Why is it more cost effective to build a new Capitol than to build a water pipeline?

> from a security, stability or usable prospective

You and me both but most people only score feature count. If they've grown accustomed to some oddball feature for a few months they feel they can never use anything else.

That they went their entire lives without it before isn't relevant.

From a market perspective, rushing more features to market makes more people with money happy than getting a good product to market.

How do you know your mouse isn't faulty?

You're right about YouTube. I was thinking HEVC was one of their delivery formats, but apparently not.

Netflix definitely did use HEVC for delivery of some of its high-end content at one time. Whether they still do or not, I have no idea.

Either way, the fact that people are running into error messages suggests that there is some actual customer impact.

Except that nobody who buys one of their machines is going to think, "I could pay an extra $100 and my machine would work better." They're going to think, "This piece of s**t can't even do things that my cell phone from eight years ago can do. Why did I buy this, and why should I ever buy anything from this manufacturer in the future?"

This level of penny-wise, pound-foolish behavior is a sure way to permanently lose customers.

...or decoding...

You mean like... anyone who wants to watch Netflix or YouTube or any other streaming service's high-res content?

That's the inherent problem with classes, you have to teach 30+ students the same but they're not all capable of learning at the same pace or in the same way.

Kids who can't keep up fall behind, while those that are faster get bored and start to misbehave so they get labelled as troublemakers.
You also have the peer pressure from other kids, who will mock or even bully the top and bottom percentages of the class respectively, discouraging them from participating.

Catering to each child and teaching them at their own pace is obviously going to work best, but it doesn't scale to a school system.
If one or both parents is free to teach the kids that's great, but there are many cases where they aren't - some parents don't give a shit and are happy to send their kids off to school, many parents have to work and simply don't have time to teach the kids even if they would be willing/able to do so, and some simply don't have the ability to teach.

It sounds like Nokia, once a great company, thought they would just pay up? But I read elsewhere that a patent troll called Avanci was behind the shakedowns?

If HP and Dell begin to make this more common and could encourage Lenovo and Apple to follow suit, then the "default H.anything" crowd might start to think seriously about moving to AV1 to drop the revenue of the trolls to zero over time. Hardware support for decode is mostly complete with more CPU's bringing encode online recently. I remember when Steve Jobs went to bat against the trolls for h.264 decode; Apple should do it in his memory.

Separately, Google seriously needs to flex against patent trolls when required. Heck, Lou Rossman is more aggressive than Google on defending the community against patent trolls.

Speaking of which USPTO intends to stop challenges to patent trolls and maybe you, dear reader, should spend five minutes to fire off an email to help EFF try to head this one off at the pass.

I used to have many magazine subscriptions.

They would each mail me a reminder to renew my subscription.

If I sent them a check my subscription would continue. If I didn't send them a check my subscription would end.

I didn't have auto- anything. I didn't have to call to cancel.

The same went for when I was a paperboy. You pay for your week or you stop getting papers. When you remember to pay you start getting papers again.

I think this is how subscriptions have worked for hundreds of years, with auto-renew on a payment card developing in the past couple decades.

Without a contractual definition the corpus of caselaw would very likely date to throughout the history of the country.

When I see things like "facial age verification", I have major concerns, whether we're talking about a site like Roblox (whatever that is — I don't know, and don't really care), social media, porn, or any other site. How are you going to do it without violating the privacy of every person who creates an account? And how are you going to verify that the person using the account is the person who created it without causing an even bigger privacy violation?

We do need some sort of age verification system, but we need it to be designed in a way that protects privacy. I have less than zero faith in any individual website to come up with such a system, and approximately zero faith in any individual government to do so. There really needs to be an international age verification working group that spends the next five years coming up with a system, then pressures everyone to implement it.

Doing it the other way around, with companies or governments shoveling bad, partial, or even dangerous solutions to the problem down everyone's throats, can only result in greater levels of push-back by the general public towards a proper scheme if someone ever creates it.

They did review and change the policy. Just too late to do any good. The point is that evidence-based medicine has to be treated as a starting point for diagnosis and treatment decisions, not a rigid decision tree.

Of course, none of that makes the CDC's new claims that "vaccines don't cause autism" isn't an evidence-based statement any less absurd. You can't ever realistically prove definitively that X cannot cause Y, because that would require knowing that there exists no combination of recognizable human genetics in which X would cause Y. Evidence-based medicine would mean assuming that X cannot cause Y until evidence exists to prove that it does or can, which has not happened.

What they're doing is rejecting evidence-based medicine based on a belief that the anecdotal information they have should be taken more seriously than the broad evidence to the contrary. This would be fine if that anecdotal information were based on actual brain scans prior to vaccination that showed that the vaccine triggered a change, but it isn't. Rather, involves mistaking correlation for causation, and a post hoc ergo propter hoc fallacy, with a complete lack of any actual plausible explanation for how vaccines could cause autism beyond some vague hand-wavey pseudoscience.

