IQ has some heritability. However, intelligence can mean anything. If you measure intelligence by IQ, you are right. If you measure intelligence by achievements, then the original poster is right.

Networks based on "trust" and "people you know"? Works for facebook and makes billions of it.

Hell, even works for human society.

So they removed the mileage limit but they still have the time limit of 8 years.

It's not like people are going to use a Tesla car to go cross-country driving. They have to charge the car after use and so has to remain near a viable charge station. So, the removing the mileage limit seems pointless.

If they removed the time limit of 8 years, then it would be something.

I don't see this as a big deal. Sure sounds good but the service centers probably realized that the mileage of the cars coming in for service was nowhere close to getting to warranty mileage and just dropped them.

If you mean testing at the end of the semester, then the school will still have to test students during the semester to give them feedback.

If yo mean weekly testing or testing after each lecture, then what is the point of decoupling education with testing at this point? There is no way all universities are going to agree on a weekly or daily course guideline. It makes every curriculum the same.

Any anti-terrorist system has the same problem. Even if this is 99% accurate, the amount of false positives would overwhelm the system.

If you read the scientific consensus in the beginning of the 20th century, they had the exact same view as you are saying. They had journals which listed what characteristics what races and sub-races had, and had intricate rankings of races - with uber-mechen and under-mechen. It is the basis of eugenics and was the root of the philosophy of Nazi justifying killing of the inferior races.

Their failing was that they considered every little difference in societies to be genetic.

Perhaps you could be or could not be Tiger Woods but so far, there hasn't been an obvious genetic test to determine that. However, there is no getting around the fact that Tiger Woods is a successful professional golfer because his dad is a golf instructor and he had training when he was young as well as access to professional network that his dad had established to be successful.

The counterexample to that comes from Gladwell's example of the Canadian hockey team and the birthday phenomenon. There are almost no professional hockey players born at the end of the year. Most of them are born in the beginning of the year. The reason is that coaching is done by age and the kids who are born later in the year have 6-12 month disadvantage over kids born earlier in the year. So, in this case, access to training and coaching was more vital than the genetic component. If genetic was important, then there would be a more even distribution of birthdays.

In order for a Northern European to evolve fair skin and hair, there has to be something that will kill a human of dark skin and hair. Since people with dark skin can survive in Northern Europe, it is not through evolution.

It is through something called genetic drift. When a small breakway population goes to a new geographic location that is isolated from the previous location, there is limited genetic depth because of the small number of the population. However, because of abundant resources, the small population quickly grows. The genes that spread by determined completely by the small group of individuals who broke away from the main population. Here, random chance plays a huge factor to what the new population gets and not evolution.

So, it is not clearly that evolution gave Northern Europeans fair skin and hair. Genetic drift could very well have been the cause.

By the method you are describing, for a trait to manifest itself in a population, there has to be selection pressure. For selection pressure to happen, over 90% of the individuals without the trait have to fail to reproduce otherwise it will still be in the population. A very mild selection pressure does not cause a selection for a trait. Each trait can have multiple locations and multiple recessive/dominant genes to make it very complicated.

However, different populations can have different traits because of genetic drift. When a population separates out from the original population, the numbers are small and the sheer randomness of the process in small numbers causes a higher prevalence of one trait over the other.

It is highly unlikely that as society we select for aggressiveness or business acumen. There is no such strong selection pressure. When there is no selection pressure in a population, we try to create as vast a gene pool as possible so that when the selection pressure that decimates the population comes along, there is enough diversity that some fraction of the population will be able to withstand the selection pressure.

Without selection pressure, the population does not change. It does not slowly evolve into something else. Without selection pressure, it will just stay as is.

The difference between the geographically segregated populations can be explained by genetic drift.

My point is that physical characteristic differences can be explained by genetic drift. It does not mean that those differences were because of selection process. Appearance differences can be highly magnified because our brains are very attuned to physical differences to recognize different humans and even small genetic differences can mean vastly different perceptual differences.

It does not mean that there is not difference between the races. All I'm saying is that the difference does not have to be based on selection pressure. It could be that certain races got certain things by the luck of the draw.

The most important thing is of course, if we take a sample of two individuals from different races, what is the probability we can predict their higher level capabilities? We can predict their skin color and other physical characteristics with high confidence perhaps 99% of the time? What percentage under confidence levels can be do to aggressiveness and business acumen? If it's not with very high accuracy, then it is not very useful and we can statistically say that there is no difference between the races.

Instead of all this BS, just make an app that stores all the sub-passwords from a master password.

You can link your biometrics to the master password and even if you sub-passowrds are compromised, you can change them.

If you master password is compromised, then used a different finger or a different combination of biometric plus another password.

The biggest problem I have faced is the arbitrary password rules. Some sites require you have to choose from .\$[] character set whereas others cannot have it in the password. Some have length limits and some minimums. Some require at least two alphanumeric characters. Some allow phrases some don't.

Here's another heuristic.

Apple, Microsoft and Blackberry uses closed software. Google uses open source.

So, Android is the best choice because you (meaning a team of concerned citizens) can essentially take all the privacy leaking parts out and create a private and secure system. In the others, you are at the mercy of others who likely are to care about your privacy as much as your cat cares about your rants.

So, apparently this has a fitness store ... not a store to sell you stuff, but a storage of the user sensor data (snarkily probably a store for advertisers).

I think this might be a good idea. Recently motorola discontinued their motoactv watch and in the process also broke their website. So, your entire history went with that and your device became almost useless after that.

Also, the devices have made data overly fractured. The pedometer syncs to a different website than your running app. They don't want to co-operate. Maybe the fitness store will be one central repository for all that data.

I would rather have an open standard and have the encrypted data stored in dropbox but I guess this is the idea of the API.

I have the Sony PRS-T2 and it was really good for its time. However, Sony really fluffed PRS-T3 by not having a front light.

However, I think rather than Sony's hardware, it was the software that was better, esp for pdf in this generation. Kobo hardware was better - the aura and aura hd are one step ahead of kindles in hardware but one step behind everyone else.

Finally Sony was the only one with actual buttons. I was really hoping Sony would bring a new reader with frontlight and page turn buttons.

The real money to be made is in selling books and media rather than hardware. So, makes sense Sony bowed out because they aren't in the business of selling books.

You think enough work and enough oversight creates efficiency? No wonder you have a distraction problem.

Except that efficiency does not work that way.

People screwing around at work is not the cause of inefficiency but a symptom of a hidden larger problem that is causing inefficiency.

If you're so impressed by their research building, you should check out their advertising building. They are better funded and have more influence in making their products sound better.