Except moving a cursor around with a controller sucks.
They could win me over, however, if they brought in the duck hunt gun as a tile selection method, made the live tiles move around the screen rapidly, and introduced "whammy" live tiles costing $1 every time they were hit. Getting to the game would be just as fun as playing it, especially if it's a crappy windows store game.
I can't wait to use all of my favorite apps with an input device they weren't intended for! This will be about one step up from text input on the Wii.
In one line you managed to span the spectrum from ill-informed to irrelevant. Good job.
1) Cures are not "supposed" to reduce (monetary) costs, and in many cases they don't. [ill-informed]
2) The number of people with Type I Diabetes is in excess of 10 million. A billion dollar clinical trial, amortized over this population, pales in comparison to the costs (monetary or human suffering) of management. [ill-informed]
3) None of this has anything to do with socialized medicine. [irrelevant]
The methods for manufacturing vaccines are constantly changing. If you wait a generation or two, the vaccine will have changed and you'll need to wait another generation or two. Of course, if you are anything like a typical anti-vax nut, you have no idea how vaccines work, how they are manufactured, or how bad the diseases they are designed to prevent actually are. Just do us a favor an home-school your unvaccinated children.
Yep, it's the old "fool me once, shame on you,
The federal government is done with all of these foreign nationals running around spilling our state secrets to the whole world.
Oh wait, those were American citizens with security clearance? My bad.
Of all of the things involved in securing top-secret clearance, I'm willing to be the polygraph is the least invasive. Interesting that it would be the only one called out by name.
I would imagine they came about due to more than one event and that those events would be instances where ordinary police units were outgunned or otherwise unable to handle a situation. In any case, the fact that SWAT units exist isn't a problem, the way in which they are unnecessarily deployed is the issue. And, as was my entire point, this is hardly a ground-breaking finding.
Of course, the author was misguided in including this example anyways: he assumes that we've allowed SWAT team overuse and abusive police tactics to occur in an effort to minimize risk, but I would contend that a desire to see criminals brought to justice is the overwhelming motivation here. For instance, if you google 'police pursuit public opinion' you'll find several stories about citizens demanding MORE vehicular police pursuits (which bring increased risk to society) which would not be the case if the goal was to minimize risk, but is expected if justice/vengeance is the goal. His other examples may be legitimate (though, again, his entire thesis is a boring re-tread of well-known principles), but the SWAT/police example is off the mark.
I guess they didn't have time to get around to inventing wireless communications technology in between being the birthplace of civilization and being invaded and exploited by foreign powers. Shame on them, really.
...in response to catastrophic events, people demonstrate a willingness to sacrifice personal freedoms for a measure of perceived safety.
The author of this blog should be commended for this completely novel contribution to society.
Oh well, at least he provided an actionable recommendation: "We need to relearn how to recognize the trade-offs that come from risk management, especially risk from our fellow human beings. We need to relearn how to accept risk, and even embrace it, as essential to human progress and our free society."
Ok Bruce, "We" will get right on that. Thanks for the advice.
Ignorant much?
IBM has, according to their website, 434,246 employees. So much for a small employee population...unless you meant 'a small country' or 'a small state.'
In any case, if you even took the time to read the 4-sentence blurb, you would see that they did this with 500 employees at their research center, which would still give 5 times your estimate of '10,000 or so.'
And I don't see why it would make any sense for IBM to give every person $10,000. The idea is to ferret out popular/worthwhile ideas. That doesn't really work if one or two people can fund it, as any of the examples could have been if each had $10,000 to spend.
And finally, your idea of profit sharing with regards to the selected ideas only works if the idea is meant to have some immediate financial impact. Procuring a 3D printer might not directly lead to financial results, but it may help someone rapidly prototype something that becomes a million dollar idea. You will never be able to measure the financial contribution made by that 3D printer, so why bother? Similarly, a disc golf course might provide some intangible stress relief, and employees may be a little more productive as a result, but how are you going to quantify that? IBM is pretty good at identifying business opportunity on their own...that clearly isn't the point of this exercise.
If a yacht is penalized in the America's Cup races, and no one gives enough of a shit to notice, does it still make Larry Ellison cry like a greedy, emotional, hypercompetitive asshole?
I don't understand why this is news. Automation has been used in agriculture for a long time in applications much more advanced than this. Why should we get excited about a simplistic robot which moves pots around according to explicit user instructions and pre-placed guidance tape? Show me a robot that, based on the type of plant, moves it to a suitable area where it will receive just the right amount of sun, or perhaps a robot that will ensure each plant gets exactly the right amount of water/nutrients given varying weather conditions, or a robot that monitors each plant for signs of disease, or really just a robot that does something that robots haven't been doing since, you know, the beginning of robots.
Happiness is twin floppies.
