No -- you're setting up a false dichotomy. Google could have easily put a little check box or something in the password dialog saying "Remember password to authorize ALL purchases for the next 30 minutes?" kinda like the "keep me logged in" box on webmail accounts or something. That would solve your problem AND make very clear what was happening to users.

After the whole Apple nonsense regarding the exact same issue, that would be at least a minimal attempt to clarify things to users.

That's true. But, in fairness, I'm having trouble thinking of other toys for kids where you can say "Here kid - play this game with the Smurfs," and 30 minutes later accumulate a $300 bill for Smurfberries or whatever.

The parents should have paid closer attention, but the normal assumption when you buy a toy at the toy store is that it won't suck hundreds of dollars from your wallet AFTER you buy it for your kid. Many kids apps today are deliberately designed to exploit the cluelessness of parents and kids to make money this exact way.

Aye! I was with Verizon for three years, but after the BS they tried to pull over Network Neutrality and their firm stance on forcing me to buy a data plan--despite using minimal data (that I only used because I was paying for it, not because I needed it)--because I had an outdated smartphone, I decided to switch. I chose T-Mobile for the exact same reason, getting the pay-as-you-go plan. (They also said they don't force the data plan on smartphones, which I believe, but I got a dumbphone so I couldn't test that.)

Unfortunately I fumbled the switch over and had my number ported too early, meaning I had to pay Verizon's cancellation fee. This revealed to me just how horrible their customer service was (until then I'd had mostly pleasant experiences with them the few times I had to call) in trying to get my last month properly pro-rated.[1] However, now that all is settled and done, I paid $200 for signing up with T-Mobile (half service, half for the phone+taxes), plus an extra $20 to Verizon over what I would have paid for my final month; that was back in October, and since then I haven't had to fill the phone once, meaning I've so far saved $170 (Verizon was approx. $80/mo). I still have >$50 on the phone, too, so this works great for someone like me who makes few calls/texts. And, theoretically, I can easily go to a monthly plan (still no contract) if I think I'll be using a lot in a short time frame, then back down to pay-as-you-go (I imagine I'll lose what minutes I have left when I first change, though.)

[1] WARNING TO EXISTING VERIZON USERS: If you have a contract and wind up in a similar situation as I (porting the number, cancelling the service, being charged the cancellation fee, and then trying to get time paid for pro-rated back), you must explicitly call and tell customer service that your phone number was ported or they won't consider it "cancelled". Their customer service tried to wiggle out of pro-rating me because I didn't do that, despite calling on three different occasions from the ported number, confirming on all three calls (if quickly) that I had full changed over, and them already charging me the cancellation fee. In the end I got my money, but it was a pain in the ass because their customer service kept saying they would do X but not do it or only half do it.

Yeah, not so much. From the summary of his model as described in the paper:

It's a BIG stretch to say that anything about his cosmological theory has much in common with ours. By that measure, we might as well point out that Ptolemy's model of the solar system was "damn good" and "just like ours" (or Copernicus's) because it happened to have planets and a sun in it... forget about how anything in the model works or the philosophy underneath it.

No, not really. If we make a number of assumptions in translating his ideas into math, most of which he didn't specify, then we end up with a model (partly imagined by the authors) which has some of these properties.

Don't get me wrong: as someone who does research involving the history of science, I find this guy's ideas very interesting for what they say about medieval philosophy and "science." And this article is interesting for trying sort out what a worked-out model would look like in modern science.

But let's not try to pretend that what this project came up with is really just an implementation of a medieval model, nor that this has anything significant in common with modern cosmology.

I'll sure 2nd that!

I tend to agree with the both are at fault scenario here.

But I'd be remiss to not mention one of apples former bad moves, trying to milk the makers of firewire equipt gear with a per socket royalty fee, the exact amount of which I have long since forgotten, after having effectively making it public domain by publishing the specs so every one would get it right.

In my limited experience with a Sony Handi-cam, sort of a compromise between very bad vhs, and hidef, a 720p digital video camera that recorded digitally on a metallic formulation of hi-8 tape, the firewire port on it Just Worked(TM), even for remote controlling the camera, using the now abandoned "kino" software package on linux. That camera is pretty good, putting its output on a dvd requires about half its sharpness to be thrown away in any format that will play on consumer grade dvd players.

Firewire had a huge advantage in that it did Just Work, and only one disadvantage that turned out to be pretty important, it didn't daisy chain like USB can.

USB, yet today, doesn't always work, primarily because there are so many excrement products for sale that should never have been allowed in the same room with a plastics molding machine.

