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Comment Re:Large homes (Score 1) 220

Of course this is true.

However there is significant strain of, "more is better" in much of North America, and it leads people to mistake wants with needs. People have lived perfectly happy lives and raised great kids in far less space than many suburban North Americans believe is a bare minimum. It doesn't mean you have to accept this for yourself, just be aware that when your local politician/developer/journalist starts talking about "needs" they might really be talking about "wants"

Comment Words != Actions (Score 1) 544

Lots of people say.... ... They want to use less energy , but drive big SUV's ... They want to eat healthy, but stock up on sugary 'health' beverages
Etc
Etc

Just because your poll suggests a preference, does not necessarily mean actions will follow.

Product design and marketing has to focus on likely actions, not verbal intentions.

Comment Re:What's so Hard to Understand? (Score 3, Informative) 192

It's hard to understand because..

a) most people probably have little understanding of military awards outside of hollywood and might be forgiven for thinking they are all given for combat

b) most managers, whether in the military or not, seem woefully clueless about the impact of cumbersome poorly designed systems and the payback on well designed ones (or well designed hacks running on top of the poor system) So that someone even noticed he was more productive, didn't freak out because he did something different, didn't freak out because the different thing involved "programming" *AND* gave him a medal... seems pretty remarkable.

Comment Carrier Subsidy (Score 1) 291

I agree with this 100% but I hope everyone realizes that with no ability to force customers to stick around, there will be a dramatically reduced incentive for carriers to offer subsidies on fancy phones. I think this is fine but I wonder if there will be an uproar when $600 iPhones cost $600 instead of $200 + contract and/or lock.

Comment Re:Interesting... (Score 2) 349

This is a problem of expectations, not economics.

Nobody needs a new car every 3 years, nobody needs 1/4 acre and nobody needs 4 bedrooms unless you have about 12 children, which no one on LI has.

Adjust your expectations and I suspect you could live well on 65k, even on LI.

Comment Re:what progress? (Score 1) 769

Boric acid is to stop the reaction, there is no indication the nuclear reaction is still ongoing. The issue is residual decay heat can be many megawatts and needs to be dissipated. If they can't dissipate it, mother nature will take of that but the results will not be pretty (molten core, possibly breaching reactor vessel, etc etc)

Submission + - Conversion Error costs AXA $242 Million (wsj.com) 1

stu72 writes: TFA only explains, "an error" discovered by a junior programmer and subsequently covered up by senior management. However the SEC report is here: http://www.sec.gov/litigation/admin/2011/33-9181.pdf and it gives some more details:

"Some Risk Model components sent information to the Optimizer in decimals while other components reported information in percentages; therefore the Optimizer had to convert the decimal information to percentages in order to effectively consider all the information on an equal footing. Because proper scaling did not occur, the Optimizer did not give the intended weight to common factor risks."

Comment Insanity (Score 1) 112

Parking spots in most cities in the world are scarce because they are priced well below what they are worth. By letting demand set the price (i.e. raise it dramatically) you deal with several problems all in one fell swoop:
- parking unavailability
- people polluting the air and causing congestion endlessly circling for a cheap/free spot
- enforcement of time limits currently in place for free spots
- using space age technology to detect free spaces

The tech sounds neat but it's just over-complicating an already over-complicated situation.

Comment Re:Oh happy day (Score 1) 449

Telco's have no interest in selling new hardware except as a means to attract new subscribers. Most smartphones sold in North America are heavily subsidized by the carrier, meaning they *lose* money every time they "sell" a new phone. The only people in North American telcos who will be upset at the loss of the upgrade imperative will be their marketing department - they'll lose their easiest grab on people's attention.

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