

Affymetrix: GeneChip 6.0, 250K

This study was the keystone project of a consortium founded in early 2011. I think, given the size, it simply took this long to get the results. That, too, was a time before Encode publications had really started impacting the world. Whatever RNA genes they would have had at the time would be pathetic and paltry by comparison to what we consider worth studying now.

We know that the most important distinctions between humans and other animals are in RNA genes, that most of the genome is transcribed as RNA genes and that the brain modifies itself using them and that malfunctions in them cause disease. This study ignored RNA genes entirely, AFAICT. Its mindset is about ten years out of date and simply reaffirms what everyone already assumed: proteins aren't everything. Intelligence probably still has a significant genetic component, this study just looks in the wrong place. (Psst: SNP studies are snake oil in almost all unsolved diseases.)

But this is typical for Microsoft; they never cooperate with the government if they don't have to; cf. the antitrust case. I do like the idea of "embrace, extend, extinguish" applied to the NSA, though...

Only slightly less unpopular than "On Not Writing Unwell."

And then he created the arXiv, to guarantee that crackpots and armchair-surfing physicists would have a safe bunker from which to lob garbage at other scientific disciplines without ever having to step out from under the shade of their brethren. Until it's peer-reviewed, it's not newsworthy. For shame, Medium.

That's really more of a federal government thing than an Ontario one.

Ontario would just require subtitles.

It's okay, though; as a Torontonian, I forgive you for not being able to make the distinction. It is the centre of the universe, after all.

Aww, jeez, thanks for the spoiler alert! They just started talking about that cruiser. :(

More fun statistics, from Wikipedia:

• - Canada has 67% Christians and the United States has 73%
• - 24% of Canadians and 20% of Americans declare no religious affiliation.
• - Only 7% of Canadians are Evangelicals compared to the US's 30-35%.

...I was going somewhere with the Evangelicals stat, since they're generally the most fervent, but then I realised that there are plenty of insufferably stolid palaeoconservative Anglicans in the UK and it wasn't really a point worth making.

It really comes down to the fundamental collectivist-vs-individualist difference between the Canadian and American cultures, I think; despite Stephen Harper's best efforts to destroy the country, our charter of rights and freedoms was still a missive about how we were free from harassment by peers (thus sending the message "we are all siblings"), as contrasted with the American declaration of independence's emphasis on being free from harassment by authority (thus sending the message "you are free to do as you please"). Interestingly, a hundred years ago you would not really find this; Canada was just as much of a racist hellhole as the US at the time, although as there were practically no black people we could only complain about other European ethnicities. It was only as our population and economy fell behind, and we started accepting in huge numbers of immigrants following World War II, that this really started to take shape.

I'm sure the relatively weak levels of religious conviction help too (only 25% of Christians attend church regularly in Canada; above the rates of Northern Europe but far below the rate in the US) and that is doubtlessly a function of what flavour (can we call them 'distros' yet?) of Christianity is in question, too, since many Anglican ministers now preach actual biblical scholarship (my favourite quote, heavily paraphrased, is "Hell (as a threat) was invented in the Middle Ages") rather than what most think of as the typical naive system of "swallow-and-enjoy-your-life-textbook-with-no-critical-thinking" morality. Whatever the exact impact of each component is, it doesn't really jive with the idea of excluding us poor little minority atheists.

...except maybe in profoundly Catholic areas. I bet they care more in Newfoundland and Quebec. British Columbia is barely half Christian (54.9%) so you can bet they sure don't.

I was purely playing devil's advocate; honestly, I agree, it seems that there are plenty of safeguards against this sort of thing. Usually the topic comes up in the context of entire corrupt departments, IIRC.

Everyone likes accountability when they have control over it. The cops would have control over the tapes, right? So they get to choose which parts to show and which parts to "inconveniently lose." Every other time this topic has come up on Slashdot, there's been quite a cynical kerfuffle about precisely this.

Not to be confused with the furniture, which has far more shrubberies in it.

Sorry, but no - I'm not responsible for other people's behavior, no matter how much you feel like I should be simply because I use the same term.

You've clearly got some issue with "feminism" and "feminists" - but it's not an issue I can help you with. .Not my monkeys, not my circus. Be well.