And on top of that, we have a bunch of people who lack enough understanding of the scientific method and/or lack enough understanding of the subject to recognize when it is not being followed properly, and they are getting misled by charlatans with a political or personal agenda, presented in the form of pseudoscientific bulls**t papers that don't hold up to even modest scrutiny by someone with limited understanding of the subject or the scientific method, much less actual scientists in the field.

We also have a bunch of journals that publish papers outside their area of expertise, relying on outside experts that are in league with the papers' authors, and all sorts of other fun scientific fraud, which further contributes to this problem.

I'm not sure how to solve this problem, because it seems like a large percentage of the public simply lacks basic critical thinking skills and the ability to read over a paper and think, "Yes, but did you consider the following twelve common factors that could influence both the proposed cause and effect?" and realize that the paper is garbage. But a good starting point would be to pressure the news media across the political spectrum to hire actual science writers who UNDERSTAND SCIENCE to cover science-based stories.

Another good starting point would be to get more science-based shows on PBS that can talk about these issues and explain them to people and debunk bulls**t every week.

Unfortunately, evidence-based medicine has become a code word for "treat everyone with the same illness identically even when the data doesn't support doing so. That's how I ended up fighting a c. diff. infection. I was hospitalized for a related condition, and the first day of antibiotics put me at no fever, but after a day, I got a fever again, and I asked if the antibiotic had changed, and they said no, but maybe the ER gave me something different. They checked, and determined that yes, I had been on a different antibiotic in the ER, but said that they should keep the current antibiotics, and used "evidence-based medicine" as the reason. I had my doubts.

They were wrong. And six months later, the general standards for treating the condition I came in with changed, and they now treat it with the antibiotic that the ER gave me instead of one of the two that the hospital put me on afterwards, precisely because the standard treatment had a tendency to make c. diff. take over.

Whoops.

So I'm all for evidence-based medicine as a starting point, but when you realize it isn't behaving normally, you should adjust accordingly. Otherwise, patients suffer enormously.

But in theory, I do agree with you that evidence-based medicine is better than evidence-free medicine based on gut feelings and assumptions that correlation means causation and other fallacious reasoning.

When Google sells a 24-inch tablet, I'll care about Google being able to sell me a replacement that can do this. In the meantime, I want this feature on older, non-Google Android devices. :-)

Actually, I was remembering wrong there. Although TB can spread in other ways, it is primarily an airborne pathogen. So the biggest way to reduce the spread would be to add central heat and air with fresh air mixing and reduce the number of people sharing air for long periods of time. The second best way is contact tracing and prophylactic treatment.

But to add further to the comment about vaccine effectiveness, bacterial vaccines can be at least somewhat effective at preventing disease, e.g. the bacterial meningitis vaccine has something like 65% to 85% effectiveness, depending on age group and other factors, which is way better than nothing.

The TB vaccine only reduces infection risk by 20%. And when you're exposed frequently, that's barely even useful. The reason for this is that it hides from the immune system, which, as a result, takes a long time to start reacting to the bacteria, allowing it time to multiply for a while before you get a reaction. In mouse models, the reaction takes a whopping two weeks.

TB actually infects macrophages (primitive immune cells), and manages to literally hide inside them by adapting its exterior to maintain a neutral pH and by synthesizing enzymes that prevent the macrophages from maturing and that slow down apoptosis, which otherwise would release the bacteria, which would trigger T-cell activation. It's unclear whether there is a realistic way to prevent this delay.

It also plays tricks like triggering certain antigen-specific CD4+ T cells to the point of functional exhaustion while reducing antigens that would trigger other CD4+ cells so that they don't get detected. It somehow brings mesenchymal stem cells (blood vessel/lymphatic/connective tissue precursors) to the infection site, which further inhibit stem cells.

Presumably any better vaccine would have to either convince CD8+ T cells to react even without macrophages recognizing that something is wrong (perhaps by increasing the number of antigens that are included so that they are more likely to recognizing an antigen on the bacterium itself directly, early in the infection process, assuming this is even possible), convince CD4+ T cells to trigger macrophages in spite of signals to not do so, or overcome one of the design limits of the immune system (preventing T-cell exhaustion, increasing random macrophage apoptosis without an infection, etc.), some of which would likely require changing the person's DNA.

So fast diagnosis (universal health care and widespread rapid TB testing), contact tracing, etc. are critical to bringing it under control, and other prevention, such as not having large numbers of people in constant contact in areas with limited air circulation can also help. Meanwhile, vaccines, although not entirely infeasible, are likely to be more of a long shot.

It can in some cases, depending on various factors like the codebase it's working with, the nature of the feature and how well you describe it.

You will often need to refine the prompts, or prompt it further to address bugs or things it decided to implement in a strange way. It also tends to work better with code bases that are smaller or more modular, and with code that was developed using an ai assistant rather than existing code bases.

You're right about it being like junior developers, it's good for getting mundane things done but does often need a lot of guidance.