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.

If they'd put the diesel generators (and fuel) in different places, instead of all in a row in the same basement, the four reactors which melted down at Fukushima could've been shut down in a controlled manner despite some of the generators being swamped. Y'know, like the fifth operating reactor at Fukushima which had their diesel generators and fuel in a different location that was shut down safely. Putting redundant backup systems all in the same location just makes them vulnerable to simultaneously failing due to a single cause.

In fact, Samsung internationally hasn't been on the winning side - they've instead been stirring up shitstorms of controversy. Because what patents Samsung does assert are ones under FRAND, and it's lead to many a jurisdiction doing inquiries about asserting FRAND patents in this fashion, including the EU and Korea.

That's actually the bigger problem with everything that's been going on that supersedes Apple and Samsung. The total market value of a FRAND patent must exceed the total market value of a non-FRAND patent. The FRAND patent may have lower royalties per device, but it makes up in volume what it lacks in price. If the total value of a FRAND patent is less than a non-FRAND patent, then you've just destroyed all incentive for anyone to submit their patents under FRAND. Why in the world would anyone decrease the value of their patent by submitting it under FRAND?

Unfortunately this is precisely what was happening with Samsung losing because their patents were FRAND. The courts were getting lost in arguments over minutia and losing sight of this bigger picture. FRAND patents were being devalued relative to regular patents. The difference in pricing Apple was asking for (a few cents per device for FRAND, vs $15-$20 per device for regular patents) would've required FRAND be applicable to hundreds of times more devices than a regular patent before they'd be worth it. In other words, almost never worth it - a single licensing deal with a manufacturer with more than about 0.3% market share would've guaranteed keeping the patent non-FRAND was more profitable. It was setting us on course for a tech world where everything was proprietary and non-interoperable. That they've decided to drop all litigation before more damage was done is great news.

I am assuming that the answer is simply that they had to manually paint in the parts of the photos that were revealed when other parts were removed.

If you've used a recent version of Photoshop, their content-aware fill often does an amazing job at automatically filling in hidden backgrounds.

The Panama Canal - by virtue of being the only alternative to a trip around the tip of South America - can charge passage fees just less than the cost of a trip around South America. Consequently they make a huge profit margin off of operating it. A quick google search says it brings in about $2 billion/yr, but only costs about $600 million/yr to operate. So they've got a massive 233% profit margin.

Add a second canal, and suddenly they're not competing with a trip around South America. They're competing with each other. Unless they collude together to fix the prices so that they're essentially the same (divide traffic 50/50, which might actually be a good thing since I hear wait times at the Panama Canal can be a week or more), the price is going to drop to slightly higher than what it costs them to operate the more expensive canal. That is the nature of competition. e.g. If the profit margin drops to a still-high 50%, profit from the current level of traffic would be just $300m/yr, and it'll take them 167 years to recoup the $50b construction cost even if they were able to borrow that $50b interest-free. Since the Panama Canal is essentially paid for, the Nicaraguan canal would probably have higher costs and thus slimmer margins, and will likely take centuries to pay for its construction.

A Nicaraguan canal would have the advantage of allowing passage of larger-than-Panamax ships (ships designed so their width barely fits through the Panama Canal). But again, if they try to charge significantly more for such ships, operators will simply continue building Panamax ships. Any surcharge they add on has to be less than the money operators would save by using larger-than-Panamax ships. (Significantly more since such ships would have to be built in the first place.)

It'll be great for the rest of the world - cheaper transport costs, more capacity, faster travel. But could end up tanking both the Nicaraguan and Panamanian economies.

Why is everyone assuming this is an all-or-nothing proposition and picking the worst possible cases as a counterargument? I don't decide a spoon is useless because it does a terrible job at cutting steak. You should evaluate this idea based on whether it can improve education if applied judiciously, not focus on the cases where it won't help or could even hurt.

Being able to mix and match partial-semester courses doesn't mean every course needs to be mix and match. Certainly required sequential core subjects like calculus will be long enough that they don't need to be broken up. It was already 2 semesters when I went to undergrad, and no you weren't allowed to take Calc 2 before Calc 1 (unless you passed the AP exam, in which case you were allowed to skip Calc 1). But there were certain short topics in linear algebra I would've loved to recap (I was out for almost 3 weeks with the flu when I took the course in undergrad).

There is also no rule or law of physics says that an educational topic must be exactly one semester. Those of you who only went to undergrad may not see it because you're still mostly taking courses there which are deep enough to warrant a full semester or two. But during grad school, I've taken many courses which would've been better as half or 3/4 of a semester, but which had to be filled out with other stuff to make it fit within the semester system. One course I took covered the new material relevant to my thesis in about a month, then the remainder was an easy ride on cruise control because I had already learned it as part of another course in undergrad. I've even sat in a few classes for few weeks as a listener (i.e. I didn't get credits for it) because that was the only way to learn the part of the course material I needed without over-committing my time by taking the full course.

If you look specifically at the cases where this idea would help, I think it has a lot of merit.

Just test it with a Nexus 5. The ones you buy from Google are unlocked and there's only one version which works on AT&T, T-Mobile, and Sprint (technically the hardware is capable of mostly working on Verizon, except Verizon blacklists it). Just pop in a SIM card for the different carriers and test away.

Autonomy was audited by Deloitte. HP hired KPMG (who subcontracted Ernst & Young) to double-check Deloitte's audit. Those are three of the four biggest accounting firms in the world. All gave the green flag.

That's a nice sentiment, except this has nothing to do with Tech/IT workers. Most white collar jobs are exempt from the FLSA's overtime protections. Generally, salaried professionals and managers are exempt; in that respect Tech/IT workers are no different from other salaried professionals like doctors, lawyers, teachers, engineers, scientists, musicians. Salaried non-commissioned salespeople are one of the few white collar jobs which are non-exempt, and that's where Linkedin got in trouble - they weren't keep track of their overtime hours for some of their salespeople.