Here's what I got when I gave it every pic in my photo library.

But seriously, I've seen the same technique used to discredit a movie of a UFO shot on 8 mm film. If you just watch the movie, you see an elliptical blob flying. Someone scanned the blob from each frame, aligned them, and averaged them. The increased contrast (bit-depth and resolution basically) let you see that the elliptical blob was more a diagonal prism, and that there were dark features underneath it. Basically it was a Cessna with the sun reflecting off the top of the wing.

Like that's ever gonna work. /sarcasm

Hate to break it to you, but nearly everyone in any job doesn't respect anyone who doesn't do the same job. The problem isn't specific to any one profession. The problem is being hyper-aware of the challenges in the job you do, and ignorant of the challenges in the jobs you don't do. So you end up overestimating the difficulty of your job (relative to people who don't do your job), and underestimating the difficulty of other people's jobs.

I've done a lot of different jobs over 3 decades (engineering, programming, technical writing, accounting, IT, property management, business management, and business owner). Every one of them had their share of trials, challenges, and complexities I didn't expect coming into them as an outsider (except engineering, since that's what I studied in college). It's easy to think the engineer's, designer's, IT's, salesman's, HR's, accountant's, management's, or CEO's job is oh so easy if you've never done it. But that's usually a conclusion based on ignorance rather than fact. I'd actually say a small business owner or a business manager in a medium-sized company is most likely to have the most neutral viewpoint of job difficulty, because they're constantly getting progress and problem reports from people doing all sorts of different things within the company.

I'm sure Verizon is evil of course, but are they evil for upgrading to fiber or for not upgrading to fiber?

Both. Their evil-ness doesn't stem from whether or not hey've upgraded to fiber. It stems from abusing their monopoly position to slow down upgrades (both fiber and copper) as a cost-cutting measure. If there were a competitor in the market offering DSL/FO/cable service and Verizon dragged their feet on upgrading to fiber or neglecting to maintain their copper, they would hemorrhage customers and lose a lot of money. But in most areas they have a (government-granted) monopoly. They can take their sweet time upgrading to fiber, and there's nothing their customers can do about it. They can let areas with older copper lines rot, and there's nothing their customers can do about it.

Case in point, the city I live in was one of the first which contracted for Verizon to provide FIOS. They rolled it out to half the city, then got into some sort of disagreement with the city and stopped. If there had been a competing cable/fiber service, they would've had a huge incentive to resolve the dispute as quickly as possible and get back to work. But they were the only game in town so they dragged it out. For six years, the houses two blocks down the street had FIOS and I didn't. Then after an election, the city council changed, Verizon got what they wanted, and resumed rolling out FIOS.

Meanwhile, the city I work in has Verizon DSL as the only provider of business Internet. Cable companies provide cable internet to residences, but apparently they're prohibited from providing it to business. So again, Verizon is the only game in town. They have absolutely refused to upgrade or maintain their copper lines. The fastest DSL speed we can get is 3 Mbps down / 768 kbps up. For this "privilege" we pay $100/mo. Most of the phone lines are of such poor quality they can't even get you that speed, and 1.5/512 or 1.5/256 is the best they can do ($50/mo). The service is such a poor value that most companies in the area just get the lowest-tier 1.0/128 service for $40/mo to minimize how much they have to pay for any Internet. Others have signed on to cellular companies' 4G data services and willingly pay per GB for overages - because it beats having to get reamed in the rear by Verizon.

Both are evil.

I've heard that a few times over the years. Americans don't know what war is like because we've never had to suffer it personally. Our soldiers always go somewhere else to fight.

About 13% of Americans are immigrants, many from war-ravaged countrires. They know exactly what war is. Probably better than you do.

When they're adults, these kids will be able to look back and use this experience to make an informed decision on whether or not to fight in whatever conflict their country gets into. Sweden's next generation of decision makers will be better equipped because of the presence of these kid's experience.

Not quite. You're making the fundamental mistake of attributing the suffering to war. War comes about from a refusal to settle disagreements amicably. That almost never happens except when what one side is arguing for is considered to be worse than war by the other side. The refugees fleeing ISIS aren't at war. But I'll bet every one of them wishes the world would go to war for their sake.

