It's a nice idea but it's not practical. You can't be running the GPS receiver 24/7 or you'll kill the battery.

Though personally I don't see what the big fuss is about. If someone wants to surreptitiously record people there are much less obvious "spy" cameras already readily available.

Well I'm not an expert, but I'm pretty sure that Google is legally entitled to to tell MS that they're not allowed to release software that users their trademarked name and logo.

They're also under no obligation to allow MS to continue accessing their web services. If MS is using a publicly accessible access point I think they would be completely within their rights to start blocking such access which would render MS's app completely useless.

Then answer me this: suppose I have a bitcoin. What can I do with it other than trade it to someone else in exchange for something? If the answer is nothing then a bitcoin has no intrinsic value.

If a bitcoin is only useful because other people are willing to give me stuff in exchange for it, then "the market" (the people that are doing the exchanging) absolutely control what a bitcoin is "worth". It's worth exactly what "the market" is willing to give me in exchange for it, no more, no less.

(Appologies for the double post. Forgot to login before hitting submit)

I'm not sure I'd agree with that. The computing time that goes into a bitcon is more akin to having a fixed production cost not an intrinsic value (although "fixed" migth also not be entirely accurate as the power of computing hardware, cost of electiricy and oppurtunity cost of what else that hardware could be doing probably varies drastically over time, but that's neither here nor there).

In this context intrinsic value means that you are able to use it for some practical purpose other than as a medium of exchange. In that sense I would argue that bitcoin has no intrinsic value. After all you can't take the bitcoin and extract from it the computing power that went into making it and use that computing power for some other purpose. If you want something with real intrinsic value think oil or wheat.

Now that's not to disparage bitcoin in any way. One of the things you actually look for in a medium of exchange is something that has limited intrinsic value. People tend to hoard currencies and you don't want actual useful stuff sitting around gathering dust in a bank vault.

Well I'm no expert in education but I expect the conversation would go something like this:

Professor:Hey Bob, I see on the computer here that you haven't been doing the required reading. Are you having trouble understanding something?

Bob:No, I've just already studied this subject in the past.

Professor:OK, great. Let me know if you have any questions.

That is of course assuming it was used properly. I highly doubt any Professor worth the name is just going to summarily flunk every student that the computer says didn't do the reading.

Hmmm well according to this something like two thirds of America's debt is owed to other Americans. Some of them will not be impressed if the government tries to welsh on the debt. And I highly doubt you're going to turn the army on them.

So you're saying that you don't improve with experience in your job?

I need an account at your bank

Step 1: myAccount.withdraw(-100000);

Step 2: ???

Step 3: Profit!

But seriously I think you're engaging in Reductio ad absurdum here. Most pragmatic people will totally agree that trivial code, where it's very obvious what the code does and why, doesn't need extra comments.

However the more complicated your code is the harder it becomes to make it "self documenting". ie I don't think anyone wants a method named

withdraw Positive Amount Or ThrowOverdrawnException IfAmount GreaterThan Balance Or ThrowInvalidArgument Exception IfAmount LessThan Zero (double amount)

Thank you Jello Biafra.

It isn't logically prohibited for people to change their views over time, but I wouldn't call it a logical fallacy to argue that such changes in opinion might be considered hypocritical and/or cynical.

Speaking of logical fallacies are you familiar with the concept of a false dichotomy?

I think you and I are in furious agreement (not sure if you meant to reply to me or the GP).

If the "C" guy does everything then he's not specializing in a single task. He's doing two tasks, the C task and SQL task. Similarly if two "C" guys do the whole thing they're still doing half of two different task. But if you put the "C" guy and "SQL" guy together, now each of them can do one thing, and one thing only, and the whole job gets done faster.

Now, has the group performed more work than the "sum of the individual contributors". I would say hell yes (as you illustrate, the same job gets done in 10 man hours vs 25). However the argument that the GP was making (or at least what I understood him to be saying) was that if we define the output of group to be "the sum of the amount contributed to the group by each individual member of the group" then the output of the group can't be greater then the sum of the individual members of the group. Now to me this seems like a meaningless tautology, so I'm not sure why he would bring it up, but I suppose that it's factually true. Of course it's entirely possible that I've completely misconstrued what he was trying to say.

But I can't have each person specializing in a single task without a group to make sure that all tasks have somebody that can specialize in them. Thus having people work together as a group makes them more efficient, which was I think the original point.

Now does that mean that the group can produce more than "the sum of each person". I guess that depends on how you define "the sum of each person". I was taking it to mean "the amount that could be produced by a single person completely by themselves, multiplied by the number of people in the group". Your definition seems to be "the sum of the amount contributed to the group by each individual member of the group".

However using your definition means that it is mathematically impossible to have a group produce more than sum of it's members (because that's the definition of what the groups produces) even without the Ringelmann effect, so it's not fair to say that the Ringelmann is the cause and I'm not sure why you brought it up.

Not sure I agree with that. Having a team means you can take advantage of things like specialization of labor. So even if each individual team member is not working as hard, the overall output can still be increased.

There's a reason that assembly lines are much more efficient than having each individual build each unit from start to finish

Is there a -1 pedantic mod somewhere? While what you say is technically true it completely misses the point. Was implication of what you said not supposed to be "Pretty much everyone that's not emotionally invested in the results are 'pro' jury and think the result was fair, as evidenced by the fact that everyone I've talked to believes this"?

Because if that's what you were going for then the the GPs reply is right on point. If that's not what you were going for, I would counter and say: Why should anyone care about your useless personal anecdote?

Oh please. Show me one person that even claims to have inadvertently bought a Samsung when they intended to buy an Apple. It says Samsung right on the freaking box!