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Comment Re:Crunch all you want... We'll make more! (Score 2) 136

In India, until March of this year, antibiotics were an off-the-shelf drug.

http://bsac.org.uk/news/major-...

You can't blame the doctors there for this one.

But as usual, things are probably a mixture of things. In India, antibiotics were easy to get, and waste at the plants was an issue. In North America, over-prescription and people not taking the full course of drugs when they ARE required is an issue. In all places, prophylactic use in animals is definitely an issue.

Put all those things together, and here we are. But it's nice to see this guy cop to his industry's (and his own, by implication) complicity in this problem. They're making drugs to help people, and the part that HE can control is how safely they manufacture the drugs. The agriculture and medical industries will have to be dealt with separately (and probably through legislation).

Comment Re:Holy Carp! (Score 1) 136

Actually, it's even worse than that. India JUST banned the sale of antibiotics off the shelf this March. Until recently, you could just walk in and grab them. http://bsac.org.uk/news/major-...

There are way too many things wrong with that, but among them is that a lot of unused antibiotics probably wound up in the trash.

Comment Re:Makes sense. (Score 1) 629

Not only does Apple support MOST of its devices for about 4 years, the first iPad's abnormally short update lifetime is still longer than Google's official support lifetime of 18 months.

And on top of that, they even pushed out iOS 6 security updates when that SSL bug popped up. That was a security patch for an OS and device that was basically EOL.

If you toss your phone after two years, that's your problem. My iPhone 4 was working great when I gave it to my Mom in September after getting my iPhone 6. Maybe she'll only get a year or two out of it, but six years is about as long as anyone ever owns a computing device these days.

I buy Apple phones specifically because I KNOW I'll get 4 years out of them. Don't pin any of this crap on Apple, because it's just not true.

Comment Re:Produce More Qualified Workers to Not Hire (Score 3, Informative) 341

Something that helps a lot (in all industries, including academia) is stripping names and gender/race identifying characteristics from resumes and papers. When those documents are assessed in a context absent the nature of the writer, they're considered more equally. They've done experiments where the same paper has been submitted with male, female and neutral names, and the female names see more critical judgement and a higher rate of rejection. This is for exactly the same paper, remember.

The problem isn't overt racism, it's subtle, institutional discrimination that most of us suffer from. Even female researchers and professors are guilty of discriminating against other women.

Comment Re:Why only in Tech? (Score 3, Insightful) 341

The CEO of Intel can't affect those industries, except, perhaps, indirectly and through example.

All of those are good questions. Those are all places where we should be striving to see a better mix of genders and races. You tell ME why those industries aren't trying to change. Could it be the institutional sexism that's so pervasive in our culture, starting when children are young, allotting toys on a gendered basis? Is it because we don't discourage construction workers in many of our cities from catcalling really offensive things, making women wonder why they'd ever want to work on a site like that? Is it because when women DO go into the armed forces, they're raped or sexually assaulted at distressingly high rates? Is it because we tell men that caring for children is women's work, and simultaneously tell them it's a horrible thing to be feminine?

By the time someone is looking for a job, it's probably too late. The people that want to be in construction have already made their choice, male or female.

Comment Re:Which Apple are you talking about? (Score 1) 598

Well, except for that 64-bit processor that was 2 years ahead of everyone else's

You mean the Intel Xeon? How was their Intel Xeon in any way special when compared to anyone else's Intel Xeon? Or do you mean the Intel i7, which was also the same i7 that was available to everyone else?

Uh, no. The A7 and A8. The ones that Apple developed themselves. The ones that Qualcomm dismissed as a gimmick while desperately trying to get out the door themselves and only just achieving this year.

Or the fingerprint sensor that works quite a lot better than any current competing models

And how many have you tried? Every iPhone user I know regards the fingerprint sensor as a nice "gee-whiz" addon but not anything important.

I've tried the ONE other that's on the market. On the face of it, it's a poor system, and much slower. The swipe action requires a lot more precision and a specific orientation. I've unlocked my iPhone upside down.

It seems like it's a triviality, but because of it, I can have a 15-ish digit passcode and unlock my phone and buy things from the appstore rather quickly. I feel like I'm in the dark ages every time I use my (3rd-Gen) iPad. It's a small change, but it's one that I quickly wanted on almost everything I owned. I'm not made of money, though, so replacing my iPad will have to wait.

Or the custom timing controller they built so they could release a 5k iMac for the same price that Dell is selling (a not-yet-available) a 5k monitor.

It's rather silly to compare an extant product to one you insist does not exist. More useful would be to note that the 5k iMac is a product with nearly no market and nearly no sales. In fact it is one of the only non-touchscreen all-in-one units on the market today.

Right, but for the same price as the Dell monitor, you can buy the iMac. It's like you get a computer for free.

Or the rather cleverly designed Mac Pro.

Clever in what way? We've seen cleverly designed workstations before that at least used novel hardware. Intel CPUs and GPUs in a fancy box are still Intel CPUs and GPUs.

The heat dissipation design is really clever. I had a PowerMac G5, and the bloody thing (while gorgeous--one of the loveliest industrial designs in the last 20 years) was insanely loud. I've worked with a few sound engineers in my time (I'm in the games industry) and they hate how loud the computers are.

