telchar

Supposing a manufacturer wanted to use Android on it's phones, they could pay a sum of money for the right to do that in proportion to the number of phones the software were installed on. This fee would cover Google's costs and need for profit. You could call it a license fee, perhaps.

I would dispute that. My experience in the hospital side of same field has been that within the framework of the existing healthcare system it's hard to reduce costs without worsening health outcomes. The costs we can cut most easily are staff, services and supplies. Cutting services reduces revenue, nullifying incentives. Trying to deliver the same services with reduced staff and supplies impacts quality.

The jobs that can be cut without reducing quality are the administrative nonsense like dickering back and forth with the insurance company, but those jobs also can't be cut without reducing revenue. It would take a change to the way we pay for healthcare to significantly reduce costs, and/or getting the cost of pharmaceuticals under control. There's a lot of fat in pharma too but that's another conversation.

Thanks, I hadn't thought of using Dropbox as a file sync between different OSes on the same machine.

For backups I understand. What I'm curious about is what is your setup that involves multiple computers. Is it one personal computer and one at work? Do you have multiple personal computers for some reason? Just curious about usage patterns that differ from my own.

Really? And I thought Dropbox was slow. I find myself asking what's the point of gigabit internet when I haven't found a service that users more than 50Mb.

Can I ask why syncing files between computers if a useful thing for you? I'm on the verge of cancelling my Dropbox account since I realized the Dropbox account is not useful as an external drive, but only as a syncing tool. To me that's not worth anything bit I'm curious what use the happy customers have for it.

I prefer the music to come from the headphones because my in-ear phones can be overly loud, even on the lowest volume setting on my phone. Having music coming from them hours every day had me feeling like I was damaging my hearing.

With earplugs inside noise-canceling phones I still get two layers of sound isolation but have a layer of sound isolation between me and the phones, providing finer volume control so I can add just enough music to finish the job of drowning out loud people around me without hearing damage.

You could go the opposite route: good earplugs with good noise canceling over-ear headphones. The advantage of this over the other setup is that the minimum effective volume from music is lower, protecting against tinnitus. I had the same issues and found this setup works well for me.

As an added bonus the obvious rigamarole I have to go through when a coworker taps me on the shoulder makes them more likely to send an email next time.

I think the value of pennies to the economy is negative.

Every time I have to handle a penny it wastes my time and energy for no gain. I never find having a penny useful unless it will prevent me from getting more pennies. Multiply that by everyone in the country and that is quite a waste of time (i.e. money). There would be almost no loss of economic efficiency if we get rid of pennies but a nice savings in real time and energy, to say nothing of the waste that mining, refining, stamping and distributing them costs.

I fully agree with your last sentence. Sadly I don't often see that actually happen in practice. And when the notation isn't explained I personally tend to waste a lot of brain cycles trying to decide what the notation means because I'm reading material that I don't already know (of course - if I already knew the material I probably wouldn't be reading it).

Math notation is simple because it's heavily overloaded. For example, it does me no good to know about exponentials when a superscript is used in a different context. Reading any nontrivial math requires knowing what the notation means in the particular context of the work. IME mathematicians typically assume the reader is familiar already and usually don't explain.

Anyone targeting their work at non-experts should explain even what seems like trivial notation to them since they can't know what other meanings the reader may think the notation holds.

They would generate some excitement, get marginal marketshare, quietly stop updating the system, let it languish for a few years, then just ghost the system?

You're not the only one bothered by that. I find school buses and small delivery vehicles to be the worst on that, given the frequent stops and starts and minimal maintenance they receive. The city buses here are marginally better but not by much.

Activated carbon filters are cheap, mine cost $12. I can't speak to whether all other cars have compatible fits though.

You are disputing the most basic fact of CO2 being a greenhouse gas. This is why we say "skeptics" can't be bothered to understand the science.

If CO2 isn't a greenhouse gas then go write a paper about it and claim your Nobel.

Note that we put "skeptics" in quotes because cranks aren't skeptics. A skeptic would consider that the one guy who failed to replicate an experiment may be wrong, as well as the possibility that all the other people who ran the experiment were wrong.

Oh come off it. If he's indeed a saboteur he will garner very little pity from losing a lawsuit. Since when do we support people who allegedly use industrial sabotage against the very companies pushing the boundaries of reducing pollution and greenhouse gas emissions? Your overblown imagery is ridiculous.

I think you're right that AT&T and Time Warner should not be allowed to merge. What you're proposing WRT the last mile is similar to what I favor, which is banning content/copyright owners/studios from also owning the network infrastructure. There would be some subtleties there but I think it could be ironed out reasonably well. From an economic incentive perspective it just makes sense.

