477 karma · joined September 26, 2012
"Peer-reviewed" by whom?...
- the language level, which is very much higher than what you would get recording anyone on the street today, with fairly rich grammatical forms, and few of the now common shortcuts or mistakes - in a way, a more beautiful and educated French than you can find in most of today's France, the kind you'd find only in older traditional upper class families
- the accent itself, which has kind of a lower-social-status conotation;
- the guy pronouncing everything, who is neither in the highs nor in the lows of society, but a middle class small busines owner who presumably did not receive higher (nor probably even high school) education
Were I not an optimist, I'd say this unfortunately is a sad illustration of what has become of education and language in our country, and more generally the acceptance by our society of everything and anything under the pretext that everyone deserves a chance even when they don't match the level previously judged as the acceptable minimum.
Selling to Wall Street is the "final sell": once it's done, you need to convince that profits grow, not just revenues.
I have to say I am always at a loss when quantum physicists start talking about "measurement".
In the classical world, measuring means looking at a particular variable x in a system S at time t, S(t) and via some process specific to x (which we want to measure), Mx, obtain the value of Mx(S(t)).
In QM by contrast, it seems that measurement itself has an action upon the system so that measuring in fact means looking at some Mx(Z(S,t)) where you actually never know S but only some kind of end product Z that is believed to reflect S but is itself the result of an unknown operation on S that QM people call "collapse".
So you seek Mx(S) but in fact spend your time looking at Mx(Z(S)) and draw conclusions on S... but I have yet to hear anyone explain to me, physically what is Z, how it works, etc. Lots of statistics, but no real understanding of that "collapse" process.
If that were functioning, whereby the two buttons presented to you were a "Continue without cookies" and "I want to opt in", the annoyance would be worth it. But as it stands, most sites just _pretend_ their tracking is opt-in through an "I agree" button, with "I don't agree" generally leading to a mess of check boxes in front of partners the general public has no idea about.
I do hope regulators end up cracking on this...
$27bn is actually successful for a company that's just a few years old.
The competition that was stirred during those years ended up with Microsoft developing what is now a good product for 80% of use cases, with integration with tools (Office) that 80% of companies use, and all those companies benefitting from it did not have to shell out a single additional penny.
From the eyes of consumers, I would call it a success of competition rather than a failure. Sure, it has now run its course, but making $27bn out of it is not what I would call a bitter end - the dream of independence aside. But that's a for few individuals to dream about...
As a European, I just stopped and wonder in what world America lives.
This is because the tax system actually has 2 conflicting uses: (i) collect revenue for the gov't and (ii) create incentives/disincentives that are meant to push taxpayers in ways that are deemed beneficial, be it to the economy or to certain policy like environment, housing, etc.
If you drop (ii) you can end up with an extremely simple tax code as most of the tax code complexities deal with those incentives/disincentives.
So the question is: to what extent can you do away with (ii), or more generally with tax code complexity?
If you want to go this way, you have to go for the full-fledged solution: either the defendant choses their attorney (at a capped price) or an attorney shall be selected at random among all attorneys registered with the bar and must take charge of the case, the only exception being if they have a valid conflict of interest in that case.
If you don't own that 95%-unused asset, then either you'll always end up paying the highest price for the equivalent service because you need it now, and this quickly becomes un-economical, or you have to plan everything ahead, at all times. The difference is just the convenience of a readily available asset.
- if anti-trust is about consumer protection (kind of a European perspective), there's no basis. You buy an Apple device knowing full well that the only apps allowed on that device are vetted by Apple. That's hardly new. The rules have not changed. Few exceptions have been made, and I bet those few have been framed by the best lawyers there are to avoid any possible contamination. So there's no new event or situation that has consumers losing.
- if anti-trust is about protecting against market manipulation : no one forces any one to be on the App Store. The rules have not changed. Few exceptions etc. Apple does have sole control of the iPhone apps "market" but is that truly a market in the sense of competition law? The fact that it's called "App Store" should not obscure the fact that Apple could as well have decided to provide only their own Apple-branded apps, and develop themselves all of the apps they make available to iPhone users. Instead they chose to let third-parties provide apps under a restrictive set of conditions that include the "tax". Would it be any different if they actually licensed the apps from developers for a fee and resell them on the App Store to end users?
Why it's a bad idea is indeed demonstrated. But why it happens in practice is not just to obey the "small team" mantra. It's also because as organizations and products mature, the law of diminishing returns kicks in: once easy gains have been made, achieving more gains requires tackling more complex problems - either because they are actually more complex in themselves, or because of the environment has become more complex.
> Even though you have multiple small teams, they still need to closely coordinate with each other.
> But I can't find the next post in the series which proposes a better alternative. Anyone else had better luck?
That complexity actually means that whatever the way you organize, you're going to have more people involved. That's when you need good managers - what I call a good manager is not only competent to manage their own team, they're also good at making their team play in a more global picture without necessarily having a boss telling them to do so.
I challenge you to demonstrate that copyright infringement per se is bad for society. This would mean copyright is good for society which is still to be proven at least in it's current acception.
My thought exactly. He actually made film music a genre by itself - even though I like to think of film music the other way round and tend to consider that it's actually the last refuge of well-written, and in that sense "classical", music. Come to think of it, it's actually film music that unifies the wildly different, highly creative, rich and thoughtful music from Glass to Legrand, from Vangelis to Morricone, from Sakamoto to Metheny.
I can very much relate to the author's thoughts about the whole exercise routine, including a lack of general enjoyment of it, and when I set out to improve my body in the gym, I lasted a few months or so and gave up: too much time and effort and motivation and money needed at the same time for something so dull - and that was e few years ago and I stopped doing much exercise except for some week end walks and the like.
Now for a few months I have been commuting to work by bike, driven by the time gain vs car or subway, and I have to say even though it's a bit of an effort on rainy days, it's really a very good combination of low cost, low friction, useful in its own right, means of doing exercise.
(i) it seems this "non-ionizing radiation" has many parameters that can modify significantly the way it propagates in the environment (and in human bodies), so I'm not sure speaking of non-ionizing radiation in a general way is sufficient to address the problem
(ii) following this reasoning and your comment about "a single study, bulletproof and large": it does seem that it is in fact what is being asked by this group - that time be given for a meaningful and large study of the specific radiation from 5G tech
and therefore requiring that kind of large study before widespread implementation actually seems warranted.
A company sells an app that, given speech in any form by a user, including any audio book format, interprets the speech on the fly back into text to show on the screen: what's the difference? what do publishers claim in that case?
Please, enlighten me.
But anyway, as someone else said, I don't trust the fox to guard the hen house - even though again there's some kind of reality check that says if (one of) the most powerful actor starts doing something, there _will_ be some traction, so yeah, let's see concretely what it is about...
About the privacy budget: if I understand well, they want to count API calls that return device/environment-specific data, probably giving some set of weights to each of calls and stop accepting requests after a certain threshold. I'm a bit skeptical with that kind of complexity but why not.
Truly, a fascinating business combination including science's rent seeker in chief Elsevier, a number of privacy-dubious services under the banner "Risk Analytics" - including for instance your insurer-imposed GPS car tracker, and a service dubbed "Active Insights" that "keeps track of changes in [client's] households" - and another nice looking rent seeker business, LexisNexis, which is if I understand correctly an Elsevier-like gatekeeper to law information and references.
[1] https://www.relx.com/~/media/Files/R/RELX-Group/documents/re...