Frqy3

Some people on HN must be to young to remember government owned telecom monopolies and trying to get services from them.

If someone sold carrots labelled as "Said to be good for your eyes" - or some other variation, then no problems.

However, if they state that there are medical studies showing that carrots improve your vision, then those claims should be checked out and action taken if not true.

With apologies to Mark Twain:

I do not have time to write a well written concise article, so I have just copypastaed some stuff I don't understand.

Data caps are likely to become more prevalent with faster end user access pipes.

ISPs have been (similar to yourself) using the limited access speeds to self-throttle the data usage of customers to limit their aggregated backhaul costs.

The result of a model is no better than a gut estimate.

But the process of developing the model, working out what the factors are that will impact market size (and your share of it), working out what things you need to monitor more closely or focus on for biggest impact is where the value is.

I see it in a similar way. These low barrier distribution channels provide an opportunity for people to live experiences beyond their financial capability. Performing on stage, walking the red carpet, etc. Sure, some strike it rich, but most don't. The same power law that exists throughout the entertainment industry.

And regarding the offset/highlighted comment about Van Gogh. If the author knew their art history (or at least had seen and paid attention to Mona Lisa Smile), he only sold one painting during his lifetime [0]. One might even go so far as to draw a parallel between his position with the art dealer Goupil & Cie and somebody today "shilling themselves out on audible.com".

[0] http://www.vangoghgallery.com/misc/faq.html

FTTH also involves household powering for the connection to work. Even if a battery at the household end is supplied, will these be regularly tested and replaced when needed?

One hand usage and fits nicely in the jeans pocket.

Back when Sudoku was a big craze I noticed a relationship between people's approach to it and their chosen career path.

Quite a number of engineers I knew had written solvers of various sorts and rarely solved the puzzle by hand, the company accountant wrote little tally numbers in the box corners and worked by a process of elimination, and a lawyer whom I travelled with for many plane flights spent hours on them using some ad-hoc hunt and seek approach.

These sort of solutions (Wi-Fi and/or Bluetooth based) are already growing in popularity amongst the retail sector (esp. large shopping malls), so no surprise that an airport is doing likewise.

And to be clear, this in no way implies that I am okay with this state of affairs.

It is fitting then that Singapore is teaching its students to wrangle with mathematics.

The US tends to more of an Orwell (monitor) and Huxley (distract) approach to control rather than heavy handed blocking. But then, they have more experience in propaganda than the Chinese.

It is getting a bit old now, but I showed the Warriors of the Net[0] video in the past to a few non-technical people who wanted to better understand things.

[0] http://warriorsofthe.net/index.html

Another interesting thing to study would be whether cyclists change their riding behaviour when required to wear a helmet. Similar to the effect on driving behaviour of mandatory wearing of car seatbelts.

So the question should now be, do they have a sustainable competitive advantage, or are these high profit margins vulnerable to being competed away?

I had a similar thought, though my original exposure to the concept was in Jack Vance's "To Live Forever".

As an example of that task specificity, for master level chess players, they are better than amateurs and novices at memorising real chess board layouts, but not significantly better at scrambled board layouts.

http://theinvisiblegorilla.com/blog/2012/02/15/how-experts-r...

The problem with drug research is that current incentives reward companies to focus on new (or sufficiently new to patent) medicines of little advantage and compete for market share at high prices, rather than to develop clinically superior medicines by focussing on social benefit vs costs. More publicly funded research into drugs with high social benefits would also help.

Sounds like you might have the premise for a movie there.

IIRC, it was Bob Lucky who said that the best qualification to win a prize is that you have won some other prize.

“The market can stay irrational longer than you can stay solvent.”

Often attributed to Keynes, though may have originated with Shilling (or been in common use).

Apart from very close species (like incubating passenger pigeon DNA in a fantail pigeon host), is it possible to recreate say a woolly mammoth even assuming you can perfectly reconstruct the DNA itself?

That is, how much of an organism is encoded in the DNA and how much in the mother's body? And yes, this question is derived from GEB[0].

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/G%C3%B6del,_Escher,_Bach

Doctors and lawyers provide a good example of how unions (though they don't refer to themselves as that) can be embedded into the legal framework. With these unions also having control over the number of newly qualified workers admitted each year, supply is also sufficiently curtailed.

Why should research showing that 'alternative medicine' is ineffective be published in a medical journal?

It provided a method and showed the negative results. Next time you are in discussion with someone who claims that time travelers are possible, you can now refer to this research.

Even if the first two journals rejected it, it sounds like the "third physics journal geared more toward the philosophy of physics" should have been a good fit.

It looks like Daan is already on it.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vcH0TAdR8FE

Also good to mix things up, and not overdo the standing either.

http://healthland.time.com/2011/04/13/the-dangers-of-sitting...

Dvorak user here, though I'm used to temporarily switching layouts for hardcoded games.

My hopes were raised when I saw the keyboard type dialog, but dashed when I looked at the options.

Also, lagging page loading to allow the auctioning of ad space a bit longer to run to hopefully extract a slightly higher price.

First time an employee goes to claim this, they will be allocated to a fixed office and required to attend there before heading out to appointments.

The coke machine and learning the Dvorak keyboard in the UCC. Fun times.