rafcavallaro

"Probably going to" is not now. Amazon faces having to collect state sales tax now with no hope that the courts will intervene. I think this does matter to investor perception of amazon.

Instead of "Supreme Court to Amazon: 'collect state sales tax,'" we got "Amazon to deliver by drone." Big players, be they commercial or political, know how work the news cycle - thus is just another example.

The only thing being ignored here is the fact that this week SCOTUS let stand New York State's requirement that Amazon collect sales tax. This would have been the big news story about Amazon this week if not for the suspiciously well timed 60 minutes drone and pony show.

On the contrary - this fits right in with all the other dreadful presentations of math - it takes so long to load it appears as though the site is off line. It's almost as if the author was at pains to confirm the trope that technical people have no social skills and are hopeless at presenting information to others.

False. Read the letter carefully. They're specifically concerned with false positives and false negatives - these are both very real possibilities - one is documented up thread.

Right - PG makes the mistake of talking about what labor is actually worth, but this value is dependent on what the political system will allow - the balance of power between labor and capital. Where labor organizing risks torture and death, labor is cheap. Where labor organizing is a protected right, labor is relatively expensive.

This drives offshoring, as capital seeks production regimes where they can reduce the cost not just of wages, but of meeting environmental and safety standards. The naive capitalist then claims that the low ball cost of production in unsafe, toxic, politically repressive locations is the "true" cost of labor. Unions declined in power in the US as the economy moved away from manufacturing, and Reagan set the tone for service unions by firing striking air traffic controllers. By declaring open season on service workers unions, the capital backed Republican right made it clear they weren't going to allow them the same sort of power industrial unions had in the mid 20th c. This political struggle continues today in efforts to raise the minimum wage both nationally and for individual large employers like Walmart and macdonalds.

By the same utility argument there should be no nuclear weapons, an all out push for zero emissions energy, and world peace, but don't hold your breath. There are existing, very powerful stakeholders such as the governments and militaries of numerous world powers who would far prefer that financial transactions not be anonymous. Tech folk sometimes forget that their bodies live in meat space, not cyberspace, and whoever controls the guys with weapons (i.e., controls police and armies) controls meat space.

US colloquial usage - where the original, subtle UK usage goes to die; see also "presently," and "beg the question."

The rates for east Asia (as was noted in the article) are almost certainly misleadingly low because mental health issues of any kind are so highly stigmatized in these cultures, much more so than in Europe and North Ametica.

The US is economically first world but cognitively third world :)

It's just that some people's unique opportunity is to be sold into child slavery.

Gates's maternal grandfather, a multimillionaire bank president, left him a million dollar trust fund; his mother was on the a United Way board with an IBM exec which is how he got the contract for DOS.

The GI Bill had little or nothing to do with Gates's success.

Point is, the more fulfilling job often requires much longer hours which certainly do cut into parent-child time. Remember, when highly successful people are asked "if you had it to do over, what would you do differently?" one of the most frequent answers is "spend more time with my children."

This could easily change if laws are passed requiring a online retailers like a Amazon to collect such taxes. The absence of such a requirement now gives Amazon a de facto tax exempt status.

The key point is the word "equally" - the observation that Venus showed ALL phases, not just some, required significant modification to the Ptolemaic model - when one model must jump through hoops to explain new data it is not facts being "equally" explained by both models.

I agree - the blog post says that for a time the evidence could support either view but this is false. Galileo discovered (there's that pesky novel factual evidence) that Venus showed ALL phases - new, crescent, gibbous, and full - which conclusively proved that the Ptolemaic model was false. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Galileo_Galilei#Venus.2C_Saturn...

If Amazon loses it's tax exempt status in all jurisdictions it may well also lose profitability - the long term plan of cornering an unprofitable market is still unprofitable.

The spiritual baggage comes from the fact that in these traditions meditation is a tool to develop concentration so that the meditator can focus his/her full attention on some form of the question "who am I" - that is, "what is my true identity" - sometimes aided by focus on a koan (a puzzle meant to spur an insight into ones real identity)

Spoiler alert - you're supposed to discover by direct experience that your real self is neither a homunculus looking out through your eyes, nor is it coterminous with your body, and this direct experience that your true self is everything that is, is intended to lead to compassion for other beings.

It's been estimated that their entire lifetime profit is about equal to their tax discount (lower price due to not having to collect and pay state and local tax) - makes one wonder what Bezos's genius is other than taking advantage of a tax loophole - and one which may very well go away in the future.

By other cultures. Example: show a set of color swatches all identical blue with one bluish green. Ask participants to indicate the exception. Speakers of languages with a blue-green distinction get it right essentially instantly (< 1 second); native speakers of languages without a blue-green distinction can take as much as 30 seconds and actually get it wrong (I.e., indicate one of the identical blue swatches)

I agree. I've been doing professional illustration for print (among other things) since the late 70s. My most recent published project is a book cover illustration. I have access to a huge range of media - gouache, acrylics, oils, pastel, oil bars, inks, etc - as well as pressure sensitive graphics tablets and various painting and illustration software for desktop platforms.

I was free to choose any of these, but I chose to use an iPad because it allows the immediacy of sketching and painting with natural media and the significantly faster turnaround of digital image making.

Like any tool it takes some adjustment, but once it clicks, there is nothing more immediate than using your finger(s) to directly paint an image. The fat touch region is a non-issue once you've learned to use it - after all, there's nothing terribly immediate about flexing one's fingers and having a mark appear 2-10 cm away at the tip of a pencil, pen, or brush - we've just become so accustomed to it that it seems "normal." A bit of time with an iPad and tablet finger painting seems equally immediate and natural.

yesandletsgetridofthosepeskypacesbetweenwordstoo!

For centuries typographers clearly thought just the opposite, so you may want to consider the likelihood that your preferences are simply the result of relatively inflexible automatic typesetting replacing more expensive but more flexible manual typesetters during the mid 20th c., not some objective standard.

Unless you are quite unusual, 4-5 hours sleep per day/night is low enough to be bad for your long term health.

see http://www.sleepfoundation.org/article/white-papers/how-much... for details.

1. He admits that he has no proof that private firms would take up the slack if government stopped funding basic science research - only his bizarre notion that science is NOT a public good.

2. He says that government has a DUTY to fund defense research, so clearly his whole argument excludes innovations and contributions to GDP from defense research funded by the state.

In short, his argument is bollocks.

There is no such thing as an inexact science. If it is science, it is exact; if it is inexact, it is simply confirmation bias fodder.

Don't confuse olive oil for cooking (commonly purchased in 3 liter tins) with extra virgin olive oil. This article is about extra virgin olive oil. EVOO is usually consumed raw, unheated, with bread, cheese, on salads - it would completely defeat the purpose of the EVOO production technique which is one of low temperture, purely mechanical extraction, to heat EVOO to high temperatures as is commonly done with lower grades of olive oil.

That's objectively false - Google, Microsoft, Yahoo, and Facebook (among others) have all been at pains to distance themselves from NSA data collection precisely because they understand how bad the NSA's behavior is for their business.

You apparently missed the fact that the Obama administration had a full scale Democratic congressional revolt on its hands yesterday - a majority of congressional Dems voted to defund the NSA collection of bulk call records under FISA - the White House was seriously afraid the Amash Ammendment would pass - it only failed narrowly - 217 to 205. So in objective terms, the response has been far worse than the administration expected. And this policy tussle isn't over yet.

Yup - all the cool kids are wearing stethoscopes!