This is the problem I have with the current crowdfunding options like Kickstarter. All the risks of providing venture capital, none of the benefits. They're being pitched as if you're pre-buying a product the company will make once it receives enough funding. But really what you're doing is providing them venture capital. Normally when you provide venture capital, you get partial ownership of the company. (Not all kickstarters work this way - e.g. artists who agree to draw pictures for funding. But as you point out, the companies pitching hardware do.)

I'd really like to see a crowdfunding site which takes venture capital out of the realm of multi-millionaires, and puts it within reach of the common person. People complain that the rich just keep getting richer. Well, judiciously investing venture capital is one of the ways they do that. The nature of the business is that startup companies aren't gonna waste their time on you waving around your $20 investment, while someone with a $2 million bankroll will be wined and dined. Crowdfunding could really change this IMHO. Startups may not care about your $20 investment, but a hundred thousand people wanting to invest $20 each and they'll be interested. At least it'll be a helluva lot more productive than getting low- and middle-income people to play the lottery. (The low- to middle-income folks currently unable to provide venture capital are frequently the customers of the products it produces. So they should on average pick good product ideas, making it positive sum, whereas lotteries are zero or negative sum.)

I like how the "new design approach" and "sophisticated look" boil down to "making it look more like an iPhone 4."

And the leaked iPhone 6 pics look like the HTC One.

Can we get off the "Company X is copying company Y" fanboy bandwagon? There are only so many ways you can design a housing for a flat rectangular screen which needs to fit comfortably in your pocket. The "metal band around the edges" look for example originates not with Apple, but with the early Sony Clies (though it was a plastic band made to look like it was metal).

The problem isn't companies copying. The problem is fanboys trying to claim their favorite company "owns" simple design elements like rounded corners, metal bands, and lines. You don't see car racing enthusiasts trying to claim a certain manufacturer or driver owns the concept of racing stripes painted on a car.

Because in my state, the wording means their recording is legal but mine is not. So that makes me think people should not rely on logic for legal matters.

Are you sure? 12 states have laws requiring both (all) parties consent to a recording. This means party A agrees the conversation can be recorded, and party B agrees the conversation can be recorded. The requirement of mutual consent would seem to exclude your interpretation. i.e. Their notice is not just getting your consent to have the conversation recorded (just hang up if you don't approve), but also their announcement that they are consenting to have the conversation recorded.

The remaining states, recording is legal if one party consents. So you can record it if you want regardless of what the other party says.

(Your interpretation also violates reciprocity and consideration, making me think a recording under those terms would be thrown out in court.)

Windows RT was simply Microsoft's hedge in the x86/ARM battle. If ARM had utterly dominated Intel in the low-power processor market and the world moved away from Wintel, then RT would've been Microsoft's safety net. If that had happened and Microsoft hadn't made RT, all the armchair quarterbacks currently criticizing Microsoft for making RT would've been criticizing them for not making RT and missing the ARM boat. RT didn't need to succeed. It just needed to be there.

The tests are designed to (or ideally should) measure how well you've learned material people in charge of education have decided is important for you to know to further your future career and contribution to society. Whether you learn the material through genetic predisposition or by using sheer willpower to study is irrelevant. All that matters is whether you know the material or not.

If you're arguing that the tests cover material not relevant to children's future success, then that's something you have to take up with the people making the tests. Or we as a society have to re-evaluate what should be incorporated into compulsory education. The tests in and of themselves are not the problem. They're just a way of collecting data on how the education system is performing (in fact you could theoretically replace them with random sampling, but I suspect that would just lead to scandals of teachers and administrators rigging their samples).

Nothing is going to happen until they get sued.

I'd say it's the other way around. Nothing is happening because they get sued. All the time. Every time there's a serious accident involving injury or death, the automaker gets sued. Doesn't matter if something about the car contributed to the accident or not, they're the ones with the deep pockets so the lawyers sue them as a matter of course. Defending against these suits costs enough that in many cases it's cheaper for them to just settle rather than really look into the matter and fight it.

Except for extreme cases, there's too much of this noise for lawsuits to be an effective means of signaling genuine problems with the vehicles to the automakers. In particular, serious problems which are extremely low frequency events like people hacking into vehicles' computer systems do not generate enough signal to cut through the noise. For a similar case, look at the recent GM recall of ignition switches. It seems to have stemmed from a real design problem, but with only a dozen or so injuries or deaths caused per year, the signal was too infrequent to rise above the statistical noise until many years had passed. When you're sued for tens or hundreds of thousands of accidents each year blaming faulty vehicle design, how do you sift out a dozen cases which are tied to a single genuine problem?

