My accounting department and midmanagement is full of 'em.

Cosmetic designs of a hand like-prosthetic to prevent adults staring uncomfortably and children exclaiming "cool"!

Idk about you, but I'd think an obvious robot hand would be easier to deal with than a fake looking piece of plastic mimicking a human hand.

Reading this on ethanol made me lose any hope in the government being anything but Oligarchy run:
http://www.mossmotors.com/Site...

AFAIK, putting 10% ethanol in gas drops the mpg of cars more than 10%. At least according to a Consumer Reports article I read years ago and they went by rule experience. Basically it means that if they took all the ethanol out of the gas, and gave you 0.9 gallons pure gas instead of 1 gallon adulterated, you as a driver would be better off.

So the entire industry is completely taxpayer supported bullshit. We're carrying an industry that has no use. And this in an era where water table is decreasing (corn is unbelievably thirsty), food prices and meat rising astronomically, etc.

I have friends in the corn states. The corn farmers (and usually farm corps) are well off... at the expense of everyone else.

And there are hundreds of other examples like that. For every 1 good thing the government does, it seems there are 4-5 examples of overreach which costs everyone and only benefits a small segment.

Or maybe they didn't try to shave a dime, nickel, or penny off of the cost in all the wrong places.

I swear most of my stuff that brakes is overwhelmingly not due to a big expensive part, but cheap shit where the labor costs 100x+ more to replace it than the part itself.

Even in cars, when it's electrical, where the new board or component cost several hundred $$$, the old one only died because some cheap ass component died but hard/uneconomical to track down.

I find the earpiece speakers in them go to shit easily. Otherwise okay.

Toilets really are one of the best tech inventions of all time. And I do mean tech in every sense of the word. Porcelain is the best material for it, and while the chinese had it for a long time, when the west (Kingdom of Saxony) got it/discovered it, it gaurded the secret closely. Thankfully it got out, are it would be relegated to fancy sculptures and plates.

This isn't to mention all the requirements like running water and sewer system... but a lot of tech resembles Maslow's hierarchy of needs, as in the oldest stuff is generally the most essential, and as time goes on, the newer stuff is icing on the cake.

$5,000,000 might be nice if the USA doesn't start to hyperinflate by then. Have some hard assets as backup.

Looking at their stock, it never required from dotcom, and has been on a slow decline since (but up from 1 year ago).

I can't imagine mobile CPUs will ever have the margin or profit of desktop CPUs. Or even close.

Sure, there are a bunch of cheap PCs. But apple or samsung comes out with a phone, that's just the same cheapish cpu several millions of times over with no variation.

Is this just another case of a company chasing elusive profits once it's market has been commoditized? In a way, Intel isn't important once Microsoft isn't important anymore.

No need to run x86. So why push x86 into the portable space?

You apparently never heard of the American Civil War then.

Human minds just aren't made to react to something so abstract, so distant, so far away. Look at the crisis building up with the US economy, national debt, and so on - something that could cause a whole generation to undergo a great depression yet nary a thought is given to it.

For example, on the economic situation, this guy was made the US's top accountant for over a decade, and appointed to posts by both R and D presidents and yet he makes videos that can barely garner 2k views about the situation (since September):
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v...

I guess if there was a girl twerking in it, it might work.

Anyway, that's how it is. We react, many don't think too far ahead. Both situations are basically simple concepts in theory (global warming is built on the green house effect which is simple to demonstrate, the economy on interest and other high school math), but so many interests go in and muddle issues, that the average guy doesn't know what to believe, so even those with a modicum of forethought are stymied by special interests.

And the special interests want status quo. Nothing will happen. That's the tragedy of democracy and why it never really lasts long. Power and money is like water, it always gathers and concentrates.

Do they always jump in feet first with these new teaching methods or something? Don't they test it on a small control group or a dozen to make sure it's not the latest new-age garbage?

It always surprises me how often I hear parents complain about a new way of learning something in school. Latest was my neighbors talking about a new way to teach math, they tried helping their kids but the methodology was so alien to them that they were stumped.

And that's where a lot of the new, marginally improved (if at all) methods fail, because parents have to be able to act as back up teachers, and if it's completely different than how they learned it. Fail.

The confidence levels in the data are 99%, not in the conclusion.

PS - I believe in man driven global warming, I just hate sensationalized headlines.

3D has been met between a variation of "MEH!" and "meh" after the initial oohs and ahs wore off for theaters and consoles and TVs. It's a feature people take but don't care about.

What will help Amazon get into the game is if it's divorced from carriers and does better pricing on that front. Kinda like how a kindle can get (slow) internet connectivity elsewhere. If it can get people a smartphone for $30~ish a month voice and data. Then it will be cool and a game changer. Otherwise it's just another phone in an increasingly crowded marketplace.

This reminds me of all types of mining, where first people discover the big nuggets, then the small nuggets, then pan for specks, then go after good high grade ore, then the 30...20...10..1% ore. Until we're blowing up mountains chasing 0.001% stuff like they are doing for gold. Getting an ounce for every one of those humoungous trucks. I think when the Alaska gold rush started, accounts said miners were literally scooping out $2,000 a shovelful.

Same goes with oil. Super rich easy to get to oil just blasting out of the ground.... and as time goes on, we have to drill, needle and prod to get the stuff.

It's all EROEI. Energy returned on energy invested. Makes absolute sense for science as well.

I would say the scientific future isn't dim though, just that with current tech, there isn't much to discover in, say, theoretical physics, until we seriously start space exploring, because are limited on experiment we can run on earth. Just like we can't really take off on nanomedicine until reliable nanorobots are in place for scientists to test out their theories on. To put it another way, ships were of a limited design until steam engines came into place. Then ship designers could go crazy again. And then the nuclear engine came into play and military ship designers could go crazy again. Sometime until the pieces fall into place, the rest cannot go forward.

http://www.peakprosperity.com/...

I am a fast reader (>400words per minute), and when i skim a screenful of information or code I exceed this significantly.

I'm always skeptical of people clamining superhigh reading speeds. I mean, yeah I can skim easy text to and just "float" above it, but what about when comprehension and understanding are required; like when you read a biology or math text and other such material you haven't encountered before? What good does reading speed help there if it goes in one eye and out the other, so to speak??