A couple people getting sick every year out of 400 million isn't an outbreak, it just looks that way because the news is capable of reporting every single incident now.

There might actually be a biological reason. I was watching a documentary on the brain on NatGeo, and they brought up a study on chimps while discussing the general differences between the male and female brain. They gave chimps who had lived without human interaction some human toys. Even among chimps without our cultural influence, the males predominantly chose the trucks and the females predominantly chose the dolls.

This was like a decade ago so I don't know the significance of that study or if it has been debunked, but I always found it interesting.

They did this for us too, in North Carolina. Are you in a AT&T UVerse area? I think they are scared of that now that the internet speeds that go with it don't royally suck.

Most people don't plan for a lock-in. I understand that you're an apple fan, but those of us not stuck in that ecosystem don't have that problem. All you're doing by buying everything from one company is getting ready to get screwed should that company start throwing fecal matter. Spreading it out and buying items on merit, not brand, gives you insurance should that company fall from you favor. Better to have to replace one item because you were spurned than have to replace everything and/or get stuck in stockholm syndrome.

This is pretty inaccurate. Their approach with the XBox and DirectX has allowed for much less painful porting, giving the game producers a 2-for-1 hit. If you recall the time before the XBox, there were a lot of PC games and a lot of console games, but most console games were exclusive to the medium. Today is a completely different story with significantly fewer console exclusives and more similar hardware inside consoles and PCs. Gaming drives a lot of Windows sales, and at any point where Windows lost that mindshare, it'd be a bad day for Microsoft.

While this may be true in some cases, I've found that there's a conundrum to just pinning it to the Dunning Kruger effect. Extremely intelligent individuals get sucked into this stuff on a very regular basis, and what I've seen is that its the opposite of the Dunning Kruger for them: They overestimate the ability and intelligence of those involved in the conspiracy itself. To them, the orchestrators of the conspiracy and their thousands, sometimes millions of cohorts, are so intelligent that they can spin this web without a whistleblower making it out of the perfectly managed social structure within the conspiracy. Its a huge conundrum, they are both overestimating the intelligence of millions while also underestimating their ability to cover up the trails leaving 'trololo' hints all over the place.

Well, either that or they are projecting their desires of how they'd act if they were part of a conspiracy onto those they condemn. Would would be hella funny if it was the case, conspiracy theorists fantasizing about being part of a conspiracy themselves. Imagine how ferverously they'd react to that psychological conclusion.

I appreciate you taking the criticism with open arms. This weekend I had quite the opposite reaction from someone else in person, which was very discouraging to me. Your command of the english language is exceptional so I wouldn't have guessed you weren't a native English speaker. I don't think the use of the commas was incorrect in any way, just presented in a form that's difficult to wade through. The reason I mentioned lawyers is I have to read legal documents at work sometimes, which use commas in a similar fashion. Its just difficult because heavy use of commas is like reading a bunch of nested IF statements, making concentration a key factor in being able to understand the writing style.

According to the WSJ, Pandora had 1.06 billion listening hours in April 2012. To get the average number of listeners, divide it by the hours in a month and we get 1.4 million concurrent average listeners. Assuming a song is 4 minutes long, so 15 songs per hour, there's 21.5 million songs played per hour. 21.5/1.5 * 1652.74 = $23,700 per hour paid by Pandora in royalties. I don't know how streaming costs are negotiated, but at this rate and assuming only 10% of the cost is royalties, it'd cost pandora over $5m a day to operate? Does that seem reasonable? To me...no.

The way the summary is worded is just poor journalism. Slashdot has no specific geographic target so its reasonable to expect things like this to be properly identified.

Something that also bothers me is that they tend to not treat summaries independently. The best example of this is Raspberry Pi. Since its posted so much, they expect everyone to know what it means when they write a summary about it. Anyone new to the topic is likely to be flabbergasted until they google the Raspberry Pi about page.

Maybe I'm just a young whippersnapper, but your posts are unbearable to parse because they read like a 1700's legal document. I'm guessing you're a lawyer of some sort? Just a small word of advice, but audience effects presentation. Its very difficult for most to parse language the way a lawyer can so I wouldn't be surprised if I'm not the only one who got lost in your comma minefield.

Beowulf comments to Watson "Your Cray goes to college." Ooooooo burnn

They are petrified of Netflix. I got a lower rate than he did for the same exact service because I wanted to retain the iternet and drop the cable subscription, saying I don't watch TV enough and will use Netflix. My total bill is $55. I think they do this because while I don't watch much TV, it ups their subscriber number for advertising negotiations, and gives them an avenue to make a little money off me in on demand movies.

Its still important to teach the pure forms, otherwise the mixed forms will never properly develop. Karate dojo:UFC is as Physics:Engineering. The former is one tool in the latter's belt. In this sense, the schools are the 'art' and the UFC is the practical application of many arts.

Well, moreso because a few people made bank in the apple app store. The same reason millions of people spend money in Vegas, app development on closed ecosystems is a gambler's game.

Its made its way into schools, which is nice, because its one of those books that is very entertaining but also very enlightening and informative. Its a really good peice of work and is really informative to those of us who haven't had to deal with epidemics in our lifetime.