But IMO, apple shot themselves in the foot on that one, guaranteeing that the standard would die with their outrageously priced royalty fee, so it died perhaps 5 years prematurely. Had they not done that, reneging of that unspoken promise of royalty free usage, its conceivable that it might have become daisy-chainable with hubs like USB is, but no one is going to put ANY R&D into something like firewire that is so encumbered by corporate greed. Their jacking it up to 800mbs was the swan song and a waste of time and resources. 400 worked just fine for hidef video work.

What we need now is a test suite for USB that will tell us instantly if that $10 USB dongle we just bought is fully compliant and will Just Work when we plug it in. But AFAIK, we don't have that yet. So we buy it, try it, and toss it when it doesn't work, because it costs more to take it back for a refund than the refund is worth, and somebody making shitty USB stuff gets to count the sale, when what they really need is a 4 year old kicking them in the shins.

It's a shame considering that, as usual, a decentralized approach would be far superior. We should abolish final exams, and institute entrance exams for jobs. That way how you come by the knowledge required to perform your job doesn't matter. Unfortunately, this wouldn't help the rich get any richer; Quite the opposite actually. Thus, I don't delude myself; As history has shown, what's best for society is rarely willingly adopted by it.

Sure! Any color you like, so long as it's black-ops.

Prove your claim. I have only evidence against it.

... says the person who obviously wouldn't end up driving to work in the dark for many months of the year.

A lot of people have to get up and head to work at 8am or 7am or even earlier. Having darkness during the morning rush hour tends to increase accidents for example, since light cues aren't there to make everyone more awake and alert. (I think I've seen stats that show these seasonal variations in accidents.)

Depending on your region, that extra hour can make a significant difference in the schedule and road conditions you're likely to encounter going to work. I don't have a long commute at all, but it still feels so much better in the fall when I can actually see in the morning again when standard time returns, rather than being lost in the early morning twilight (perhaps also with icier roads in cold regions, etc.).

On the other hand, I'm pretty sure there are studies showing increased accidents during the spring forward shift as well, due to people being exhausted and off their sleep schedule. I guess we can't win.

Agricultural workers have consistently opposed daylight savings. It screws up their schedules. In growing seasons, etc., they need to make use of all the daylight they have anyway, so they'd rise with the sun, no matter what the clocks said. Daylight savings is for the convenience of city-dwelling people who don't live on natural schedules, and who rely on artificial timekeeping to allow them to take advantage of daylight hours. (Otherwise, they'd just sleep for a few early morning hours, and still go to work at 9am or whatever, rather than making use of more of that time.)

You seem not to understand the whole point of a standardized time system. In your world, I'd not only have to remember that business X is usually open from 9-5, but whether that business changes its hours for the summer, and when exactly that shift in time happens, etc.

And that's just the beginning of the problem. What happens when your employer changes hours for the summer, but your daycare doesn't? Or if they change their hours at different times of the year? How do you coordinate running errands, picking up the dry-cleaning, going to the bank, etc., when you have to remember the nuances of every business's changing schedule?

In case you've never encountered this, there are in fact many businesses that change hours for summer or other seasons. Often these are businesses that depend on daylight, because they are located outdoors, or because the summer weather makes them more popular, or whatever. Some just recognize that people are more likely to go out late in the summer.

In general, though, most businesses who do this don't shift summer hours (aside from the daylight savings time shift), but rather expand hours to allow for more business in the extra hours of daylight in the evening.

In any case, you're making incorrect assumptions based on incorrect information about the rationale for daylight savings, and then you make ridiculous proposals that would result in a much more complex system than the current one. Sounds like a perfect recipe for "+5 insightful."

Do you have kids? If not, have you ever been around a small child? How the heck do you think most people learn to talk, to walk, to read, etc.? Sorry, but repetition is essential for any skill acquisition. Toddlers often learn to read by reading the exact same words in the exact same books dozens or even hundreds of times. Generally, it's a better idea to keep introducing the same word many times in multiple contexts, but repetition is essential -- and in the process, generalized skills acquisition happens. Before you know it, kids begin to sound out related words with similar weird spellings, etc.

I'll grant you that many mathematics textbooks and many teachers focus too much on stuff that's too repetitive, rather than making use of more variety in problems.

And even though you dismissed my concern about how you and I absorb things quickly as a "different" problem, it's not. Some toddlers are smarter than others and have greater abilities at abstraction -- they can be exposed to a particular idea or thing just a few times, and they immediately get it. Others have to do things dozens or hundreds of times to acquire the same skill.

