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Comment Re:Pilots must remain in control (Score 4, Interesting) 385

Sure, you can't remove all risk. But it's at least possible that the guy in this case did not have the kind of crazy required to be physically attacking people, or looking them in the eye while killing them. He did after all wait for the opportunity to make sure he had the cockpit to himself, and he didn't make threats, or indeed say anything to anyone during the incident, so it doesn't seem to me like he was up for any kind of face-to-face confrontation. Maybe just the fact of having someone else there would have been enough.

Comment Re:Move more, eat less (Score 1) 496

Must have been obvious, since I dealt with it in the first line of my reply. You seem to be resistant to the idea that piling way too much food on your plate is a good way to get fat; I'd suggest that's a problem right there. It's not necessary to know exactly the right amount you need. At home, I tend to take very conservative portions. After I've finished my portion, I can take a moment, see how I feel, whether I want to eat more, and what I want to eat more of. I'd suggest this is a better strategy than piling way too much food on your plate in the first place, and then trying to stop yourself from eating it all.

Comment Re:Move more, eat less (Score 2, Insightful) 496

Unless you have more on your plate than you need (in which case there's a better obvious solution to the problem), I don't see where this gets you in terms of calorific intake; eating slowly doesn't change the number of calories on the plate. It might make a difference to the rate of increase of blood glucose, which has its own benefits, but I doubt it will make much difference to that, because its the rate of digestion that's going to determine blood glucose levels.

Comment Why terraform? (Score 3, Interesting) 228

Plenty of people on this planet rarely if ever go outside; people live indoors, work indoors, shop indoors, and take much of their recreation indoors. So I don't really see the reasoning behind the assumption that we can't colonise another planet without terraforming it. Mars has no magnetic field to divert solar radiation, so even if you did terraform it pretty good, you'd still get fried; KSR solved that in his books by eventually genetically modifying the colonists to be able to self-repair the radiation damage, but who knows when such a solution will be feasible in reality. Build your colony underground as much as possible, and you gain protection from everything that is hostile about the Martian environment; the atmosphere, the temperature, the toxic stuff, and the radiation all become much more controllable. Sure, it's a bit harder building underground, but not nearly as hard as terraforming.

Comment Re:Swap drive now? (Score 1) 204

Okay, those numbers that you quoted are very arbitrary, I'd like to see anything to back that up. The near-instantaneous seek time of an SSD compared to a mechanical disk ought to be a major factor when it comes to swap performance, far more so than throughput. In any case, there are many SSD-only systems now, in which case the swap space is on the SDD whether you like it or not, so there's certainly not an unreasonable thing to try.

Comment Re:Alpha not so great. (Score 3, Informative) 210

For instance, "How do I plot a course from earth to Uranus?"

The really tragic thing about this particular example is that Alpha could just return (and indeed to any question involving Uranus):

"To plot a course to my anus, you're going to need to start by buying me a drink"

Thanks folks, I'll be here all night.

Comment Not a study (Score 5, Informative) 305

Very misleading summary (yeah, duh). This is not a study, it is an editorial. Someone's opinion. It says so right at the top. Note at the bottom of the article; "Provenance and peer review: Commissioned; not externally peer reviewed."

It's incredibly misleading to cite this article as a "study", all it is is an opinion piece article, nothing more.

Comment Re:Liability? (Score 2) 271

I'd suggest it might be because of the support costs of all those people having trouble logging in, forgetting their passwords etc, or getting compromised because they wrote down their hard-to-remember password, if they went more secure. My bank allows a weak password (plus some nominated characters from a secondary "memorable phrase"), and no requirement to change it ever. TBH I'm pretty cool with that because I can remember both, so if I'm ever caught without access to my password manager, I won't be screwed. In order to add a new payment recipient, they do require a code sent to my registered phone to be entered. I feel it's a reasonable balance between security and convenience.

Businesses

How, and Why, Apple Overtook Microsoft 458

HughPickens.com writes James B. Stewart writes in the NYT that in 1998 Bill Gates said in an interview that he "couldn't imagine a situation in which Apple would ever be bigger and more profitable than Microsoft" but less than two decades later, Apple, with a market capitalization more than double Microsoft's, has won. The most successful companies need a vision, and both Apple and Microsoft have one. But according to Stewart, Apple's vision was more radical and, as it turns out, more farsighted. Where Microsoft foresaw a computer on every person's desk, Apple went a big step further: Its vision was a computer in every pocket. "Apple has been very visionary in creating and expanding significant new consumer electronics categories," says Toni Sacconaghi. "Unique, disruptive innovation is really hard to do. Doing it multiple times, as Apple has, is extremely difficult." According to Jobs' biographer Walter Isaacson, Microsoft seemed to have the better business for a long time. "But in the end, it didn't create products of ethereal beauty. Steve believed you had to control every brush stroke from beginning to end. Not because he was a control freak, but because he had a passion for perfection." Can Apple continue to live by Jobs's disruptive creed now that the company is as successful as Microsoft once was? According to Robert Cihra it was one thing for Apple to cannibalize its iPod or Mac businesses, but quite another to risk its iPhone juggernaut. "The question investors have is, what's the next iPhone? There's no obvious answer. It's almost impossible to think of anything that will create a $140 billion business out of nothing."

Comment Re:This is the solution how? (Score 2) 66

Content is key whether it is online or in a book. Handing out hardware doesn’t solve the content problem.

Good thing they're not just handing out hardware then.

FTA: "As with Sunward Park, the schools in this new pilot will be using a centralised portal developed by Bramley’s MIB Software for managing tablets and aggregating educational content into a single portal. MIB’s backend pulls in CAPS aligned digital textbooks from the likes of Via Afrika as well as extra resources from around the web."

Comment Re:everytime this is tired (Score 2) 66

Just because it's been done wrong in the past doesn't mean it can't be done right in the future, although it doesn't bode well that this particular project appears to have been rushed, and significant questions not answered in detail. However there's nothing wrong with the theory; access to textbooks, collaboration and communications tools, monitoring of students progress while they perform activities (and as the article mentions, monitoring of teachers as well), the list of potential benefits to using tablets or laptops as a central educational tool is long. At some point, someone is going to get it right and actually realize many of the potential advantages.

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