Can we factor in the cost of even 1 minor nuclear plant accident and see what the numbers look like then?

Nuclear currently generates about 2700 TWh/yr of elecricity. Electricity prices variy around the world but $0.15/kWh is probably a good average figure. Levelized cost of nuclear production ranges from $0.04/kWh to $012/kWh with a median of $0.06/kWh. So the net benefit of nuclear is $0.15 - $0.06 = $0.09/kWh

2700 TWh * $0.15/kWh = $400 billion worth of electricity each year generated by nuclear. 2700 TWh * $0.09/kWh = $243 billion net benefit each year from nuclear. Even if you factor in the once-a-decade multi-billion dollar accident, the benefit from nuclear exceeds the harm by 2-3 orders of magnitude. The cost of the accidents are literally a drop in the bucket.

Per unit of power generated, wind and solar are much more dangerous than nuclear even if you factor in the meltdowns. What's going on is the same reason some people are afraid of flying. When a plane crashes it gets reported all over the world, with hours of coverage and video and pictures.. Meanwhile, most car crashes go unreported (did you know wind turbines killed more people in 2011 than Fukushima?). Thus creating the misperception that cars are safer, even though statistically planes are far safer.

Making more money in and of itself isn't a problem. Money is just a representation of productivity. The more productive you are for a given cost (relative to your competitors), the more money you'll make. By that token, it's in society's best interest for everyone to try to make as much money as they can. i.e. It's good to want to make more money (in a productive manner - scamming or skimming doesn't contribute any productivity). Whether you do so with a hobby or a job is irrelevant - the fact that you're making money means you're doing something productive which someone else values and is willing to pay for. (I think the AC was trying to distinguish between non-productive "hobbies" and productive "work". But what distinguishes those is productivity, not how well the employees are compensated.)

The problem comes about with how that money is distributed within a company. The owners/high-level executives have too much control over the process of wage/bonus distribution. It's like passing around a bag with money (profits), and the owners/executives get to pull as much out as they want first. Not enough is left over by the time you get to bonuses and salary increases for regular employees.

I don't know a good solution to this problem. It's one of the reasons I'm not opposed to unions despite my fiscally conservative beliefs (as long you don't make the union a monopoly, which just creates different problems). The taboo against telling others how much you make helps contribute to it though (not all countries have this taboo). Maybe if you required companies to post annual salary/bonus stats with the names redacted out? That would give individual employees a better idea where they stand, and if they should be demanding higher wages because they know they're one of the better employees but they see they're near the bottom of the pay scale. Giving regular employees stock options helps too, though I always felt the rules regarding exercising those options and what happens when you leave the company were too complex and arbitrary.

I always analyzed bonus distribution for my employees as a pie chart, so I could see which fraction of bonuses were going to managers, salaried employees, hourly employees, etc. The idea was to try to make sure the ratios of the bonuses in the pie chart were pretty close to the ratio of wages (which is also a general measure of productivity). That way it'd be pretty obvious if I or the managers were taking too much money out of the bag first, and grabbing a disproportionate share of the bonuses. (Actually I tried to bias it the other way - with non-managers getting a greater share of the bonus than the managers, who were already pretty well-paid.)

Unless you are literally playing in a sick persons bodily fluids, the risk is almost 0

As I said last time this topic came up, the fear is not that Ebola will spread by people playing in each others' bodily fluids. The fear is that it'll spread beyond a containment zone in Africa, then mutate into a form which can be spread through the air. That's what happens to the various strains of flu. It usually starts off in a form which jumps from animals to man via direct contact. That limits it to farmers and people who work directly with animals (e.g. butchers, cooks in restaurants). But then mutates into a form which spreads easily via the air, which is when it becomes a pandemic.

Of course Ebola is very different from the flu. It may be very difficult or impossible for Ebola to mutate into a form which can survive long enough in water droplets that sick people cough/sneeze into the air. But we don't know that. Given how deadly the disease is (50%-90% fatality rate, vs about 15% for the Spanish Flu that killed more people than WWI), it's a stupid assumption to make. That's why the international health agencies are assuming the worst-case and handling it as if it was going to mutate into something communicable via the air.