I think between the longevity of their products and the high quality of the releases at the start of the generation, there's much less of a penalty to being an early Apple adopter than there ever was

I encourage you to think about that in more depth. Apple tends to push arguably the shortest generation time of any hardware vendor today. My non-apple laptop is 7 years old and runs fine. I don't know anyone who is currently using an apple laptop that is more than 3 years old, and it isn't because they did anything incredible hardware or software-wise in the past 3 years. Similarly their workstations - which you can't buy for less than $2,500 - also are designed to be replaced completely in bewilderingly short time spans.

I think you're misreading my statement. It used to be that buying Gen 1 of any Apple product was a recipe for disaster. You always waited for the next revision because the first one would have an irritating problem. Now, I feel like Gen 1 of Apple's hardware is a lot less worrisome from that perspective.

But to speak to your point, while Apple does frequent updates, they support old hardware for a long time. My iPhone got OS updates for four years--they're the only ones in the industry that do that. My 5 year old iMac is still getting OS updates. They're not really designed to be replaced quickly, it's just that their new designs are awfully good. I switched to Macs a few years ago specifically to AVOID the upgrade treadmill, and it's worked rather well.

And, to tie it back to the original thesis of this article, I feel like there's been a dip in the quality of the software that makes the longevity of the hardware a little less pertinent. Sure, I've got Yosemite running on my iMac, but the OS is mystifyingly crash-prone. It doesn't matter if my Mac is new or old, problems like that will drive you insane.

Comment Re:Which Apple are you talking about? (Score 2) 598

Well, except for that 64-bit processor that was 2 years ahead of everyone else's. Or the fingerprint sensor that works quite a lot better than any current competing models. Or the custom timing controller they built so they could release a 5k iMac for the same price that Dell is selling (a not-yet-available) a 5k monitor. Or the rather cleverly designed Mac Pro.

Apple consistently puts out really high quality hardware still, I think. Apple used to really consistently lag behind in performance-per-dollar, and I think between the longevity of their products and the high quality of the releases at the start of the generation, there's much less of a penalty to being an early Apple adopter than there ever was. Of course, this all relies on you being willing to give up the control of expandability and repairability. There's certainly a trade-off there that has to be considered; I 100% respect anyone that makes decisions based on that criteria.

But the software is noticeably worse. I had a problem the other day where I couldn't drag and drop files in my Finder in Yosemite. Turned out I needed to delete some sort of Finder plist file; something migrated badly from Mavericks and screwed me up. And ever since installing Yosemite, I've been plagued with random kernel panics. I actually don't use my desktop machine much anymore, but I used to keep my account logged in even when my partner was using the machine. I've used it a bit more in the last couple of weeks, and I've made sure to log myself out because I was suspicious that I had some rogue process running causing the crashes. Well now when she logs back in after I've logged out, Yosemite will log her out after a minute or so. Then she goes back in again and it's fine.

Everyone has a completely different list of software problems now. It's madness.

Meanwhile, my iPhone 6 replaced my iPhone 4 (only because the iPhone 4 wasn't eligible for OS updates anymore), the iMac and Mac Mini hardware have no trouble at all, and our two iPads are rock solid. Hardware-wise, I haven't had to warranty anything from Apple in the last 6 years. Now I'm just faced with weird random problems with OS X crashes and dumb iOS bugs.

Comment Re: noooo (Score 1) 560

Your viewpoint is, ironically, too narrow itself. Ecosystems are hard. They're big, and complicated and saving them is going to be difficult. Those ecosystems are things that we rely on as a species, so it's hard to tech your way out of the mess entirely.

For example, take the Great Barrier Reef. It's immense. It protects an enormous part of Australia's coastline. Artificial reefs that we build aren't as effective as natural ones at least partly because natural ones regenerate, given the right conditions. Additionally, they act as fish nurseries and give refuge to species that we eventually want to eat. As the population of the planet grows, it becomes ever more important to protect these areas to ensure long-term benefit to us. (Also, I beleive that it has its own inherent worth, beyond what we can exploit or derive from it.)

Heating of the oceans drives acidification. Acidification is bad for animals that make shells...the acid eats away at them. Additionally, the corals have evolved to live in a certain temperature band and so there are just issues with forcing them to live at different temperatures.

On top of all that, jellyfish don't have any issues with rising temperatures or acidification because they have very few hard parts, and they compete with other sea life at all tropic levels. They eat eggs and larvae and adult fish and invertebrates. Suddenly animals around the reefs are under competitive pressure as well. Jellyfish don't really have many natural predators--it takes ecosystems to keep jellyfish levels where they are.

I'm not a marine biologist, and this is just grazing the surface of what I've read. While I agree with you that tech will help, we've got so much to do on so many fronts. Out survival depends on the survival of a lot of things. We like to think we're important, but we're really just a disruptive force, not a particularly useful one. The planet would do no worse with humanity gone, but if you could wipe out all the insects with a snap of your fingers, humanity would almost certainly disappear.