You happen to be in the small subset of people who "get" things quickly. Congratulations. But thinking that repetition isn't an essential part of the learning process for the vast majority of people is, frankly, a bit delusional. There are all sorts of tricks that good teachers have employed for thousands of years to make that repetition more interesting or enjoyable for kids, but it's the main way most kids acquire actual skills.

Look, have fun enjoying the advanced world of math for yourself. It's fun to play in; it really is. But the vast majority of people in the world simply lack the cognitive skills or discipline or interest to get to that level... and that is NOT some great failing in the educational system. It's just accepting the fact that people are different, have different skills, and have different interests.

Believe it or not, as a teacher I spent a great deal of time doing the very things you seem to value. I worked together with a couple other teachers to do a complete redesign of the intro algebra curriculum in a school district which would use lots of interesting exploratory activities, multimedia materials, etc. to get away from "traditional" approaches to math. I also taught "conceptual physics" courses to high school kids for a few years, designing open-ended exploratory experiments with very little intense math or drilling in traditional "problems."

But guess what -- these courses were deliberately designed for the 80-90% of kids who actually didn't need facility in math or algebra or mathematical physics. They would never use it in their lives, so spending time doing the algorithms would be stupid and a waste of their time. Instead, kids might go on after doing a "conceptual algebra" course to take a general math elective (rather than algebra II or whatever), which would in fact involve a lot of fairly repetitive scenarios to prepare them for math usage in the real world -- e.g., designing a budget, evaluating loan and mortgage terms, calculating savings and investment returns, etc. Those sorts of problems do actually require a certain kind of "algorithmic literacy" and fluency in certain mathematical skills, divorced from the world of "higher math" reasoning.

For the other small percentage of students bound for college in math or science, they needed to spend more time on regimented algorithms, because otherwise they'd never be able to do more advanced problems... just like your average toddler would never be able to read a book without repetition. I absolutely agree with you that we need to make changes to how most math curricula work, but your "solutions" and ideas are rather ignorant of how most people actually learn, what they are capable of, and what the utility and goals of basic mathematical study should be.

"We're tracking every flying object in the sky." -- Bullshit. I guess that was just grandstanding from NORAD and also demonstrates the futility of the NRO. How many billions have Americans alone spent to ensure this can never happen already? I mean, was every bit of that post 9/11 "security" just posturing and scaremongering?

Egg meet face, world. If you ask me, having a large passenger jet disappear in mid air just goes to show how much we've squandered in the guise of security when without actually getting any safety at all.

Yeah, and two other egregious errors in that sentence, too.

Or maybe we just need to understand the true meaning of the sentence: "then right a new paper sighting the published one and submit to a more prestigious journal"

In other words, I take a new paper in the works and make it "right" by including research literally gleaned from the previous paper while staring at it ("sighting") and copying it.

Perhaps the GGP was actually talking about plagiarism and falsifying research to fit an agenda.

A few points: (1) A well-structured set of problems in a basic math textbook is often intended to gradually allow students to work through various difficulties. The first few problems start with some new idea or skill, then a few more introduce some complications and special cases, then the next few combine it with previous knowledge and skills, and finally we arrive at greater fluency in using the new material. I, probably like you, never needed that many exercises to figure things out. I probably could have done 10% of the problems assigned, and I still would have absorbed the new material. But as someone who has actually taught high-school math, I can also tell you that you and I are NOT the norm. I tried not to assign too many repetitious problems, too. But many students need to work through at least some of this build-up of skills when incorporating a new idea into existing knowledge.

(2) Even for cases where there is more-or-less repetition to learn skills, it is sometimes useful to learn skills. This is different from memorizing facts (though with really basic arithmetic, there is a need for actual memorization too). Basic math is often about internalizing algorithms, to give you tools to be able to higher math. If you don't internalize these algorithms, higher math will become increasingly difficult to follow and understand.

(3) Also, sometimes the algorithm IS the goal. For >99% of people in the world, math is only useful as a tool, not some sort of higher-level "play in an abstract world and have cool insights" kind of thing. They need to be able to do basic manipulation of numbers and symbols to solve very particular types of problems -- with real-world applications. That should be the focus in math education for those not actually going on into higher math -- no need to do all sorts of wacky advanced algebra or memorize stupid facts about geometry in high school... let's teach students how to solve real world problems, and make sure they practice those skills to internalize them.

It sounds like abstract ideas came quickly to you. They came quickly to me as well. But that's not true for many students. Part of the problem is our curriculum structure, which seems to assume all students past middle-school math should be headed toward higher math, instead of focusing on applications and skills that could be useful. But part of the issue is that many students need significantly more repetition to get things, or they need a gradual build-up in difficulty when dealing with a new idea.

It's not always "garbage."