Regarding QoS, why couldn't you as the client choose which packets are to be considered high-priority? Is it that you want to be able to saturate your connection with high priority packets that supercede your neighbor's packets if you're on a video call? Maybe a NN-friendly compromise is that everyone gets a % of their connection that get to be high-priority packets (you choose which) and you can pay more for a bigger pipe. Therefore if you want 1M up at high priority you need a 5M pipe. Your neighbor can keep their 1M pipe but only 200k of their packets can be high priority. (to throw out some numbers). It seems fair and gives you QoS options while not violating NN, which I think is overall more important than QoS anyway.

I think that's a misleading observation though. It is squinting at the macro structure of the body and saying "ah ha, encapsulation!". When you look closer the apparent encapsulation seems less and less like an accurate notion. For example the newer research showing how the gut affects cognition. [0]

This is a bit off-topic but I think paleo-ontologists fall into a similar trap, at least based on popular writing about e.g. sharks. Claims that they haven't evolved in 100M years because they're the same shape as they used to be completely ignore all the other aspects of the shark that could change without affecting the overall shape.

0. https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/24997042

Don't forget the plants! They're dying as well through the effects of agriculture, draining swamps for new subdivisions, and such. And from the few invasive species that thrive to the detriment of many native species.

Although I suppose the animals are getting the worst of it since we actively go after many of them.

It's ok to want an answer. You may have to accept though (and it seems you're on your way to this) that the answer isn't simple, can't be broken down to a simple paragraph and can't be digested in a sitting. If you're not content taking the short explanation (e.g. "CO2 contributes to the greenhouse effect so our CO2 actually caused the observed global warming.") then you need to accept that you will have to study the models in depth and try to understand what assumptions/approximations were made, why the scientists consider those valid, what data are used and what biases or errors exist and needed to be corrected for and why those are valid, etc.

And that's all ok. As long as a person doesn't reject the science outright because they can't understand the work or don't want to put in the effort. But those who reject the science or insist that nothing be done about it until they personally understand it need to either put in the effort to understand it or lend faith to the scientific consensus which has been developed through great effort.

You're being down-voted but it would be foolish to ignore the possibility you bring up, especially when we consider that Tesla has competitors based in countries where the rule of law is weaker than it is in the US. Certainly if he's going to break the law and exfiltrate data it would be a small hurdle to try to profit on top of that.

You seem to be making an argument that I have seen a lot, in short (paraphrased): A free open competitive market is ideal therefore you should seek that instead of net neutrality. Don't ask for net neutrality.

I disagree. Net neutrality is not a problem. See [0] for a previous take on the misguided notion that QoS and net neutrality are at odds.

It might be an ideal solution if we could nationalize network infrastructure and guarantee local loop unbundling, as I think you are suggesting. But we are so far away from that possibility in the US that you seem to be advocating against net neutrality in favor of effectively the status quo.

Let's not throw support for net neutrality out the window in favor of a far away pipe dream or for unproved, supposed benefits from getting rid of it. Let's get back net neutrality first, in legislation this time, then see if we still think we need to nationalize the network infrastructure.

If I am misunderstanding your proposal then maybe you could clarify.

0. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8125588

I won't. The notion that Shkreli did next to nothing wrong because he only gouged insurance companies is one I have seen echoed too much. It bears refuting when it comes up lest people see such assertions go unchallenged and don't consider the implications.

You're forgetting robo-signing foreclosure affidavits in the wake of the financial crisis. That's potentially hundreds of thousands of counts of fraud. The banks were only forced to settle, and were not prosecuted. [0]

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2010_United_States_foreclosure...

Which makes every single person with insurance a (diffuse) victim. Let's not pretend that exorbitant pricing doesn't have any relation to the high cost of medical insurance/care, which in turn of course indirectly kills people.

Or better yet, we can work toward a future (no later than 2021, I hope) when net neutrality can be brought back into force just as it was from 2015-2017 by FCC action or perhaps with more staying power via legislative action. Ground taken once can be taken twice.

If we resign ourselves to the current legal landscape we hand a victory to these corrupt players.

That said I'm sure the tech giants will want to hedge their bets.

You're probably right about that. Although I can point to one very specific way the olden days were better: a Google search used to turn up lots of forum posts, which are often the most useful results on a given topic. These days I almost never see forum posts of any kind turned up a search results (except stack overflow, thankfully). I'm not sure what caused the change but I find useful information is much more likely to be buried by low-information wikihow-type results and corporate landing pages.

This is an interesting take. Would you care to speculate about what may be going on under the surface?

I imagine Google has big advantage here, at least for brick and mortar places since they can use location data to determine whether the account connected to a device has physically been in a place. It would also explain why they always ask me to review/rate businesses 5 minutes after I walk in.

I wouldn't. They forced ads into my tv after I purchased it.