So, think bigger. I think we're mostly on the same page, honestly. But if what you hear is unrelenting gloom and doom, it's because when you start looking at the massive scale of disruption that we're faced with, it's sometimes hard to think of a way that we can legitimately fix it. We're really in a bind. I hope you're right, and we can just think our way out of this mess, and I hope you're part of that solution. We kind of need everyone on board.

Comment Issue is continuity of experience (Score 1) 325

Here's the issue as I see it.

I owned an iPhone 4 for all four years of its lifeâ"release to EOL. It was the 16GB version and I got by by managing my music playlists carefully and occasionally offloading the photos. Even in iOS 7, this was fine. When I was deciding which iPhone 6 to buy, I figured that I'd pretty much work the same way I always had. Sure, I can't carry as much with me, but I'm rarely away from home so long that it matters, and I was already planning to buy the iCloud storage package.

Even still, the space problem on my 16GB iPhone 6 is getting on my nerves. I've had to delete and restore my music at least once. Connecting to my Mac first uses a bit less space, but not so much less that I don't have to delete things. The iCloud photo system now works well enough that I'm definitely saving space there, but as a whole I'm running much closer to my limits. I get low space warnings from time to time, and I've started to monitor whether or not I REALLY need certain apps on my phone.

I would've paid the extra $100 for the upgraded version if I'd known the delta between 16GB on iOS 7 and 8 was so large. Apples cloud services just aren't good enough for me to rely on, and I cross into the USA all the time, so I go fairly long periods without reliable mobile data frequently (I had to have a GPS app that relies on stored data, I can't stream music or podcasts, etc.)

When availability is a bit better, I may sell this one off to someone that more easily gets by on 16GB, but Apple shouldn't have put me in this position in the first place. I use and enjoy their products, and I'm willing to pay for what I needâ"I'm just irritated that what I need changed with no behavioural change from me. It's all on Apple here.

Comment Re: what else is new (Score 1) 234

The Celsius scale isn't that arbitrary. The freezing and boiling points of water are well covered. As well, 1 calorie is the amount of energy it takes to heat 1ml (1 cubic centimetre) of water 1 degree Celsius.

Ultimately, everything is arbitrary, sure, but that's a poor argument to put forthâ"some systems are more consistent than others. Use the system with the greatest internal consistency.

Comment Re: I love Shashdotters, but.... (Score 1) 250

Yeah, but this system is taking that sales part away. Books take time to read, and the alotment of funds comes out of a small fixed pool. Where once an author would be able to hustle and just make sure they were good and that people knew about their new work, this pool makes sure that they take less away. Exposure means a lot less with a system like this. The great writers draw people in, and the crap writers get an equal cut of the pie.

And then these authors WILL get new jobsâ"as you suggestâ"and we won't have quality books to read any more. This move is ridiculous and short-sighted. There should be caps, or ways for the user to distribute funds, at least. If I get 3 books through this system one month, and one is great, one is okay and one is terrible, I should be able to split the money to reward the great writer and leave the others with less. Quality would be favoured again, hacks would be driven out, and we'd actually be able to encourage better writing than the current system allows forâ"how many times have you bought a book on a whim and then discovered that it was actually terrible and you'd been suckered. With a post-reading money distribution scheme, I'd be able to punish bad writers with slick advertising campaigns for eating my time.

Comment Re: So it's a library except digital with monthly (Score 1) 250

Libraries have scarcity built in. In the case of physical copies, this is obvious. If they want more of a popular book, they have to buy more copies. I've definitely gotten sick of waiting in the past and just bought the book I was waiting for.

Even the digital library systems have artificial scarcity and time limits built in. At least the ones I've encountered. But as the library is effectively the customer of books, they've always had to pay for them. The writer and publisher always got their cut.

Amazon is the publisher and seller in this case, and their mandate is to make money, not spread reading around. That $10/month has to cover their costs (or at least defray them enough so that they're not even MORE unprofitable) AND pay the authors, and they're not being funded by the government. Sounds pretty tight, to me.

Comment Re: Freedom (Score 1) 250

The problem is that Amazon is a monopsony, not a monopoly. That is, they're the only BUYER that's important in the market. If you're not on Amazon, your potential for success is seriously limited. As a result, publishers and authors cede concessions that were previously off the table, harming their long-term prospects. That also ends up giving Amazon a competitive advantage.

But monopsonies aren't regulated, as far as I know. As long as Amazon doesn't do anything damaging monopolistic with their power, they can screw up the landscape as much as they like. Like Walmart.

Comment Re: Best of 2009? May be, but we live in 2014. Rig (Score 3, Insightful) 132

I haven't found this to be true. I've tried swiftkey and swype for weeks at a time, and I've found that they're generally slower than me tapping words out. The problem is that the worst case--that the system gets the word wrong and you need to replace the whole thing because none of the suggestions are correct--comes up surprisingly often for me. I also find the flow of tapping to be a lot more comfortable. I never stop tapping until I'm finished, while with the swiping methods, I have to pause in between words before I start swiping again.

Mileage varies, but I'm considerably faster with the built-in Apple keyboard unless I'm walking and typing with one hand. In that case, the swiping method has an obvious payoff because I can be less accurate with my movements.

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